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

Jasmine , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a time you helped a customer really get an amazing result through their work with you.

When I started my business I immediately realized that building a clientele was not easy. In the cleaning industry you’re not just selling a service, you have to learn to earn your clients trust. This took time and hard work. Now after almost 6 years in business, my company still has some of the same customers we started with. We have become more like family. To have great connections and trust with your clients is something small business owners should pride themselves on.

Jasmine , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Jasmine McNair and I have been in the cleaning industry for almost 10 years. I started out as a housekeeper working for a temp agency. I’ve worked at several hotels in the Atlanta metro area, including the Ritz Carlton hotel.

The summer of 2014 the temp agency I worked for sent me to a retirement facility to fill in for a housekeeping crew who were on vacation for a week. After that week of working I was offered a full time position that I gladly accepted. After just one year there, I was promoted to housekeeping supervisor.

I loved that job, but the pay just wasn’t enough. I started to build a small clientele with the residents who lived at the facility. Within just a few months I was even cleaning for some of their family members and friends outside of the job. I was making more money cleaning on my own so in 2017 I decided to branch off and start my own business.

I quit my job in the fall of 2017 and started Royalty Cleaning LLC.
Business started off extremely slow. I had a few regular clients but it wasn’t enough to pay all my bills. I have a family to support and although I felt I was following my dreams of being my own boss, I was struggling.
I decided to return to my job and they welcomed me back with open arms. This was one of the hardest decisions I had to make since starting my business. I felt as if I was putting my dreams on the back burner again.

I worked my job during the week and operated my business on the weekends. It was a lot of work. I often felt over worked and stressed out. Although my job was good, the politics of working for someone else comes with it’s fair share of drama. Every few months new rules and policies were added or taken away. My boss at the time was fired. My schedule was always changing. I wanted out again.

My first real opportunity to put my business first came in late spring of 2018.
I received an email from a young lady who was launching her 2 Air BNB properties and was looking for a reliable cleaner. I immediately accepted. I wasn’t even sure how Air BNB operated but I quickly learned. By the end of 2018 I quit my job for the final time and at that time I had a total of 4 Air BNB cleaning contracts.

Word of mouth traveled fast for me and my business. Royalty Cleaning LLC has not slowed down since 2018. In 2022 my company booked almost 300 cleanings including at least 50 cleanings from my original Air BNB contract. We currently have 10 Air BNB contracts, almost 40 regular residential clients, and several commercial cleaning contracts.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

In the world of owning your own business, marketing has always been a very important tool to use to grow your business. Today it’s so much easier with the use of social media and web designing. You can now build your own website and create your own social media handle. Although all of these tools are great, they can be costly. Social media is free to start but it you want to grow your audience you have to use their marketing tools which is called boosting your ads to gain more attention. This of course is not free. As a business owner often times, especially in the beginning of growing our business, we don’t have the access to funds to just splurge. We have to be very mindful and smart about how we spend our money. What I learned over the years is that the one marketing tool that often gets overlooked or is said to be an “old school technique” is word of mouth. As a cleaner I learned pretty quickly someone always knows someone else who needs a cleaning. I took advantage of this and decided to start a referral program with my clients. I took a percentage off of every cleaning fee for every referral. IT was simple and most importantly for me, it was free. This grew my clientele immediately and is now the biggest marketing tool I use for my business.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

In any industry you work in reputation is everything. Think about going out to eat. If the reputation of a certain restaurant is bad, chances are you would not spend your money there. I believe a good reputation comes with being completely transparent with your clients and hard work. In being truthful with your clients, don’t ever take on a job or order you can’t fulfill. Often times a struggling Entrepeneur will say yes to a client just because they can’t afford to say no. I have booked cleaning jobs I knew were way more than I could handle. This always backfired. I may have gotten a great pay, but a dissatisfied client. A client 5-star review is more important than any paycheck. You can always find ways to get paid if you work hard, but trying to rebuild a business reputation is sometimes not ever reparable.

Knowing that saying no is ok. Whatever skills or products you lack in your business, are just things you can grow with hard work. Your reputation comes from the hard work you invest in your business. Proper training and learning skills to grow your business help with a positive reputation. Being knowledgeable and understanding that you actually know what you’re doing when a client books you for a service or purchases a product from you, is very important.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: www.instagram.com/royaltycleaingatl
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/royaltycleaningatl
• Other: Bookings available via email at Royalcleanatl@gmail.com

Image Credits
Janay Warren