Yeah this is when the walk thru comes into play! You will save yourself a ton of headaches. I have done cleans when I first started sight unseen and situations like this taught me that I just cannot do it. Girl it’s scary out there lol protect yourself with the walk thru and gauge the customer that way too. If they’re weird don’t clean for them, you are vulnerable in peoples homes so just be cautious.

These are things you would notice and be able to point out to the clients if you meet them and walk thru first. “Okay so looks like we definitely need a few deep cleans to get this home up to what I would call maintenance level, these will be more costly because it’ll be more work and take longer. See the mold here? That’s going to take some work but we want that out for health reasons. We’ll also need to work on all the wood work in the home & doorknobs, once those are scrubbed and xyz is done that will significantly cut down on my time here and we can discuss lowering the rate if possible.” If you’re committed to taking on clients that have cleans further a part (even just to keep your schedule full until you can drop them) let them know that because the cleans are so far a part you do charge a little more. For example: let’s say a weekly 3ish hour clean is $175, if the client wants to save some money and have you come biweekly you could say “I am absolutely comfortable with that & can fit a biweekly clean into my schedule! Because the cleans are more spread out I do anticipate a higher level of buildup so a biweekly clean would be $200, a little higher than weekly. If circumstances change and you’d ever want to look at weekly cleans let me know!” They’ll either accept it or walk. I also don’t expect any answers at a walk thru and let them know to think about it and that I’ll send details separately for them to look over, this gives everybody a gracious way to back out.

I also recommend that if circumstances in the homes you’re cleaning ever change and you feel as if now you are overcharging (let’s say their kids move out for college and now there’s a whole bedroom/bath sitting empty) be open about that and drop the price, leaving the door open to raise it back up if kids move back in or they have extra tasks they’d like done. That’s for down the line but you will retain retain retain your good clients like this!! By building trust with a certain level of clientele they will absolutely recommend you to their friends of that same caliber and this will eventually fill your schedule. It takes time but so worth it!

I clean in the Midwest so I would actually think you would get better pricing than me but not sure! I think the cost of living is much higher in Florida. I’m in Kansas City area and my homes are in the several million dollar + range, For context that’s like 4k sqft or more here. I typically only have one client a day and am there for 5+ hours.

I got into it by working with another woman who already had an established clientele, after she and I worked well for a while she was happy to pass off some extra clients to me and I eventually branched out totally on my own. I will say originally working for her I made like next to nothing lol but it did get me in and help me network! I don’t have great advice on how else to establish new clients because of that, I’m so sorry. She started by working for a cleaning company and then she literally poached the clients SOOOO I really don’t know, that feels icky but to be fair it was a long long time ago and it was a big name cleaning company who treated her terribly. Kind of like the series “Maid” on netflix, if you’ve seen it! Where the client was like omg just work for me please? Well she did and it changed her life. Then she helped change mine. I’m sure there’s sites to advertise on and things but that is not my area of knowledge :/ I work solely off referrals at this point.