One of us came out of carpentry, the other out of a cleaning company. Between the two, we had spent years in other people’s homes: one building things, the other cleaning up after everything else. We knew what a house needs, and we also knew how often the job gets done halfway when nobody who owns the company is the one holding the cloth.
So we stopped working for other people. We got the paperwork done, registered the company in Delaware, took out insurance, and started calling the customers who already knew our work. That was three years ago. Since then we have cleaned more than 200 homes across Sussex County, Delaware, almost all of them from a neighbor telling a neighbor.
Later, a partner joined who had been running a company that looked after summer homes along the coast. That is where the other half of what we do came from: opening houses in the spring, closing them in the fall, and washing the outside as well as the inside, because a beach house that has been shut for six months needs both.
We still hire by the job rather than carry a fixed crew, and we are honest about why: growing faster than we can supervise is the quickest way to become the kind of company we left.
