Cleaning By Myself – Can I be Successful?

The Ask a House Cleaner Show and Podcast with Angela Brown

Cleaning by myself - can I be successful? House cleaners and maids want to know. Yes, you can moonlight as a house cleaner and run a domestic cleaning service. You MUST consider business vs. hobby when being a solo operator.

Cleaning by myself – can I be successful? House cleaners and maids want to know.

Yes, you can moonlight as a house cleaner and run a domestic cleaning service. You MUST consider business vs. hobby when being a solo operator.

Cleaning houses involves a lot of routine cleaning and repetition cleaning is boring. You can earn extra money cleaning houses even cleaning with no employees.

Listen: Cleaning By Myself – Can I be Successful?

Watch: Cleaning By Myself – Can I be Successful?

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.

Can I be Successful Cleaning by Myself?

Cleaning by myself, can I be successful? The answer is yes. Yes, you can be successful as a solo cleaner. There are a lot of house cleaners that have regular full-time jobs.

They moonlight on the side as a house cleaner and they only clean a few hours a week. If you are cleaning solo and you are cleaning part-time, yes, you can be successful. If you are cleaning full-time and you work for yourself, yes, you can be successful.

The key is you have to treat it like a business. If you treat it like a hobby, hobbies cost money, businesses make money. If you treat it like a hobby and you kind of go through the motions, you’re not going to have a business.

You Have to Treat House Cleaning as a Business

If you only have two houses a week to clean and you treat those two houses like a business, you’ll get referrals. They will stay with you for a long period of time, and you will earn regular money from those two accounts.

It doesn’t matter if you have two accounts or 20 accounts or 50 accounts. But if you treat it like a business, you can be successful.

Codependent People Need Others to Succeed

There are people that are codependent which means by myself I am nothing. I’m waiting for someone else to come to complete me. In a relationship, for example, they’re waiting for their spouse to come home. Then the day can start and they can feel love and kindness and feel fulfilled as a person.

Until you as yourself are complete and fulfilled by yourself. It’s going to be very difficult for you to provide in a relationship with what the relationship needs. In the business, the same rules apply. If you by yourself are super satisfied with the work that you do, only then will you ever be able to expand your business and grow.

If you don’t want to grow, that’s fine, but you will forever be searching for things and wondering, can I be successful? Can I find fulfillment? Can I find a purpose? Am I doing a good enough job?

You Have to Decide Yourself That You’re Good Enough

You have to decide. If you are a solo operator, you have to decide. You may be okay being a solo operator. “This is as big as I ever want to go. I am delighted with the fulfillment that it gives me.”

“I am delighted with the ways that I can help my customers up-level their life and bring their lives up to a standard.” By the time that you take your money to the bank and now it’s all automated and it drifts into your account view.

The one-click credit card processing, by the time the money hits your account, you’ll go, “Yes, I achieved something because I am a business owner,”

You Have to Find Fulfillment by Yourself

There are lots of people that only ever want to work for themselves and that is awesome. But you have to find fulfillment by yourself first because there’s nobody else in this business that’s going to give that to you. The customers are not going to give it to you. Your spouse is not going to give it to you.

Nobody’s going to give it to you except you. You have to decide, “What does this mean to me? Why am I doing this? What are my reasons? How do I want to make it feel and how will I know when I have accomplished success?” How will I know”?

Because there are a lot of people in the business, they are solo operators, they’re earning 50, 60, $70,000 a year. But they’ve never articulated what that year looks like to them.

What is Fulfillment to You?

What is the fulfillment and how will you recognize it when it arrives? If you are very clear on what you’re trying to get and what you have to give, only then will it make sense to you.

I love this conversation for this reason. There are people that are already by all shred of the imagination successful, but they haven’t determined what success is.

Thus, they don’t even recognize it, and so they’re scrambling around in a state of success, but they don’t even know they’ve achieved it.

You Have to Enjoy the Routine

Yes, you can be successful, but you have to decide what that looks like for you and then you have to go through the motions every single day. You don’t want to ever have this conversation, but you have to have it with every employee. You have to have it with every staff person, You have to have it with every independent contractor.

A lot of the stuff that you do in the cleaning business is routine. It’s boring. but every day you have to go through boredom to get to success. Nobody wants to wake up and think they’re going to a boring job.

The good news is boring is stability. You don’t get up and reinvent the whole cleaning process every day. That’s not where the excitement lies. The excitement lies outside the job. You go do the job, which is boring routine stuff.

Separate Work from Your Life

After your work is done, then go have an exciting life, right? Go play music and go to parties and go take classes and expand your world and do fun, exciting things, but the job is very routine.

When you clean 12 or 15 toilets a day, it gets boring. Can you be successful? You can, but you have to agree to the boring stuff. Life isn’t boring but the cleaning industry is boring.

Even though people love cleaning and they like seeing the before and after and all that stuff. You have to do and be willing to do the routine stuff every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year. If you’ve been in the business for 20, 30, 40 years, you cleaned a lot of toilets. You cleaned a lot of sinks, a lot of showers, a lot of tubs. You cleaned a lot of hair out of the drains.