We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mathiba Kgopa a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mathiba , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Getting that first client is always an exciting milestone. Can you talk to us about how you got your first customer who wasn’t a friend, family, or acquaintance?

Our cleaning business started with a single step… I started.

Mathiba , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I was born and raised in Sahara Ga-mamabolo, South Africa, where I learned how to be part of village that strived to help each other through hard work and luck from a young age. At 18 years old, I left everything I had ever known behind me after I was awarded a Peace Corps Volunteer Scholarship to study in the United States. This award was created by my host brother and sister, Ivy and Seth Leavitt Carlson, who had volunteered in my village back in 2004. While there, they became highly motivated to help members of my community to break intergenerational cycles of poverty and improve their outcomes through education.

With their help, I studied at the New England College, where I earned my BA in communications and minored in theater. After graduating in 2014, I moved to Colorado, met my (now) husband, and went on to obtain my MBA from Regis University. In the 2018 years that have followed, I’ve owned and operated a photobooth business, which I started in Colorado and expanded to Texas, and became a U.S. citizen.

Our business peaked at the beginning of 2019 –doing about 23 events a month – just before it was forced to shutter its doors throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many other Americans, this was a challenging time for me on both a personal and a professional level. I struggled to find work and direction; grieved the loss of the business I had built from the ground up; and had to let go of six part-time workers who had come to depend on me. It was as if the world had stopped and all I could do was watch everything around me unravel.

So, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I leaned on my business degree and pivoted as quickly as I could. To keep myself from going insane, I came up with a different business idea every day (and drove my husband crazy in the process). First, I thought about starting a home daycare, but after conducting some preliminary research I realized that the policies and regulations were too complex and restrictive. Two weeks later, I had created a website that sold essential gift cards, but the business needed more capital than I could come up with. Eventually, I narrowed my focus and reflected on the sheer volume of people who were in lockdown and were struggling to manage multiple roles within their households, let alone take care of their chores. This inspired me to start a cleaning business.

Since I had no prior experience in this area, I began by offering free cleaning services to single parents in exchange for their honest, unbiased feedback. After cleaning five homes, I was already getting recommendations, and, before I knew it, I had to start hiring people. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Teebs Cleaning cleans has six full-time employees, who work Monday to Friday and clean an average of 200 houses per month. Almost all of our profits (99%) come from recurring weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly customers. We pride ourselves on paying our cleaning techs the top market rate and tailoring our services to meet the needs of every client.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Growing up in South Africa, I was taught to help my neighbors, friends, and family members by any means possible. I was very comfortable to knock on my neighbors’ doors and ask for salt or sugar when we had none, and vice versa. As an adult, I had to learn (the hard way) that you can’t apply this mentality to a business.

I kept coming back to the idea that if I could hire and retain workers during a pandemic and start a cleaning company with zero capital, I could surely figure out how to help people with their financial troubles. My eyes were opened when I realized that paying our cleaning technicians $23 – $27/hour was still not enough. Since their wages had been so low for so long, they needed to catch up by taking on multiple jobs and working irregular hours.

According to The Hollywood Reporter article, as of 2021, “Of the nearly 2.5 million domestic workers in the U.S., 91.5 percent are women. And of the 343,000 domestic workers who are house cleaners, 95 percent are women, and 71 percent are women of color. The devaluation of this work is crystal clear in the wages: domestic workers earn on average $15,980 per year, compared to $39,120 for other workers. House cleaners make even less at $14,915.”

Understanding that there is a huge wage gap in housekeeping made me realize that I could not solve all of our workers’ problems. For mothers, who are increasingly breadwinners in their homes, doing their best is all they can do. This was a hard pill for me to swallow. I wanted to share my sugar and salt, even though I had very little at the time. But, unfortunately, housekeepers, no matter how hard they worked, never had the chance to return the gesture because they could not afford it in the first place.

While paying people more than the minimum wage was a step in the right direction, I had to discover that the only thing that was truly in my control was to continue growing Teebs Cleaning so that it could provide our workers with life-changing benefits – such as 401K, Health Insurance Benefits, Life Insurance, Retirement Accounts, Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and many more.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

During the first few waves of COVID-19, the demand for cleaning services was very high. Even though working from home had cut out employees’ commutes, many households were struggling to navigate their workloads, childcare responsibilities, and chores since everything had to take place under one roof and without a broader support network. Cleaning was something that made a big difference in people’s lives, but that they often didn’t feel like they had the time to do.

As a business owner, I took the opportunity to grow while the market was hot. Since I began with zero capital, I was the sole employee of Teebs Cleaning for Five months, as I worked and reinvested the profits into the business. But I could not have anticipated how hard it would be to hire and retain workers. Many candidates did not show up for their interviews, and those who did often failed to make it through their first shift. It was so disappointing and frustrating that I decided to pay an agency to help with the process.

Despite my best efforts and the fact that I offered highly competitive wages, I kept experiencing the same issues. At one point, I was so desperate to have even one worker that I could rely upon that I started throwing money at people. As I soon discovered, the problem with that approach is that you end up with people who are unqualified and lack motivation, and it becomes very costly to the business – in terms of finances, opportunity costs, and the risk of reputational damage. Ultimately, the most beneficial thing for Teebs Cleaning was to grow slowly, steadily, and regroup as needed. But first, I had to understand what my workers needed from me.

I called my first worker pretty much every day for a month to check in with her and understand what she needed to see in an employer. I learned so much from her through the process that I was able to hire four subcontractors soon after. Once I had established a base, after three months I transitioned them to employees. Having a base of workers that I could rely upon allowed me to be very selective about how I hired and negotiated with new employees and met their evolving needs. At the same time, I continued working to increase our marketing budget so that we could target our ideal customers.

It is worth noting that I was able to start Teebs Cleaning from scratch and invest all my profits into it because my husband had a regular job that kept us afloat. And for that, I am very grateful and privileged.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.teebscleaning.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teebs_cleaning/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Teebs-Cleaning-106004414460357