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Automating your cleaning business can feel intimidating, especially if you don’t have solid systems in place yet. But the time you put into automations up front will pay you back every single week.
Consider Sheri-Anne Woolley’s experience automating her maid service, Mona Home and Office Cleaning. The business ran successfully for 17 years before Sheri-Anne was able to leave the cleaning business for other pursuits that mattered to her.
In this article, you’ll learn how to automate your cleaning business so you get more time, more freedom, and more control. We’ll also share more about Sheri-Anne’s experience with implementing these automations in real life.
Table of contents
Get Organized: Know What to Automate First
The real answer to this question is that everyone needs automations. Automations take routine tasks off your plate, like sending reminders and invoices to clients.
Solo operators gain more billable hours with automations; business owners looking to scale gain time back to invest in growth projects. For Sheri-Anne, that freedom started with asking herself a few important questions:
- Am I willing to tolerate boredom for success?
- Am I willing to release my addiction to blame and guilt to focus my energy on what needs to be done?
- Am I willing to show up and act like an owner?
- Am I willing to believe that success can be easy?
- Am I willing to put the systems in place that will support consistency in my business, marketing, fulfillment, client intake, sales, follow-up, and customer service?
- Am I willing to release the need to reinvent the wheel as a way to express my creativity?
If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, you’re ready to start automating. Setting up the right systems is what it will take to scale your maid service and give you freedom.
How to get started
Sheri-Anne started automating by making a list of all the tasks she least liked doing because they took up so much time: client messaging, payroll calculations, drive-time and route planning, and booking. Then, she chose ZenMaid to help her build systems because it could help her build systems she could “set-and-forget” because they didn’t directly enrich her or her business.
Other cleaning business owners have benefited from ZenMaid systems, too. Stephanie Pipkin of Serene Clean and Maria Dorian of The Funky Sponge spoke to us about when they realized they needed automations, and how they went about building them.
Change Your Mindset: Think Like an Owner, Not an Employee
Part of the issue Sheri-Anne experienced in her business was thinking about the tasks in front of her from the perspective of the employee, not a business owner. She bogged herself down putting out the fires in front of her, scrambling to catch up on tasks instead of building systems that supported her while she ran the business.
The best place to start is with a change of mindset. Stop telling yourself “nobody can do it as well as me” — that kind of thinking is what holds you back. It may feel selfish at first to take time out of your schedule to build automations. But you are not your business! That distinction is important when maintaining your owner-first mindset.
Software and automations do things just as well as you can — and often much better. They make it possible to delegate work to other employees, or save time in the long run so you can focus on other areas of your business that can’t be automated. You just need to invest a bit of time into building them.
How to take action
It can be hard to find that time, but the mindset shift only works if you change your behaviors. ZenMaid CEO and cleaning business owner Amar Ghose joined Stephanie on Filthy Rich Cleaners to discuss this topic, and the concept of working “on” your business, not “in” your business.
For solo operators, this could mean blocking off time on your calendar for a few weeks to make room in your schedule to build automations. For cleaning business owners with employees, you may need to let your employees flex their knowledge and experience for a week or two, and let them take the first pass with any issues that arise.
Make the Client Experience Seamless
Many cleaning businesses struggle when they don’t keep client experiences and expectations top of mind. Introducing new software won’t fix a bad experience, and it can break working ones when implemented without care. Keep your clients in mind while building your automations.
Automations do help you save time. But they also should handle clients with care.
A good experience offers clear communication, sets expectations you can deliver, and makes clients feel just as appreciated as they did when you were sending emails manually.
Start working on this by getting some clarity about what you and your clients expect from your business. These questions could be helpful to answer:
- What outcomes do you want to deliver to your clients?
- Do you believe that you charge too much? (Spoiler: you probably don’t.)
- Do you treat your customers how you want to be treated?
- What would elevate your experience right now?
This clarity is crucial to outline before you trigger any automations. Every message needs to have your clients in mind, from the timing of the message to its contents.
What to automate
Software like ZenMaid can help you with automated emails and text messages that coordinate both your clients and cleaners. Once you set up your templates, ZenMaid makes sure all of these routine communications happen without you having to sit there and click buttons.
This includes things like sending checklists to cleaners before appointments, asking for reviews after services, and prompting clients to confirm appointments a few days in advance.
We have a guide to sending automated messages that land, if you want somewhere concrete to start.
Get the Mood Out of Your Marketing
Many small or local businesses go through cycles with marketing: they get excited about a new idea or platform, they make a flurry of posts, and then life takes over, and they abandon the channel.
It’s common for cleaning business owners to burn out sometimes. During these burnout periods, you’re likely to withdraw in life and disappear from time to time to recover.
This gets difficult when your clients rely on you to text them reminders. And when you maintain your posting schedule and marketing strategy alone, these breaks create large gaps in your campaigns, which can be off-putting to prospective clients.
A few quiet days are fine. But go a month without posting, and prospective clients may wonder if you’re still in business.
Treating marketing like a system is what builds consistency and helps you avoid this consequence of burnout. Put systems first and automate everything you possibly can, so that marketing becomes an exciting space to practice your creativity.
Plan out three months of marketing
Knowing when to post, how often to post, and what to post takes a lot of the guesswork out of marketing. Sometimes, just eliminating your choices upfront makes posting more achievable because you just need to execute instead of decide.
It also makes it easier to plan shoot days if you do video content, or writing days if you have a blog or Facebook group. Rather than working on the fly, you can work in batches and schedule marketing posts out through a month or a week.
The most successful cleaning business owners don’t have more discipline than you; they have better systems that support them. Our guide on social media marketing walks you through this process and more.
ABG: Always Be Gathering (Reviews)
Reviews are a key part of marketing because they come from real clients of your business. Since most clients really take reviews seriously during their shopping process, you want to gather as many positive ones as you can.
Before you start asking for public reviews, though, you want to feel confident in your service quality. Maintaining service quality may not seem like something you can automate, but you can at least automate your internal service rating requests to do a pulse check.
ZenMaid’s service rating feature sends every client a quick rating request after each cleaning. You’ll spot problems fast and can follow up with anyone who’s unhappy before it turns into a bad public review. Then, make it easy for every client to leave a public review on your Google Business Profile.
You can also follow up with clients who aren’t happy with your services, and see if you can improve their experience.
The impact of automating review gathering
Sheri-Anne was able to maintain a 4.7 rating on Google, gather over 200 customer reviews, and receive a 97% rating on Homestars and HomeAdvisors by implementing review systems. Gathering reviews automatically helps you with marketing — the more positive reviews you have, the more likely people are to trust you.
If you’re in need of a pep talk, Stephanie Pipkin has one for you over on Filthy Rich Cleaners, our official podcast.
Track Your Crucial Business Metrics
Let’s be honest: tracking your numbers feels depressing. You might even feel dread! But ignoring them isn’t going to help you grow.
Looking at your numbers is your fastest way to identify new opportunities for your business. It’s how you see what’s happening in your business: where you can make changes, shift, edit, improve, and save yourself from going over the edge.
Aside from the anxiety you may have about looking at your numbers, it can be genuinely intimidating to gather all of your numbers if you don’t know what you’re looking for or where to look for it. Take a look at this guide to gathering your key performance indicators (KPIs) and automating reporting — it might help you feel more confident about where to start.
It seems counterintuitive, but tracking all of your transactions shows you where cash is leaking so you can fix it. You’ll be able to see where gaps or lags in your schedule appear and close them.
You’ll be able to budget more efficiently and find more affordable suppliers if you know what you’re paying for your inventory. But more importantly, you’ll be able to pay yourself and your employees without worrying.
Set up recurring reports
Each of the KPIs you want to track lives somewhere. In ZenMaid, you can pull reports for things like your monthly revenue, clocked hours, or marketing channel to see trends and focus your energy. Set a monthly check-in on your calendar to pull these reports and review them.
Over time, tracking this information will help you forecast demand for all areas of your business — new business, more cleaners, or a price change.
Know When to Ask for Help
You may be asking yourself: How do I make the changes to build these successful systems?
This is a difficult question to answer because the how is custom to you — not just to your business, but to your personality, belief system, team, and clients.
You can’t build a sustainable business by applying generic information to your unique circumstances. The best advice in the world may just not apply to you! But learning new skills, building new systems, and reminding yourself to be nimble will get you far.
Cleaning business owners look at where they want to be and can examine their responsibility in getting there. Sometimes, this looks like taking stock of your current situation and figuring out what you’d like to improve.
But more often than not, it also looks like asking yourself who has what you want to achieve. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who has already done this and made a system around it?
- Who deeply understands not just the business side of things, but the psychology of it?
- Who isn’t just guessing how to do things, but has a proven way to build a business?
- Who has experienced holes in their business like mine but has come out on top?
Imitation may be the greatest form of flattery, but it’s often a quick way to build your confidence in something. If you want to grow, look at what your competitors and the aspirational people in your life are doing.
Curate, don’t copy
Don’t crib someone else’s entire marketing play and try to pass it as your own. Use their moves as inspiration, adjusting them to your specific needs, and go from there.
Over time, you’ll build your own voice and curate taste, seeing what works for your clientele and knowing what converts.
As Sheri-Anne grew her marketing habits, she built skill in marketing herself, building her unique voice, and developing an authentic relationship with her audience. After 17 successful years in the cleaning industry, Sheri-Anne took this skillset and started a new venture in a different industry: senior care.
ZenMaid’s Mastermind is a Facebook group of over 10,000 cleaning business owners and industry professionals. Our members are always open to sharing wins, ideas, and helping each other grow. Join today!
Wrapping Up and Key Takeaways
Here are seven next steps you can take action on right now:
- Get organized: Know what you need to automate, and research your software options for support.
- Work on your business: Take a week off from the day-to-day and spend that time building systems.
- Stop chasing clients: Build systems that make client communication easy, predictable, and automated.
- Batch your marketing: Plan ahead and use scheduling software to post for you.
- Take reviews seriously: Ask every client, often, and let reviews do your marketing for you.
- Know your numbers: Set up reports that show where to grow your income and keep cash flowing.
- Learn from others: Seek out other successful business owners and learn from them.
If you’re ready to automate your cleaning business tasks, you’re probably looking for software. Try ZenMaid free for 14 days, and see how much you’re able to accomplish in your first session.
