We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Francine Gomes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Francine below.

Francine, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

It was the end of COVID-19 quarantine I had just moved back to South Florida from New York where I used to work as a waitresses. I had no idea what to do for my future professional life, I just knew I wanted to make something bigger and work for myself. My mother on the other hand kept on telling me about cleaning business where she was doing subcontractor jobs or freelances here and there. One day I decided to start it with her. I had no idea how to clean anything I had to star from the bottom learning specifics supplies and methods to professionally clean a house. So we started as residential professionals with our first small house once a week which the price was $80 per cleaning, from that house and on we started getting more clients in 1 month we had at least 2 houses per day. I was doing the labor work myself and as soon as we started getting more businesses I hired already someone to help me and I just saw the business growing and growing I was happy I was able to start it and have the patience to wait. 6 months after I already had one group formed and I started working on my marketing and the backstage of the business. I did everything myself since starting LLC to our first year taxes. I would ask people around for help understanding how everything works, watch as much as I could of YouTube videos and reading books. I learned a lot by myself and I still do because there are always room for improvement and yet I am not where I want to be. I am inspired to continue and take my business to the next level. Today with more than 200 clients I can say all of my first thoughts of double and fear just pulled me up and I know that nothing is impossible if you want to make it happen

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When I started this industry I knew I needed a lot of discipline, first because I didn’t know how to clean and secondly I was completely new to business at all. I had to discover and learn everything from zero, once I started it I fell in love more and more there’s no day I say I want to quit because this is mine all effort is being recognize fully and being lazy is no option. I have to wake up every morning to make sure everything is settle, everyone made safely and on time to work and after that I can just work on my personal health and continue my day with improvements for the business. It’s my goal each day to improve something either professional or personal so I’m always listening to podcasts or reading books. Sometimes its very stressful to deal with employees and costumers so for that we need to have our right mindset and be good with ourselves, you can’t constantly lose a client or an employee so to be a leader you need to work yourself first and have it in your mind you’re the boss you’re the problem solving and with your mind in the right way you can think straight and make your business the better and the chosen one. There are plenty of cleaning business out there but I ask myself what make my business different? Well, first I don’t look at my competitors I know what we both offer and do so I offer my way of speaking and understanding them most of companies only look for the paper they don’t understand and listen to what the costumer are saying. We speak to our staff individually and tell that each house is different and their needs is different. All of them are treated like their part of family. Accommodation is my word.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Cleaning business doesn’t require a lot of effort or labor work to get more clients. We use google as our main strategy. Google has been the greatest so far and of course referrals, the quality of work we provide we always have people referring us all around South Florida. Having our high rate on google helps us get clients all over. And all thankful for our well trained staff.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

I had a couple of thousand of dollars saved and in the beginning it didn’t require so much but it did need money to start off. We had to buy cleaning supplies, with my mother experience we didn’t have to go throw waste of money with supplies and expensive vacuum or mop. Our vacuum cost $70 dollars (Eureka) we work really well with it since the beginning its able to unbuild and reach parts without moving anything around, sometimes furniture can be really heavy so our vacuum help us.
For our LLC, insurance and all of the accounting I had help of people that I already opened their business so I didn’t spend money opening them but I wouldn’t recommend anyone to do it alone if they don’t have any experience it can be very delicate because if you make one mistake that can affect your taxes at the end of the year.
For insurance I shopped around as much as I could and I found a insurance broker that gave me the best quote I couldn’t find any better deal. I am very thankful that I met this insurance broker during my free time.
So I’d say I didn’t spend more than two thousands of dollars to open my business. And of course I was not ambitious put money on every adverting platform to start making money next day I opened it. I had in my mind I had no experience and I needed to learn everything from scratch so I didn’t overwhelm myself in the beginning.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rosies-cleaningllc.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosiescleanllc/

Image Credits
My mother and partner Rosi Gomes