Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Derek Gothmann. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Derek, 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.
For the last 12 years I have been a maintenance supervisor for several apartment complexes. As a maintenance supervisor, hiring cleaners who are both affordable and who provide quality service has been an obstacle. Studying how much we paid the cleaners, how much the hourly pay of cleaners and the levels of quality they provided over several years and several different companies, I developed my business plan to focus more on providing a livable wage for my cleaners in return for exceptional quality and increased Satisfaction within. I found that happy cleaners do better work. So I was excited to pitch a slightly higher than average hourly rate with less imperfections and less need for returning to correct things.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
So I feel like the biggest thing that sets my company apart from other cleaning companies is that I’ve trained all of my staff to handle everything an apartment complex needs from tenant move out to new tenant move in. Sometimes, apartment complexes run into a mass exodus issue where multiple apartments become vacant at the same time. Leaving a lot of work to do for the maintenance teams. Seeing this from the inside, as I was a maintenance supervisor for 12 years, having a cleaning company who can do basic maintenance repairs like painting, patching nail holes, replacing items like drip pans, toilet seats, blinds etc. Was a highly valuable offering. So, I trained all of my staff members in all of those tasks that would save the property time and energy and take on less losses from time the units aren’t being paid for. Making our team stand out from the competition.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
I started this business with $130 in cleaning supplies and each time I got paid, I’d use some of the money I made to buy another cleaning kit and hire another cleaner to use it and then I would schedule more work for them. Charging $40/hour for cleaning and paying my cleaners $25/hour left me $15 per hour per cleaner overhead to put back into the business. Snowballing that until I had about 10 full time employees making roughly $150/hr towards overhead and taking home $25/hour as a cleaner.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
So, this business has always been a side hustle for me. I owned and opererated this business part time while maintaining a full time job in Apartment maintenance. I hired cleaners to handle the work load while I focused on back end, generating clients, scheduling appointments, and cutting checks. I never paid myself. I paid my employees, and everything I made in overhead just went back to the business.
Contact Info:
- Website: Maidsofhonorcda.com
- Facebook: Maids of Honor Cleaning company