I told the story of the year I lost £60,000 in What I did after I lost £60k in a year. This is the companion piece: the maths behind it, what it was really costing me, and the five systems that would have caught it.
One thing to be clear about first, because the number turns up elsewhere on this site. The £60,000 here is money I lost in a single year. It isn’t the £60k revenue ceiling that so many cleaning businesses stall at. Same figure, completely different thing.
I’d been hiring on hope. I had no system that told me whether I could afford another cleaner, so I covered the guess with my own hours.
The sum in short
One cleaner who leaves after eight weeks costs about £3,200 once you count pay, on-costs and your own time. The same cleaner who stays costs £14,660 a year and, billed at £30 an hour for 80% of their hours, adds about £6,300 towards your overheads (the working is in Can you afford your first hire?). What separates the two is a system, and there are five of them.
What happened in the £60k year? The story in thirty seconds
I took on cleaners but didn’t know whether I could afford them. So I kept cleaning every day myself, just in case: fourteen-hour days, three little ones at home, covering every sick day and every no-show. Things slipped. Complaints started coming in. We lost three major contracts.
When those contracts went, I felt sad for about an hour. Then I felt relieved, because I knew I’d been holding together something that was never going to hold. The first thing I did the next week wasn’t to chase new contracts. It was to start building the systems I should have built before I ever hired anyone.
What one hire that doesn’t work out really costs
The thing I couldn’t see was how expensive a failed hire is. It isn’t just the wages. Here’s an illustration for one part-time cleaner on 20 hours a week at the National Living Wage of £12.71, who leaves after eight weeks.
| What it cost | £ |
|---|---|
| Eight weeks’ pay (20 hours × £12.71) | 2,034 |
| Employer National Insurance and pension on top | 222 |
| 20 hours of your own time shadowing and training, which you could have billed at £30 an hour | 600 |
| Three re-cleans (two hours each, at £21.50 an hour real cost) | 129 |
| One customer credit | 75 |
| Four hours writing the ad and interviewing, at £30 an hour | 120 |
| Total | about 3,200 |
About £3,200 for one hire that doesn’t work out in two months, and that’s before one of those re-cleans turns into a complaint, and one complaint turns into a contract. (The figures are illustrative. The pay, National Insurance and pension are worked out from the 2026/27 rates, and everything else is a plausible example for you to swap your own numbers into.)
Now multiply by the number of times you’ve hired on a feeling.
Who is the most expensive person on the payroll?
When I covered every sick day myself, I thought I was saving money. I was actually spending the most expensive hours in the business on the cheapest job.
Your hours are the only ones that can win customers, set prices, write the checklist and look at the numbers. When you spend them covering a no-show, none of that gets done, and the business quietly gets worse while it looks as busy as ever. Owners call it dedication. A business that depends on one exhausted person is carrying a risk that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, and one illness away from a very bad week.
The wider picture is sobering. The Health and Safety Executive estimates 964,000 workers in Great Britain suffered work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, with 22.1 million working days lost, an average of about 23 days per case. Those are self-reported estimates for all workers, and I couldn’t find a separate figure for owners of small businesses. But I don’t need a statistic to tell me what fourteen-hour days did to me. When I felt relieved at losing the contracts, that was my body telling me the truth.
Is training on a customer’s premises a shortcut or a risk?
New starters at Mackies were learning on the job, in customers’ homes, with me too tired to supervise properly. It felt practical. It’s also a risk on three fronts.
- The customer sees every mistake. Your standard gets set by the first week, in front of the people who pay for it.
- It’s a legal duty, not just good practice. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act, an employer has to provide the information, instruction, training and supervision necessary to ensure workers’ health and safety. Under the COSHH Regulations, anyone using cleaning chemicals has to be given information, instruction and training on them. “Learned it on the job with nobody watching” is a hard thing to defend.
- It doesn’t scale. If training lives in your head, the only way to train someone is to be there, which is the problem you hired to solve.
Training before a person ever steps into a customer’s home is slower for a week and faster for years.
What’s changing for employers?
The cost of getting this wrong is going up, not down. The Employment Rights Act 2025 is being phased in, and three changes matter to a small cleaning employer:
- Statutory Sick Pay from day one. From April 2026 it’s payable from the first day of sickness, and the lower earnings limit is removed. A no-show now costs you cover and sick pay from the start.
- Unfair dismissal after six months, not two years. The government intends to introduce this in January 2027. If you’ve been relying on a long grace period to sort out a bad hire, it’s shrinking. Probation notes, documented feedback and a proper induction stop being nice-to-haves.
- The Fair Work Agency. Launching in April 2026, it brings enforcement of the National Minimum Wage and labour-exploitation rules into one place.
(Check the government’s implementation roadmap for the current dates. Some of the Act’s timings have moved.) None of this is a reason not to hire. It’s a reason to hire with a system.
What should be in place before you hire? Five systems and a six-week plan
When the dust settled, I could see five things I’d been missing. I built them in the order of what had cost me the most. Here they are as a plan you can run in six weeks, around the rest of your life.
| Week | System | What to build |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Can I afford them? | The four-box check from Can you afford your first hire?. Your real cost per hour, your break-even price, six weeks of wages in the bank |
| 2 and 3 | Training before site | A written checklist for each type of clean, a short induction, a shadowing plan, so nobody learns in front of a customer. I started here, because bad hires were where I’d lost the most money |
| 4 | A repeatable way to choose people | The same interview questions for every candidate, a short filter, a paid trial. Templates mean it doesn’t depend on how you feel that day |
| 5 | Somewhere it all lives | Compliance, training dates and kit logs in one place you can check in seconds: who’s trained, who’s covered, who’s got what |
| 6 | Who covers when they’re off? | A named cover plan that isn’t you. If the answer is always you, you haven’t hired help. You’ve hired a second job |
The order to hire in is in Who to hire first as you grow your cleaning business. I also wrote scripts for the hard conversations, the “something’s gone wrong” ones. I’d been avoiding them, and having the words ready meant I stopped. There’s one in this article you can copy.
Where it ended up
Years later, all of it became the Staff tab inside Cadi: the training, the templates, the compliance tracking and the kit logs, sleeker and faster than my kitchen-table version. Your team sees their own jobs, their checklists and their time off, and never your money. It’s built for the first hire and the tenth.
That’s the whole reason Cadi exists, really. Every feature in there is something one of us built in a kitchen at midnight after a bad week. Losing £60k was the most expensive lesson I’ve ever learned. I built Cadi so you don’t have to pay the same price to learn it.
Common questions about the cost of hiring
How much does a hire that doesn’t work out cost a cleaning business?
As an illustration, one part-time cleaner on 20 hours a week at the National Living Wage who leaves after eight weeks costs about £3,200. That’s £2,034 in pay, £222 in employer National Insurance and pension, £600 of your own time training them, and a few re-cleans, a customer credit and the cost of recruiting. It’s before any complaint turns into a lost contract.
Why shouldn’t I cover every sick day myself?
Your hours are the only ones that can win customers, set prices, write the checklist and look at the numbers. Covering a no-show spends the most expensive hours in the business on the cheapest job, and the business quietly gets worse while it looks as busy as ever.
Do I have to train cleaners before they work in customers’ homes?
Under the Health and Safety at Work Act an employer has to provide the information, instruction, training and supervision needed to keep workers safe, and under the COSHH Regulations anyone using cleaning chemicals has to be given information, instruction and training on them. Learning on the job with nobody watching is hard to defend.
What is changing for small cleaning employers under the Employment Rights Act 2025?
Three changes matter: Statutory Sick Pay from the first day of sickness (from April 2026, with the lower earnings limit removed), unfair dismissal protection after six months instead of two years (due in 2027), and a new Fair Work Agency enforcing the National Minimum Wage and labour-exploitation rules. Check the government’s implementation timeline for current dates, as some have moved.
What are the five systems to put in place before you hire?
Know you can afford them (the four-box check), train before site, choose people the same way every time, keep compliance and training records in one place, and have a named cover plan that isn’t you. The article lays them out as a six-week plan.
Sources, checked 4 November 2026
- Key figures for Great Britain 2024 to 2025, HSE
- Implementing the Plan to Make Work Pay and the Employment Rights Act, GOV.UK
- Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, HSE
- COSHH, HSE
- National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates, GOV.UK
The £3,200 is an illustration, not a quote. Employment law dates have moved before, so check the current timeline. Not legal advice.
Cadi opens on 1 January for UK cleaning businesses, with a free Lite plan. Join the waitlist and you’ll hear from us before anyone else.
Rhianna
