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This month emmaheaven.com is shining the spotlight on...

Clean Queens

Clean Queens

In my humble opinion having a cleaner is a luxury, almost bordering upon a necessity! My life has become so busy that the last thing I want to do when with what little time off I do have, is to spend it cleaning. I have used cleaning companies in the past, but for one reason or another, they haven’t worked out.

With the magazine growing bigger and life getting busier, the time had come to revisit trying to find a good cleaning service which would give me everything I needed: a thorough job, which is value for money, people I can trust, and who I would feel comfortable letting into my home.

Step forward Amy and Hayley, the owners of Clean Queen to tell us about their business.

“We met at our children’s schools - starting with a wave ‘hello’ and a friendly encouraging smile.

From there a friendship soon formed, with disastrous gym dates abandoned in favour of tea and coffee dates instead.

For family reasons, we had both taken career breaks. Amy had been cleaning homes for elderly relatives, saying how much she enjoyed it, when the conversation led to us starting up our own cleaning company.

Amy set up a Facebook page, with a ‘loss-leader’ offer, which meant we would be earning nothing while working our socks off to get the business up and running. Fortunately that offer secured us our first 10 clients. Although those first four weeks were hard-going and we were exhausted, word quickly spread and we gained even more clients.

Looking back we can laugh at how naively optimistic we were! After the decision to start the cleaning business was made, we hot footed it to our nearest supermarket and bought up any and every cleaning product known to man. We had no idea what we needed but every eventuality was covered! We even bought matching t-shirts! Now things are a lot more organised and we know exactly what’s needed.

We are fortunate that we have managed through social media and word of mouth, to grow our business and build our reputation with relative ease.

We have a great rapport with our clients, getting to know them and their needs. All our clients require different things and so rather than us putting together different cleaning packages, we tailor every client’s cleaning needs individually.

We were advised by a business colleague to buy customers some flowers as a personal touch, but that didn’t seem to make sense, as as we would have to put our prices up to cover that cost; besides which, what if the customer doesn’t like flowers, or is allergic?

We decided that there would be no gimmicks. The customer will get value for money and their house will be cleaned to the highest standard, because that is what they want and are paying for.

With the business expanding so rapidly it was no longer humanly possible for us to take on any more clients and we were faced with the dilemma of taking on staff.

To begin with we took on people we knew, because we trusted them and knew they would work well. After being trained to our standards, we were soon able to send them out to work with our clients. Still this wasn’t enough to cope with the increased demand and we had to recruit more staff.

When candidates apply, we meet them first of all, to get an idea of their character to see if they will fit in. The next stage is for them to job shadow us, and Hayley will train them up and accompany them on their calls until they are up to the standard required.

Only then will we let them go out on their own, as we have worked hard to build our name and reputation, and we want Clean Queens to be represented well.

We love being cleaners and we love building our own business. In the beginning it was a lot of hard work but now everything is starting to settle down as we become more established.

We have set working hours and learnt that we need to stay within those hours if we are to have quality family time, which means we no longer work weekends ourselves.

Amy is office-based, handling the diary, social media and the business side. Hayley trains the staff, does the spot checks and is more hands on with the staff.

Work life is ticking over nicely and we continue to work hard and build the business which we are passionate about.

We have great job satisfaction, happy customers and are excited for the future of Clean Queens.”

If you are looking for cleaners who are friendly, down to earth, professional, trustworthy and most importantly, fabulous cleaners who offer excellent value for money, visit the Clean Queens at:

Facebook.com/CleanQueensSwansea

If you are interested in becoming a Clean Queen then please message Amy and Hayley at:

Facebook.com/CleanQueensSwansea