Forever brokecels and miscers with no drive in life move along

Have a rental unit that I hired a local cleaning company to come and clean before the new tenants move in. The work only took two ladies 3 hours to completely clean a 1,100 sqft condo from top to bottom and charged $500. So that got me thinking....what would the realistic upfront costs be to get something like this off the ground and hire 2-4 workers as 1099's to begin with.

I played with some hypothetical numbers and it looks like it could pull in a decent profit with minimal work from me?

Its probably one of the cheapest/easiest businesses to start. But there are a few things you need to factor in. 1. The majority of those cleaning businesses work on repeat customers. Which means it takes time to build your customer base, have references, a good reputation, etc. 2. You can either do residential. Small businesses/offices. Or industrial (Think restaurants and stuff like that). Easiest to start/build a customer base is the first.


If you start out hiring a bunch of employee's and buying all kind of equipment you'll likely rack up a ton of debt and go bust before you get off the ground. Here's what I'd advise:

-Buy all the cleaning supplies you need in bulk from somewhere like Costco.
-Start advertising/acquiring customers. ********, Nextdoor app, craigslist advertisements, etc. . Residential will likely be the easiest. Next would be smaller businesses/offices.
-Either start out solo or hire someone part time to assist you. Since your not going to be working 'full time' this means a % of the payment from the job.

After you've enough customers to say have at least 6-8 hours of work per day, 5 days per week. Then you can promote your assistant to manager and hire an employee to help them.



If you plan on working your full time job and not being involved at all I'd recommend buying an already established business with customers already established. 50-100K should buy you a small/decent operation.

Really appreciate the feedback.

Would definitely keep it pretty small and solely residential at the beginning. I would prefer to build it from the ground up rather than buy something established even though I definitely do see the appeal in that. I currently work as a CPA and have a small side e-commerce business that take a large portion of my time so I would have to figure out how to dedicate as much time as possible to this, at least starting out. The biggest roadblocks I currently see are:

Cost of supplies
Vetting potential employees
Liability Insurance

As I said, I just started toying with this idea a few days ago and have been trying to come up with a starting point because this type of business is completely new to me.

I'd start as a 1 man employee company with the employee being you. Find houses, clean them. Once business becomes big, hire some cheap mexicans.

How are you going to get in touch with them? The two women that came to the condo hardly spoke English so in a case like that, how would you even go about finding someone willing to clean?

you can make good money in the right areas.

Do you speak Spanish OP?

Lol at everyone pretending its easy to find decent reliable help.

I'd wager OP ends up hiring a bunch of min wage slobs who don't show up so he ends up doing it all anyway.

Not fluent but enough to have small convosI live right in South Florida, there are plenty of immigrants that are eager to make money to feed their families. Wouldn't hire lazy entitled Americans

lmao at starting the kind of business lifers in prison try and start when they get out. With that said it could work out. Good luck.

I actually did this when I used to have a maid. Was 100$ a month for once a week full cleaning. Been looking for another one since I moved but no luck yet.

Don't forget that you have to get the cleaners bonded. They're going to be going inside peoples homes, those people need to know they can trust your workers.

-Cleaning supplies really aren't that expensive. If your doing residential you could probably start with as little as $500 for interior cleaning. With the most expensive item being a decent vacuum.

-Vetting employees is huge because if you hire a thief word will spread and your business will get bad reviews.

-Liability insurance is a non issue if you start out small.


My grandma retired at 65 and has been cleaning houses for the last 20 years. (85 now). She's been having most of the same customers for 10+ years. People are always looking for a trustworthy person/service. And they absolutely will pay for someone to come into their home 1-2x per week and clean/do laundry.



When I was in college I helped her clean a few offices/office building on the weekends. Good money in that too.