How to Start a House Cleaning Business With No Experience and No Money

Starting a house cleaning business as an independent cleaner is one of the easiest and cheapest small businesses to start.

I used to run my own house cleaning business, and so I thought I would share some of my top tips here to help you start a house cleaning business with no prior experience and no money.

Learn how to make $600+ per week with your own house cleaning business.

I’m going to go over the basics and very first foundation steps you need to know and be aware of before you go investing your time and any money into starting your own house cleaning business.

The reason why I’m sharing these foundation steps with you today is because I missed most of these very important steps myself when setting up my own house cleaning business, and other home-based businesses.

So you do not want to miss out these vital steps!

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

Are You Actually Cut Out For Self-Employment?
The No.1 Myth Which is Holding You Back.
Your No.1 Motivational Driving Factor.
How To Start With No Experience.
How To Start With No Money.
How To Start With $100.
Summary.
Next Steps.
House Cleaning Business Resources.

1. Are You Cut Out For Self-Employment?

So the first thing to address is “Are you actually cut out to be self employed?“ – because not everyone is cut out to run a business.

I think that a lot of new small business owners don’t really consider the implications of being self employed.

So I want you to think really hard if running your own business is something that won’t daunt you. Yes it will be a learning curve, but are these ‘other’ tasks (apart from cleaning) actually manageable and doable for you?

In addition to your customer cleans, you’ll also have to:

Carry out marketing activities.
Manage your appointments diary.
Record your income & expenses.
Register with the IRS/Inland Revenue.
Complete your year-end income tax form.

The best way to manage these tasks is to have little systems set up and put in place so they keep you organized and accountable.

2. The No.1 Myth Which is Holding You Back

Because I’ve worked in the cleaning industry, I’m very aware of the main myth which stops a lot of people from becoming a self-employed cleaner, and this is that they think that they will have to work their socks off for only $8 an hour.

And so they start thinking “Is it worth being a self-employed cleaner?”

This is definitely not the case and I want to debunk this myth now.

The main key to earning $600+ a week with your own house cleaning business is to find premium customers who are very happy to pay you $15-$25 per hour.

You just need to do some diligent research and find out who these ‘premium’ customers are and where they reside – then focus your marketing efforts on these affluent people.

I go into detail about finding affluent, premium customers in in my House Cleaning Business Roadmap ebook.

But for now, believe me that there are people who are willing to pay upwards of $15+ an hour, as long as they are getting a professional clean from a trustworthy cleaner.

3. The No.1 Motivational Driving Factor

As with any job or business, it can eventually become a daily grind.

And because you will be self-employed and you’re solely responsible for your income, you absolutely must find some form of motivation to keep you going through any ‘meh’ days and to help you overcome business and life obstacles.

However, we all know that motivation comes and goes, so you need to replace motivation with dogged determination.

What is Your WHY?

The best way I know on how to get a dogged determination mindset; is to find your WHY for starting and running your own house cleaning business in the first place.

Your why will become your driving force to keep pushing on; no matter what.

I want to leave my job.
I want to earn $300+ per week
I want to save for a new car
I want to have exotic vacations.
I want a new home or house renovation.
I want to work flexible hours around my children.

When you find your why, keep thinking of it in order to keep moving your business forward.

4. How To Start With No Experience

Okay, so now we’re getting on to the exciting steps.

How can you start a house cleaning business with no experience?

Well, the great thing about starting a house cleaning business is that you don’t need any particular skills.

You don’t need any cleaning training.
You don’t need a business qualification.
You don’t need any business training.

I’m assuming that you clean your own home? Well, just transfer those skills into someone else’s home – but even do a better job.

As with business training, you simply learn on the job as you go.

You’re not managing or training staff and you’re not setting up some high-flying Fortune 500 company. It’s just you, setting yourself up as a self-employed, independent cleaner.

Inside my House Cleaning For Profits ebook, I show you how to carry out your cleans efficiently, what the best cleaning products to use are and how to run the business side of your house cleaning business by creating systems.

Keep things simple, and as I said in point 1. above, set up little systems to keep yourself organized.

Systems such as:

Stress free marketing / advertising.
Keep an appointments diary.
Simple income & expenses tracking.
Use a key-holding system.
Have basic admin stationery such as a customer receipt book.

Once you have a few systems in place, it makes your job (and your life) so much more easier!

Related Resources:

5. How To Start With No Money

Now you know that you can start a house cleaning business with no prior experience, the next question is “How can I start a house cleaning business with no money?”

The quick and simple answer is:

Carry out free marketing activities, and
Use your customers’ cleaning products

Free marketing activities such as using social media to spread the word on a local level, and the good old-fashioned offline word-of-mouth.

Using your customers’ cleaning products is something which a lot of your customers would prefer anyway. A lot of people are set in their ways and like only certain cleaning products, and liking certain smells a cleaning product gives. Therefore, you should have no problem in getting customers who are more than happy for you to use their products.

Also, although I do recommend that you do wear an apron/tabard (which you can get for only $15), you don’t have to wear one. You can easily wear an old pair of jeans and a jumper.

6. How To Start With $100

Although using social media and word-of-mouth marketing are great as free marketing activities, they are also a slower way to get your business off the ground.

So in order to speed up your launch, I would recommend that you spend around $100 on the following:

Basic Cleaning Products

Get yourself an apron and some of the basic cleaning products so you’re never without them if a customer doesn’t have them stocked in their cupboard.

House Cleaning Resources & Accessories

Leaflet Flyers

For $50 you can get 1,000 colored A5 leaflets printed which you can put through your target market’s letter boxes.

Leaflet distribution is by far the best form of marketing for a house cleaning business – this was my no.1 highest converting marketing activity in my house cleaning business.

Now having said all of this, if you don’t have $100 to spend, then go down the ‘no money’ route as outlined above, as you can still definitely get your house cleaning business off the ground. I don’t want you to think that you have to spend $100 if you don’t have that kind of cash to spare.

Just keep remembering your WHY for wanting to start a house cleaning business in the first place, and keep pushing forward even if you have no money to start. With a dogged determination mindset you can still accomplish starting this amazing, very easy to start and very profitable small business.

7. Summary

So to summarize and recap:

You’re OK with taking on the extra self-employment tasks.
You’re OK with taking on a new learning curve.
You know who to target to earn $15-$25 per hour.
You’re going to find your WHY to get a dogged determination mindset.
You know how to start with no experience.
You know how to start with no money.
You know how to accelerate your launch with $100.

So as you can see, you’ve actually accomplished a lot already before you even start the setting up your business.

I’m sure you now realize how important these basic ‘business foundation’ steps are.

Do not miss these essential steps!

Next Steps

Once you’re happy with the above, then you’re ready to move forward and take the next steps.

The first thing you need to do is get a notebook and write down (or type up in a document) a business plan.

Your business plan needs to include:

Who your target market are (who you want as your customers)
Where to find them.
Who your direct competitors are.
What marketing you’re going to do.
What hours you want to work.
Are you going to offer a key-holding system?

There’s a lot more that needs to go into your business plan, but those are the essential items which need to be addressed first.

Then of course you need to make yourself legal, so check out how to register your business with your local county / state / Government. I’m reluctant to give any IRS/Inland Revenue advice here because a) I’m not an expert in this field and b) legal information different from country to country.

If you need a helping hand, then I recommend you get a copy of my ebook which is literally a step-by-step roadmap taking you by the hand and showing you what to do each step of the way.

>> Follow The Home Cleaning for Profits System

This book acts as a step-by-step checklist which makes it easy to follow and set up your own house cleaning business.