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What if you could start a cleaning business and make over a thousand dollars a day in profit? Not revenue — profit. It sounds impossible, but after 25 years in this industry as a cleaning business owner, and after coaching countless students through my mentorship program, I can tell you it’s not only possible. It’s happening every single day. You just have to choose the right business model.
Most people assume every cleaning business is basically the same — you show up, you clean, you get paid. That’s like saying every restaurant is the same because they all serve food. In reality, there are three distinct business models in the cleaning industry, and picking the right one for your goals is what separates owners who thrive from owners who feel stuck and frustrated six months in.
Some people want to build a big cleaning business from day one. Others want to start small and grow over time. Plenty land somewhere in the middle. All three paths are legitimate — but only if you understand the model you’re actually building. Let’s walk through all three, with the real income math behind each.
Model 1: The Solo Operator ($525/day+)
This is how most cleaning business owners start, and it’s exactly how I started over 25 years ago. It’s a great way to test the waters, and it can also be an incredible side hustle on its own. Imagine landing just one office building to clean Monday through Friday nights after your regular job. It takes an hour or so a night, and you take home an extra two thousand dollars a month. That’s completely achievable.
You can also go all-in as a solo operator. I did this for over ten years and loved every minute of it, specializing in luxury residential properties. Here’s what most people don’t realize: if you position yourself correctly and go after the right clients, you can make six figures a year working part time. I have coaching students doing exactly this right now.
The drawback is that your income eventually gets capped. Time is money, and when you’re trading your time for money and your time is limited, so is your income. Students in my program charge anywhere from $50 to over $100 an hour depending on their market and client type. For this example, let’s use my current base commercial rate: $75 an hour. Bill 7 hours of cleaning a day at $75 an hour, and you’re at $525 a day.
What about supplies? If you build your business right, you’ll pay very little out of pocket — I always get my clients to buy the bulk of the supplies, both when I did residential and now in commercial. Insurance and marketing are also very affordable as a solo operator, which means healthy profit margins. Your only real limitation is time, and plenty of owners are perfectly happy with that trade-off.
Model 2: The Small Team ($805/day+)
This is where you hire one person to help you, or maybe a couple. The principles stay the same regardless of team size. People often ask whether I hire subs or employees — the honest answer is a mix of both, and that mix has worked well for my business.
Here’s the game changer: once you hire help, you’re no longer just trading your time for money. You’re leveraging someone else’s time to make money. Pay your people well — it creates loyalty. You can focus entirely on finding clients and let your team clean, or you can work alongside them. Working alongside your team has real benefits: you oversee quality in real time, it keeps everyone accountable because the boss is there too, and you still make way more money in much less time.
Here’s the math. A home that normally takes three hours at $75 an hour is a $225 job. Bring one helper, and the same job takes 90 minutes because there are two of you. Pay your cleaner $30 an hour, which comes out to $45 for the job, and you take home $180 — meaning instead of making $75 an hour working alone, you just made $120 an hour with a single helper. String multiple jobs together in a day, and this business model has the potential to hit $805 a day. Plenty of owners are perfectly happy stopping right there.
Model 3: Mass Expansion ($1,125/day+)
This is where you go big and hire out all of the cleaning, so you can focus entirely on finding clients and running the business. It doesn’t take as long to get there as you might think: find clients, put systems in place, hire cleaners, and repeat.
You could build this model with residential, post-construction, or vacation rental cleaning, but I recommend commercial for a few reasons. First, consistency — it’s the same routine every night. You set up a building, create a task list for your team to follow, and nothing really changes. Because I use the same cleaning system at every building, I can send any staff member to any location — the kind of repeatable, checklist-driven consistency a platform like CleanRev is built to help you manage as you add clients and staff. Second, if you target the right commercial clients — offices, banks, medical facilities — the space is usually empty when it’s time to clean, which makes the work far easier to hire out. Third, there’s very little emotion involved. In residential work, you’re in someone’s home, and special requests around kids and pets are normal and expected. Commercial spaces are just workplaces, and clients are typically far more relaxed about who’s actually doing the cleaning.
So how do you get to over a thousand dollars a day in profit with commercial cleaning? Simply put, you find commercial contracts that each net you around $75 a day in profit. Some of my contracts net closer to $200 a day after paying my cleaners — the bigger the better. This is also why I keep a minimum of one and a half hours per job in my business. The longer each job takes, the fewer contracts you need to hit your goals, and more contracts always means more negotiating, more staff to manage, and more training. Go for bigger contracts and fewer of them — it reduces your workload while maximizing your profit.
To reach $1,125 a day, find 15 commercial spaces and ensure each contract nets you around $75 a day in profit — or better yet, fewer spaces with higher net income each.
The Real Money Is in Lifetime Value, Not Volume
Regardless of which model you choose, there’s something critical you need to understand to be successful: building a peaceful, profitable cleaning business is about finding repeat customers with a high lifetime value (LTV) — not playing the volume game and chasing one-time cleanings. Volume is what leads many cleaning businesses to fail, because more clients means more bidding, more invoicing, and more customer service, with no end in sight.
Here’s what high LTV actually looks like. A weekly residential client paying $200 a week, kept for ten years, has an LTV of $104,000 — and when I did residential, I regularly kept clients for well over a decade. A commercial building paying $2,500 a month, kept for five years, has an LTV of $150,000 — and I’ve had commercial clients in my business for over seven years. Clients only stop using your business if you give them a reason to.
Even if you’re doing construction cleaning or move-out cleaning and only touch a space once, you should still be chasing repeat relationships — a contractor or real estate agent who keeps sending you jobs is still a high-LTV client, just a different kind.
Which Model Fits Your Goals?
The cleaning industry isn’t going anywhere — robots aren’t taking over this business anytime soon. So the real question was never whether you can build a successful cleaning business. It’s which of these three models actually fits your goals and your lifestyle. Solo work capped at $525 a day, a small team pushing $805 a day, or mass expansion built for $1,125 a day and beyond — all three are proven paths. Pick the one that matches where you want to be, build the systems around it, and let it compound.
Written by Bethany Jean Montlary — CEO of CleanRev Inc. Bethany has built multiple 6- and 7-figure cleaning businesses over 25+ years and coaches cleaning business owners on her YouTube channel, The Professional Cleaner. If you want help figuring out which of these three models is right for you, that’s exactly what I walk students through inside my coaching program: Work with Bethany →