How To Find Cleaning Clients Fast (Remote Cleaning Business)

Most cleaning businesses struggle to find clients — but it doesn't have to be that way. We built a $3M+ remote cleaning business and helped thousands of people reach $5-10K/month. Here's exactly how we get clients consistently.

In this episode, you'll learn :
✅ How to get your first client within 24 hours
✅ The free platforms that already have clients ready to book
✅ How one client paid us $60K (and how she found us)
✅ Why Google Local Services Ads are 90-95% of our lead generation
✅ The partnership strategy that turns other businesses into your sales team
✅ How to build reviews that make clients choose you over everyone else

THE TRUTH: You don't need cold calling, a big budget, or a huge following to sign cleaning clients. You need the right systems in the right places.

Register for the FREE Remote Cleaning Masterclass: https://www.cleaningbusinessmasterclass.com/?el=Youtube-clientsfast

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Transcript

Why Most Cleaners Stay Invisible

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There are people in your city searching for a cleaning company right now, and most cleaning business owners have no idea how to get in front of them. I'm gonna fix that in this video. Over the last seven years, my wife Janope and I have built a remote cleaning business that's done over$3 million. We've never touched a mop or a broom and we've helped thousands of people do the same thing. Students like Jasmine and Quay, they went from zero to$130,000 in their first year. They've serviced over 600 homes and they never cleaned a single house themselves. And like Jacques, he got his first client by telling his long guy about his business, and that one conversation turned to$10,000 a month within six months. And he runs it completely remote. And as of right now, our students have generated over$21 million across 42 plus dates. These aren't people with marketing degrees, they just knew where to show up. So in this video, I'm going to break down every method that actually works for getting cleaning clients fast so that you can copy this, apply it to your business, and start signing clients this week. Let's dive in. So before you go out and try to sign clients, you need to make sure your business can actually handle them. Most people skip this step all the time and they fumble their first booking, and that first impression is hard to recover from. Three things that's it. First, know exactly what you're selling. For us, it was residential home cleaning. Keep it simple when you're starting out. Don't try to offer commercial, residential, post-construction, move in, move out, and try to do everything else on day one. Pick one, get good at it, and get fancy later. And I'll tell you exactly why I'm saying that. Early on, we added laundry to our services. It was a complete mess. We had no idea actually how long it took to do a full load of laundry per client. And the client will ask if we did laundry, we say absolutely, and we kept turning it into a problem over and over again. We were undercharging, the things were frustrated, the clients were unhappy, all because we said yes to something that we had no system for. So we started with residential home cleaning, that's it. And everything comes after you master the quarter. Second, know how clients are gonna pay you. We use Stripe, and here's why it matters beyond just processing payments. So when a client books with us, their card is on file before our team even leaves their house. Before our team ever leaves the house, the payment is secured. And if the client's cart isn't on file, and if there's no pre-authorized hold, our team doesn't even go out. They don't waste gas, they don't waste total money, they don't waste time. And a job doesn't happen until that money is confirmed. And here's the other thing we can charge clients from anywhere in the world. So if we've been traveling or we got other commitments, we charge clients from our phone. Like we were in South Africa for a week and a half. We were able to run our business. This is why we don't do cash. Cash limits who you can serve, how fast you can scale, and how far you can remove yourself from the day-to-day operations. So, third, have a website with online booking built in, not a contact us now form, or we'll get back to later, a booking system. This is one of the biggest mistakes we see people make constantly. They build the website and put a contact us button, right? And then they wonder why nobody's booking because what you're doing is actually creating friction for your clients. A potential client goes to your website at midnight, fills out the form, then they have to wait for you to get back to them next day. By the time you respond in the morning, they've already moved on to the competitors and they moved on to that next company that had that online booking platform. So you just lost a job in your sleep instead of making money in your sleep. So you're automatically losing money, not because your service was bad, not because you didn't have the right things in place, but because your clients had the weight and you made it too hard for them. Your website needs to let clients find, book, and pay you all on one visit at any hour of the day. That's it. It doesn't need to be beautiful, it literally just needs to work. And most of your local competitors are still using terrible websites with no online booking at all. Just have a functional website where your clients can book you and pay you, and that puts you ahead of 80% of your market already. And we built our own software for this. It's called Tidy Track. It handles the bookings, the payments, the clean and coordination, customer communication all in one place. Links in the description. So don't overthink the setup. You're not building next Apple, you're building a local service business. Seven days or less, that's how you get your foundation off the ground. Everything else you fix along the way. Okay, your business is set up. Now let's get you your first client. So now I want you to start here because this is the fastest path for most people, and almost nobody talks about it. Start with who you already know, not selling to them, just asking them to refer you. There's a big difference. Send a message to your friends, your family, and people in your contact say, Hey, I just launched a cleaning business. If you know anyone looking for a cleaner, send them my way. I would greatly appreciate it. That's it, because most people will be happy to refer you to someone they know. They just need to know you exist. So we tell people, don't launch internally, launch in public. One of our students got 20 clients in their very first month of launching just by telling co-workers at their job and tapping into their network. 20 clients in the first month, no ads, no Google, no nothing. They just open up their mouth and start talking about their business to people that was already around them. So who do you know in your network? Your barber, your hairstylist, your babysitter, your long guy. Anyone in the regular routine of your life could send you a client this week. Jacques, one of the students I told you about earlier, he mentioned his cleaning business to his long guy. His long guy ended up referring him over a thousand dollars in new bookings within the first seven days of his launching. And that one conversation started the chain that got him to his first$10,000 a month within six months of launching, and then eventually getting him to$25,000 a month within a year and a half. And he runs it completely remote about one to two hours a week. You just have to open up your mouth. But then you use the platforms that people are already looking for cleaning services. For example, Nextdoor is a gold mine. This is exactly how Janoka and I got our first client within 24 hours of launching. We posted on Nextdoor, said, Hey, we started our cleaning service and we asked if anybody in the neighborhood needed help. You could go to nextdoor.com, type in cleaner in your area, and you'll see people advertising and requesting services every single day. And local Facebook groups work the same way. Search cleaner in your city and you'll find people asking my recommendations constantly. But don't just drop an ad. Answer questions first, add value, let people see you know what you're talking about, and then you talk about your services. Community centers, churches, schools, most have a bulletin board. Ask if you can put up a flyer, people still look at those boys. Don't just skip the basis because they feel too simple. Simple works, fancy fails. This is one thing that separates people who plateau from people who actually get to the scaling part. So partnerships, and here's why they work your partner already has relationship and trust with a client. So when they refer you, the client comes in warm. They're not skeptical, but they're more likely ready to book. So you're not doing any cold marketing, you're literally inheriting someone who has credibility. And the best part, your partners essentially become your sales team for free. The three best partners for a cleaning business real estate agents, property managers, and Airbnb hosts. Real estate agents give deep cleanings as closing gifts to new homeowners. And they always need to clean before they move in. I want to give you a real example of how this works. The realtor who helped Janoke and I purchase our home, they literally referred us clients. So something to think about. Someone we had a real relationship with who trusted us, sent us business because they knew what we did. That's the power of a warm relationship in this business. And then there's Jessica, one of our students. She's a full-time real estate agent herself, full-time, full-time job. She launched her cleaning business and used her own real estate network to get clients. In her first month, 30 days, she hit$8,000.$8,000 because she already had the relationships. She just pointed them in a new direction. Property managers are handling turnover cleanings across multiple units. One property manager could be 10, 20 recurring jobs a month. Airbnb hosts need same-day turnarounds over and over again. So like Dimitri, he hit$10,000 a month in his cleaning business the first 30 days because he had an Airbnb host who needed turnover cleanings over and over and over again, at least three, four times a week. So make the incentive clear. I'll clean your home, make it worth their time, then follow up. Don't reach out once and disappear. Make sure you're staying in front of them and you track it. So which partnerships are actually working in your business? Once it starts working, double down on those and cut the ones that are not producing. Now I want you to remember partnerships compound over time. So you're not going to email a real estate agent today and get 10 referrals by Monday or Friday, right? It's a long-term game that pays off big. So start building these relationships today. Don't wait. I want to be real with you about this section before I get into the platform. Lead generation is paid to play. And I know some of you are thinking, I don't want to pay for marketing, I just want clients to find me. Think about it this way: you put a store in a corner and there's no customers driving by, there's no traffic. Do you think people are really gonna find you? That's not how this works. So you start getting serious about the business, you start investing in being found. You are now paying to play on some of these platforms. And we're not telling you just put marketing dollars into any platform. Don't take that advice seriously. The platforms I'm about to walk you through are where your ideal clients are already looking for you right now. So let me go through them from least to most effective based on what we've seen. Angie's list, we had a ton of students tell us about their experience, and it has been great. And I feel it could be a race to the bottom on price. That said, it's still a platform where real buyers on it, so it's worth giving it a shot. Now, Thumbtack, similar dynamic in some markets. I want to be clear one of our longest standing clients, Mary, found us on Thumbtack. She has booked every single week for six years. To me, she's paid our cleaning business over$60,000. That's just from one client from a listing on that platform. Those numbers don't lie. Now, Yelp, I'm gonna be straight with you here. We call it the Yelp Mafia. Yelp is a platform where you have to seriously pay to play. And if you don't pay them, they're not gonna give you no visibility. And that's just how they operate. We don't run that business. But here's the other challenge Yelp will remove your reviews if someone leaves your review and they're not an active Yelper. What does that mean? That means that they don't have a profile picture, they haven't left a review before, they're not a regular on the platform. Yelp will pull that review. So you can earn a review today and never see it go live. So I don't recommend focusing on Yelp until you have at least five to ten reviews already in place. But our second longest standing client, Robert, came from Yelp. He's paid us over$66,000. And I'm not telling you to ignore it, but I'm telling you go in with your eyes open, right? Now, how do you stand out on these platforms? So obviously, more reviews the better. Better photos than your competition. Most people on these platforms haven't touched their profiles in years. Respond fast because competitors are slow and clients will book whoever responds first. Be professional, always try to get a name, email, phone number on these platforms and call these clients. They are on the platforms ready to buy. You just gotta show up like somebody worth buying from. All right, Google my business profile. This one is free and non-negotiable. If you don't have a Google business profile, you're invisible. So when someone types in cleaning service near me, and people do this every single day, your profile needs to show up. It's free. So it shows up in the local search results and Google Maps. And the majority of your potential clients are going to find you through Google before they find you through anything else. But here's how you optimize it. So upload professional photos. If you got a team, your results before and after is super important. Make sure you fill out every single field completely. Pick the right business category, keep your hours and contact information updated, and most importantly, get reviews. This is where you're competing with the locals in your area. Everyone can set up a Google business profile and they're fighting for those same results. The business with the most credible profiles and the most reviews are the ones that win. This is why reputation management is not optional. It's a part of running the business. Just like you're tracking your leads, you should be tracking your review count every single week because when someone searches for your cleaner and they see your profile with 50 reviews next to a competitor with three, they're calling you plain and simple. So when you show up in these local search results, you get a new consistent flow of new bookings. You build credibility with people who never heard of you, and you're giving your clients multiple ways to reach out to you, right? So they might go to some of these platforms. It might go to Google, they might go to Thumbtack, they might go to Yelp, and then they might go and search you again on Google. So make sure you're on these platforms with these bright setups. All right, Google local service ads. This is the part most people skip, and they realize it's costing them more money, right? So on top of your Google business profile, you also want to be running Google local service ads. And here's what makes the difference from regular ads. You appear at the top of every search result. So when you type it in, the first ones that are gonna show up are Google local service ads above the regular ads, above organic, above competitors who've been in business. Google also pre-qualifies you background checks, insurance, licensing, and that badge of approval gives you another level of authority and it gives your clients confidence to call you over everyone else on the page. This is the stat. This is currently about 80% of our lead generation, not on social media, not word of mouth, ads, right? So when you think about what that means, someone goes to Google and types in cleaning services near me, you're gonna be the first one that they see above anyone, and you only pay when they reach out to you. That's the game. So when you first started, there were only a few companies getting approved. Now they're about 30 plus, and you're still getting massive results because you got in early, you built the reviews. So most cleaning companies don't even know these exist. That's your edge right now. So to set it up, you need at least five reviews, proof of insurance, you'll go do a background check, verification. It takes a little bit of time, but once you're approved, you're immediately ahead of the competition that's still relying on things that stopped working years ago. Get it done, ASAP. Speed to lead. This is the moment most people miss. I want to talk to you guys about something that ties everything together because you could be on every platform, you could be on the top of everything and still losing bookings. Speed to lead. The first person that responds more than likely gets the job done. And here's a real example we had a faucet in our home that was leaking. What started as a simple fix turned into a ten thousand dollar job. Ten thousand dollars. We called five to ten companies, and I said, listen, our wall is leaking. The first person that picks up gets the job, ten thousand dollars. Nine other companies never got back to us because they were so slow. So think about that from your client side. Someone searches for a cleaner, they fill out a form on three to five websites. Whoever calls or texts them first, they're probably gonna book. So it doesn't matter if you've been in business longer, it doesn't matter if you have better photos. First response wins. So set up notifications so you know the second a lead comes in, automate your initial response. If you have tidy track, it does it automatically for you. But however you can do it, speed to lead is your standard operating procedure because the business is sitting there waiting for someone to respond, and the first one that reaches out normally gets the booking. Social proof reviews, these aren't just nice to have. This is your client acquisition system. So most cleaning businesses might have five, 10, maybe 15 reviews. We have over 500 with a 4.8 star rating. That's not luck, that's a system, and that's why we went to booking over competitors who've been in business longer. How do you get your first reviews fast? Use the beta testing approach. You could go out and say, I just launched this cleaning service and I'm looking to get my first five clients in exchange of honest feedback. But I'm only offering this to the first five to ten people, and that gets your clients and reviews at the same time. Then you need a system because asking once doesn't work. Think about it like this you go to a five-star resort at the end of the state, the staff mentions leaving a review. You say, Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna do it later. You go home, life happens and you never do it. That's your clients right now. They had a great experience, they meant to leave your review, but they were busy and life happens. That's why you built an automated follow-up sequence in the tidy track. We went from mid 200s to over 500 reviews by doing one thing differently. Instead of asking your clients once, the system follows up multiple times automatically. So every client, every cleaning, every week, you set a review goal the same way you set revenue goals, the same way you set lead goals. You might say, This week I'm gonna get five reviews, this month is gonna be 15, this quarter might be 30. You treat it as a KPI because it is one. And here's something worth knowing about the psychology of it. So focus on Google first. That's what drives local search results and gets you found and respond to every review. Good, bad, or neutral, usually within like 24 hours. And that signals to Google and future clients that you're real, you're active, and you're professional. Here's what reviews actually do for your business besides just looking pretty, right? They reduce the risk for new clients who don't know you yet. Higher ratings means more calls, more bookings, and more social proof lets you hold up your prices instead of being a race to the bottom. Each new review makes the next booking easier. Now, social proof, here's my honest take on it. And I'm gonna say something here that most people may not agree with and they don't want you to hear it. But social media may be the slowest methods on this entire list. Now, here's why. When you open up Instagram or TikTok, why are you there? You gotta be entertained, maybe educated. You're just scrolling, you're not going on Instagram to find a cleaning service. No one opens up TikTok and says, Let me find someone to clean my house, right? Your ideal client isn't searching for you on social media, they're searching for you on Google. That's where intent-based search is and that's where the money is. Social media is a scroll-stopping platform. Your job is there to stop the scroll, not to capture someone who's already looking for your service. Now, also, cleaning is not a visual business in the way that it stops a scroll. You can see a clean house looks like a regular nice home. It doesn't scream hire me the way before and after might do. So, where does social media fit? It fits for documenting your story. People love to come up, they want to watch someone build something from scratch and they want to rule for them. Share your first client, share your first win, share the testimonials you got. People in your area start to watch you from a distance and they'll want to support you when they're ready, but that's not where you start. You got next door, you got Google, you got partnerships, you got your first five clients that way, and then add social media on top of that. Build Google first always. Now, all right, these are the methods. Your first clients came in this week from your local network next door. You got consistent lead flows coming from Google Ads now. You got your long-term growth from partnership or reviews. But here's the honest truth: getting clients is only one piece in this entire puzzle. You need to find reliable cleaners, build the systems that keep the business running without you doing every job manually and set things up and set things up so you're not chained to your phone while working your nine to five. So click the link in the description, register for our free training. That's where we're break down the hiring, the systems, and how to run this business in under an hour a week. Before you close this tab, make sure you go watch this video on how we build a$3 million cleaning business from scratch. And we'll see you next time. Peace.