What I did after I lost £60k in a year
Rhianna — Cadi team4 min read
Stop shrinking to fit into an easier box.
The ceilings you can’t see are the ones stopping you.
Growing big enough that you’ve hit the VAT threshold. Charging well enough that your profit finally funds some time off, or a holiday — yes, the week off you’ve been trying to take for two years now. The hire you keep putting off because you’re not sure you could pay them on time.
Free to start. Upgrade whenever you’re ready.
Your prices. Finally worth it.
Your week. Finally yours.
Your numbers. Finally clear.
Your prices. Finally worth it.
Your week. Finally yours.
Your numbers. Finally clear.
[02] Recognition
Things you’ve said to yourself this year
- I’ll start trying to grow when I’ve got more time.
- I’m just waiting on invoices and then I’ll be fine.
- I can’t afford to hire yet — I need another one or two big contracts first.
- I can’t go VAT registered, I’d lose half my customers.
- My prices are fine, I think?
Every one of those is a decision to stay small.
That isn’t always the wrong call. Some parts of growth genuinely need a certain size of business behind them. But you have to break through to get to those levels, and most of what’s in the way is invisible.
You can’t run a business on a bank balance and a tax return once a year. That’s what most of us are doing. It’s why growing feels like a risk you can’t take — not because it is, but because you’re guessing.
Some of those ceilings are real. VAT genuinely bites on a domestic round. Some of them aren’t.
You can’t tell which is which until you can see what’s actually happening.
[03] Proof, for you
It starts with your own numbers.
Signing up to Cadi isn’t import your customers, build your schedule, done.
The core of it is strategy. We take your data and show it back to you in ways nobody has before — which is where the confidence comes from.
- 01
Bring your business with you.
Import your customers from previous software or a spreadsheet. Still on a paper diary? Take a photo and we’ll put it in for you.
Every customer, every job, every price, in one place.
Most people are set up the same evening.
- 02
See your money properly. Probably for the first time.
Import your statements. Six months free on any new account.
Cadi walks you through what it found: what came in, what it really cost, and what’s actually yours once the costs and the tax come off.
Your tax pot starts filling itself, week by week. No more finding out in January.
Most people find something in the first ten minutes they didn’t know was there.
- 03
Then run it with a plan, not a hunch.
Answer a few questions and Cadi builds your next 30 days: the steps, the money goals, and what each one is worth to you.
While you work on the business, Cadi keeps the day-to-day moving underneath: the schedule, the invoices, the chase for the one that’s late.
Growing stops being something you squeeze in at 10pm. It gets done in the week.
Free · the quiz1 OF 8
What do you mostly do in a normal week?
I’m on the tools, all week
On the tools, with a bit of admin at night
Some cleaning, but mostly running the work
I don’t clean. I run the business
No email to see your result.
[04] The day-to-day · Run
And nothing sits waiting to be remembered.
Cadi is active about running your business, not just somewhere to keep it.
The quote you meant to send back yesterday. The invoice you feel awkward chasing for the third time. The job you meant to move and never did.
Every one of them costs money. None of them are about how good you are at cleaning.
Your customers, your schedule, your staff, your services and your invoicing, in one place that talks to itself. Set your prices once and everything quotes off them. When something goes overdue, Cadi tells you, with the chase written and ready to send.
[05]
We tried all of it first.
We spent thousands on cleaning software over the years, looking for one that could actually run the business. Every one of them was missing something behind the scenes.
There’s not much out there, and it falls into three piles.
01
There’s software that’s been around forever and has barely changed in a decade.
02
There’s foreign software pushed into the UK market that doesn’t know what a VAT threshold is, or a DBS check, or why a domestic round prices differently to a contract.
03
And now there’s a new wave built by cleaning companies themselves, often put together in a couple of months, which works until it doesn’t.
We get why people build their own. We’re a cleaning company too. The difference is who’s building it. Cadi and Cadi Connect are built by a proper engineering team with decades of experience between them, working alongside someone who’s run a cleaning business for seventeen years. No product team interpreting a brief. No meeting where somebody decides what cleaners probably want.
All of that software will schedule a job and print an invoice. None of it tells you whether the job was worth doing.
So we built the one we couldn’t find.
Signing up to Cadi isn’t “import your customers, build your schedule, done.” The core of it is strategy. We take your numbers and show you what they mean: which customers are making you money, which ones are costing you, what you should be charging and what to put aside for tax. Most owners have never seen their business laid out like that. That’s where the confidence comes from, whether it’s putting your prices up, turning down a job or taking on your next cleaner.
A scheduling tool has no reason to care about any of that. We do, because I spent years not knowing.
[06] Your work speaks for you
There’s a room you’ve never been let into.
Think of the contract you didn’t get to bid for. It went to a company down the road, and you know for a fact they don’t clean as well as you do.
You didn’t lose it on quality. You lost it because the buyer had no way of seeing the difference, so they went with size, the way they always have. That’s how good small cleaning businesses get left out.
Cadi Connect changes that.
Every job you log, every visit you turn up to and every certificate you keep in date builds your Cadi Score. You’re doing that work already. Now it counts. Facilities companies looking for cleaners can find you by your record, not by how big you are or how good you are at filling in forms.
There are no tender documents, no cold calling and no waiting years for someone to take a chance on you.
It’s free on every plan, including the free one. Getting commercial work shouldn’t depend on what you pay us.
[07] The Cadi Score
You can’t fake a well-run business.
Cadi Connect runs on your Cadi Score. It’s built from the work you actually do: the jobs you turn up to, the work you log, the compliance you keep in date.
That changes how commercial contracts are won. Not by the biggest name or the slickest tender, but by the business that can show it runs well.
Which puts well-run small businesses back in the game.
What facilities companies can see
- Whether you turn up
- Whether you log the work
- Whether your compliance is up to date
What they can never see
- Your margins
- Your customers
- Your bank statements
- Your tax pot
[08] Why I built it
Nobody told me how to hold onto money.
We’ve been cleaning since 2008. We spent years making great money and never being in a position to see the profit — waiting until the end of the year to find out what we owed, then working out how we were going to pay it.
When we hit the VAT threshold we panicked and shrank back down, because most of the work was domestic and we couldn’t see how to add twenty per cent without losing them. We started hiring and convinced myself it wasn’t sustainable. I pulled my own team back down with me and called it being sensible.
I was running blind. I’d have made every one of those decisions differently with the numbers in front of me.
Cleaning is more lucrative than anyone gives it credit for, if it’s priced and run well. What it’s never had is software that treats it that way.
— Rhianna, Mackies Cleaning Services
[09] Where this came from
Before Cadi there was a course and a business planner — the tools you need to run a sustainable cleaning business.
I’d got fed up watching uninsured, untrained operators undercut everyone and win the work, while the businesses doing it properly picked up the pieces.
Sixty-two cleaning business owners, one year, going through their numbers properly — most of them for the first time. Between them we found over £100,000 in profit that was already there. Not new work, not price rises. Money the business was already making that nobody could see.
But something kept coming up. Most of them didn’t need coaching. They needed to get started, keep track, and build as they grew.
So we closed the course, refined the planner, and built Cadi.
62
cleaning business owners, one year
£100k+
in profit that was already there
[10] The Cadi Ceiling
Every ceiling, and how to get through it.
The VAT threshold. The first hire. Getting off the tools. The contract you’re told you’re too small for. Every one has a way through, and most are simpler than they look from underneath.
Breaking through industry ceilings. Weekly.
- B · SCALINGDiagnose before you scale
- A · PRICINGStop using industry standards if you want to win
- D · TEAMWho to hire first as you grow your cleaning business
[11] The waitlist
Be one of the first inside.
We’re letting cleaning businesses in a small group at a time. Join the waitlist to get your place, and you’ll hear from us before anyone else.
In person
Cadi Conference 2027
One day, one room, full of people who run cleaning businesses. Owners sharing what actually worked and the numbers behind it, and time to talk to people who’ve hit the same ceilings you have.
Date and venue announced soon. Register interest and you’ll hear first. Interested in sponsoring or exhibiting? Get in touch.
[12] Two doors
Looking for more commercial work?
Getting into contract cleaning isn’t about being big enough. It’s about being able to prove you’re reliable.
Read: breaking the glass ceiling in the cleaning industry →For facilities companies
Looking for cleaners rather than software?
Cadi Connect is where facilities companies and managing agents find cleaning businesses whose record can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Cadi Connect for FM