Cleaning the house of celebrities can seem daunting at first. Here is what you need to know to keep the job and get referrals from their celebrity friends. Also, here’s what your employees need to know about how to behave while on the job.
Listen: Cleaning House for Celebrities
Watch: Cleaning House for Celebrities
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
Cleaning a Celebrity’s House
Cleaning a celebrity’s house, what do you need to know? Now, today we have somebody that called in with two questions about working for celebrities. I’m going to have you listen to those now, and then we’ll answer them.
“How do you market or get more celebrity contracts? What type of agreement letters, contracts, what type of literature is drawn up or paperwork is drawn up for those celebrity contracts?”
I Have Worked for Celebrities in Charlotte
I’m so glad that you called in. This is a very interesting series of questions, and I’m prefacing it by saying this is based on my personal experience and the industry that I’ve been in for the last 30 years working with gobs of house cleaners.
I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and this is the home of a couple of pro ball teams. We’ve got lots of NASCAR celebrities. We have famous movie stars and famous authors of books. We’ve got Fortune 500 celebrities who run companies here, and we have the banking industry that produces lots of celebrities in the money industry.
So there are lots of celebrities, as well as some fun multi-level marketing company owners that live here in Charlotte, North Carolina. So it’s a fun place to live. And there are celebrities that will hire house cleaners. So how do you get the job, and then what contracts do you write up?
I Don’t Suggest Marketing to Celebrities
So the first thing is. I don’t suggest that you market to celebrities. I don’t suggest it. They’re going to find you because of your reputation, and the reputation is going to be something like, “This house cleaning company does excellent work. They are fairly priced on what they charge and the job that they do.
They have a satisfaction guarantee. And you say, “Wait a second. That just sounds like a regular customer.” I know. They’re going to hire you because of your discretion, and what that means is that you don’t go tattle-telling to all the neighbors about the client and the customer, and what happens behind closed doors.
You’re confident about your client base and that word gets around. So here’s the thing, celebrities are very well connected, and so they’ll ask everybody they know, “Hey, I’m looking for a new house cleaner. Who do you know that fits this bill?”
If You are a Great Company, They Will Find You
If you are already in that company, they will find you, and then they will say, “Hey, can you come to clean my house?” And then you have to decide, is it in your market or are you going to go outside the zip code that you clean and you’re willing to do their house because they’re willing to pay you a little bit extra?
It’s a decision you have to make. All right, so now that we’ve discovered that they’re like everyone else, there are more similarities with celebrities than there are differences. The differences are, they are making more money than us and they might live in bigger homes than us.
Their schedules may be busier than ours, but they are like us, and that they’re humans, they have relationships that may or may not go very well. They may have kids that are bratty, and those relationships may or may not be very good. They may or may not have time to clean up after themselves.
Celebrities Can Have Messy Homes Too
And although they may have a beautiful crib that they in, their house could have parts of it that are sloppy and disheveled, and messy. And there may be kids’ bedrooms that are all a wreck and stuff like that. It’s very common. They are humans just like us. The similarities are more than there are differences.
One of the things that I would recommend, and this is as far as setting a contract goes, the contract is not going to be with them. They’re not going to drop these big contracts and say, “You have to follow these rules,” or we do not have big contracts we have them sign either.
They don’t own us and we don’t own them. If they hire you for a job, it’s a business transaction. And so we have them assign our worksheet just like every other customer. There’s no special contract. But. That said, there may be a special contract on our end with our employees.
There May Be a Special Contract for Your Employees
And that special contract might be, you are not allowed to ask for an autograph, the person that is hiring you, although they are a mentor and they are at the top of their game, they are not a mentor to you. You are the house cleaner. You’ve been hired to do a job. You go in and you do the job, and when you leave. You don’t linger, you don’t ogle and awe.
Don’t ask for autographs. Don’t ask them, “How did you get to be where you are today? Can you give me some tips? Can you give me some pointers?” That’s not why you’re there. And so the differences and the contracts that we create are with our companies and our employees. They don’t want the hassle. They want you to show up, do your job, and go home.
And then one of the things we have to be super sensitive about, and this is one of the differences, one of the super sensitivities about working for a celebrity is that a lot of times they’re on what we call a hyperextended schedule.
Celebrities Have a Hyperextended Schedule
And that might mean that they have 10 or 15 guest appearances in a single week. And for any of us, that would be overwhelming where we spent three or four weeks thinking about what we’re going to wear, how we’re going to do our hair, how we are going to dress up. It’s a big event for us. They may have 10 or 15 of those in a week.
Their schedules are highly activated by their publicists and their agents and their attorneys and whoever it is that’s managing them, and so they might be on a plane flying somewhere and as soon as they get back, they’ve got 45 minutes, they’re going to take a shower, pack a new bag, and they’re gone again.
And so you may or may not ever see them, or you may show up to clean the house and they say, “Leave this wing of the house off today because I’m sleeping and I just want it to be quiet.” And so then you have to determine, are we going to run the vacuums today? Is this going to be annoying or will it be not heard in other parts of the house?
Treat Them Like Any Other Person
There are a couple of things that you have to navigate, but for the most part, you treat them like a normal person, you respect their privacy, you respect the fact that they have this hyperextended schedule, and that they might be working more than the normal person. There’s one more thing that I would like to bring up when working with celebrities, and it’s not to take it personally.
When a celebrity is running 10 or 15 media appearances per week, it is possible that, just like any human, they get to a point where they forget to eat a meal and they skip a meal, and then their blood sugar levels dip.
If they find you at that moment, whether they’re texting you, whether they’re calling you, whether you’re at their house during that moment, they might snap at you, and it’s not personal. It’s just that they went into a mode where their body broke down for a minute and they didn’t feel so great.
Celebrities Get Grumpy As Anyone Else Does
You were there, they said, “Hey, this is messy. This needs to be fixed or whatever.” It’s not that they’re angry with you, it’s just that they’re angry with the job or something needs to be fixed or something needs to be tweaked, or maybe they need a smoothie. Who knows? It’s not personal.
So one of the things that I recommend, if you get a job for a celebrity, just take a big breath, stand back and just realize that, hey, I have this privilege to learn a little bit differently about customers than I normally do, because most of my customers are not celebrities. And then that’s it. You don’t tell any of your friends that you work for them.
You don’t take pictures of their house, and you certainly don’t take pictures of anything that’s private. That would be trophies that they have on the walls, best-selling books, albums, anything that they’ve won. You don’t take any pictures of any of those things. Those are not your priority and they’re not your property.
You Don’t Get to Expose Private Things on Social Media
So you do not get to expose that stuff and go on social media and go, “Hey, wow, look, I cleaned these trophies today.” You don’t get to do that. You have to be highly sensitive to the fact that these people make their living by their reputation.
So if you see something that you don’t agree with and you might, it might be recreational drugs, it might be a partner that’s at the house that’s not a married partner to the person that they’re supposed to be married to, there are all kinds of stuff that happens, you’re not there to judge and you’re not there to share the gossip.
So if you are discreet and if you can clean, and if you can do a great job, you can keep the contract. The important part of this is to realize that if you are blessed with the contract of a celebrity. It is just a learning experience, it’s going to be a great ride, you might learn a few things that you would do differently for the next celebrity that hires you, you probably will get hired by other celebrities.
Celebrities Run in the Same Circles
Because celebrities talk, and when somebody says, “Oh, I’ve got the best house cleaner in the world, you should hire her,” or, “You should hire him,” you’ll probably get a job from any of their friends. They run in the same circles. So if you get on that track, they will promote you. You don’t need to promote yourself.
You just need to do the same fabulous job that you do all the time on every customer and just treat your business the same way. And I tell you what, it will go so far and you’ll probably be rewarded handsomely.
Resources
Principles: Life and Work – https://amzn.to/3mnWuiU
Dealing with Difficult Customers – https://amzn.to/3dsKmcm
If It Wasn’t for The Customers, I’d Really Like This Job – https://amzn.to/2PT9twA
Mastering Respectful Confrontation – https://amzn.to/3rMxx1E
I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships – https://amzn.to/3dsEvDK
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