Who to hire first as you grow your cleaning business

Hiring is where a lot of cleaning businesses go wrong, and I know that from painful experience.

A few years ago, I lost £60,000 in a year at Mackies. A big part of that was hiring without knowing whether I could afford it, then carrying on cleaning every day myself just in case. Standards slipped, complaints came in, and we lost three major contracts.

So I’ve thought a lot about who you should hire, in what order, and what needs to be in place before you do. Here’s what I’d tell anyone building a cleaning business today.

The short answer

That feels backwards. You’re paying someone to do work you were already doing, so on paper you’re earning less. But it’s the only hire that gives you the time to grow. Hire cleaners for new customers while you’re still cleaning every day, and you end up exactly where I did: more staff, more customers, and you still holding the whole thing together at midnight.

The only rule that matters

Hire to buy back your time for the work only you can do.

Every hire should free you up for something more valuable to the business, like pricing, winning better customers, building systems or managing your team. If a hire just makes you busier, or you end up doing the same work as before plus managing someone, it’s the wrong hire.

So before you hire anyone, find out exactly where your time goes.

Start with a two-week time audit

For two weeks, write down everything you spend time on in your business, in 30-minute blocks. Include cleaning, quoting, scheduling, answering messages, invoicing, chasing payments, covering sick days, training, marketing and fixing problems.

Then sort every task into three groups:

Now add up the hours in each group. The biggest pile in the second and third groups tells you who to hire.

What a cleaner really costs you

This is the question I didn’t answer properly, and it cost me dearly. So let’s do it properly.

Say you employ a cleaner for 20 hours a week on this year’s National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour.

That pay includes their holiday. Everyone gets 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, so you pay for 52 weeks but they work about 46. That’s 928 hours actually worked.

So each hour they work costs you about £15.80. If your business can claim the Employment Allowance, which can cover up to £10,500 of employer National Insurance a year, it’s closer to £14.50. Check with your accountant whether you’re eligible.

What they’ll actually bring in

Not every hour you pay for is an hour you can bill. Travel between jobs, gaps in the day and waiting for keys all come out of it. In a residential round, 80% billed is good going.

So those 928 hours become about 742 billed hours. At £30 an hour, that’s £22,260 a year in work.

That’s around £120 a week. It’s a real contribution, but it isn’t the fortune it looks like when you just compare £30 an hour with £12.71.

If they’re replacing you, the maths changes

If your first hire takes over your own cleans, the work doesn’t increase. You were already billing those hours. What changes is that you now pay £14,660 a year for them.

So the time you get back has to earn at least that. At £70 a fortnight, a regular customer is worth £1,820 a year. You’d need about eight new regulars over the year to cover the hire, or a price rise across your round, or one decent commercial contract.

That’s very doable with 20 hours a week of your time back. But only if you actually spend it on growing the business, not on catching up with admin.

Before you hire, answer three questions:

The order I’d hire in

Every business is different, but most cleaning businesses benefit from growing their team in roughly this order.

Hire 1: Cleaners to replace your cleaning hours

Start with the hours you’re doing yourself, then add cleaners for new work once you’re off the tools for most of the week.

Look for: reliability above everything. You can teach someone to clean to your standard. You can’t teach them to turn up.

Ask at interview:

• “Tell me about a time you couldn’t make it to work. What did you do?”
• “If you finished a clean and noticed you’d missed something after you’d locked up, what would you do?”
• “How would you get to jobs in [area]?”

Hire 2: A senior cleaner or team leader

Once you’ve got three or four cleaners, you need someone between you and the team. Otherwise every sick day, every question and every quality check still comes back to you.

A senior cleaner or team leader can cover absences, do spot checks, train new starters and handle day-to-day questions. It’s often a promotion for your most reliable, experienced cleaner, which also gives your team somewhere to grow. Pay them more than the team, even if it’s only £1 an hour. It makes the role real.

Look for: someone your other cleaners already respect, who holds high standards without being difficult to work with.

Ask at interview:

• “A cleaner tells you a customer has been rude to them. What do you do?”
• “You do a spot check and the clean isn’t up to standard. How do you tell the cleaner?”

Hire 3: Admin or operations support

This is the hire most owners leave far too late.

Scheduling, answering enquiries, confirming bookings, sending invoices, chasing payments and updating customer notes can easily take 15 to 20 hours a week in a growing cleaning business. If you’re doing all that at night, it’s costing you your evenings, your energy and your ability to think about growth.

This doesn’t have to be a full-time role. Ten hours a week of part-time or remote support can change your whole week. Start with the tasks that follow the same steps every time, like confirming bookings and sending invoices, and write each one down before you hand it over.

Look for: organisation, clear communication and a friendly phone manner. They’re often the first person your customers speak to.

Ask at interview:

• “A customer rings to cancel tomorrow’s clean and they’re upset about last week’s. What do you say?”
• “You’ve got three things due at once. How do you decide what to do first?”

Hire 4: A supervisor or operations manager

As you grow past a few team leaders or into multiple areas, you need someone to manage the day-to-day running of the business. That covers rotas, quality, staffing, customer issues and making sure standards hold everywhere.

This is the hire that finally lets you step back from running the business day to day and focus on growing it.

Look for: someone who’s managed people before, ideally in cleaning or a similar service industry, and who can solve problems without escalating everything to you.

Hire 5: Someone to win and manage bigger customers

For businesses moving into commercial contracts, this could be an account manager who looks after key clients, does site visits and handles renewals. For residential businesses, it might be someone focused on sales, quoting and partnerships.

Look for: someone who builds relationships naturally and understands your business well enough to price and promise responsibly.

Outsource early: your accountant and bookkeeper

Don’t wait to hire an accountant and bookkeeper. Getting professional help with your books, payroll, tax and VAT early will save you money and far more stress than it costs.

Signs you hired too early, or too late

If you hired too early, don’t panic. Put the time you’ve freed up into winning the work to fill their hours. If you’re hiring too late, the time audit is where to start this week.

What needs to be in place before your first hire

Hiring without systems is how you end up training people on the job, on a customer’s premises, while you’re too exhausted to supervise properly. That’s exactly what happened to me.

Their first 30 days

Most new cleaners who leave do it in the first few weeks, and it’s usually because the start was chaotic. Plan it:

1. Before day one: contract signed, right to work checked, kit ready and their first week’s rota sent.
2. Week 1: they shadow you or a senior cleaner. No solo cleans.
3. Week 2: they lead, you watch and give feedback at the end of each clean.
4. Weeks 3 to 4: solo cleans on their regular round, with a spot check on each new home.
5. Day 30: a sit-down chat. What’s going well, what’s hard, and what they need from you.

It’ll slow the hire down by a week or two. It’ll also mean they’re still with you in six months.

The legal basics you can’t skip

Build your team on solid ground

The difference between hiring that grows your business and hiring that sinks it isn’t luck. It’s whether you know you can afford the hire, whether you’ve got the systems to train them properly, and whether you use the time they give you back.

When I rebuilt Mackies after losing £60k, I started with a training portal, then built interview and onboarding templates, compliance tracking and kit logs. Years later, all of that became the Staff tab inside Cadi, so other cleaning business owners don’t have to learn it the way I did.

Rhianna