We recently connected with Kayli Kinkaid and have shared our conversation below.

Kayli , appreciate you joining us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

We started off super small- my husband and I got a few clients and cleaned every house ourselves. We researched products and cleaning methods, tried things out, and learned the best way to clean in an eco-friendly way.

After a year, we were getting so much business through word of mouth that it was time to hire an employee. We found someone we were able to trust and taught her everything we knew.
After another few months, we were able to repeat that process and bring on two more people.

Over the years, we’ve grown to 10 employees. We now spend our time training and managing.

We haven’t spent money on advertising and have let our business grow organically through word of mouth. This has kept us at a steady growth rate while we find employees we can trust, and who will be with us long term. For us, it’s been all about balance and not trying to take on more than we can handle in order to keep standards high.

There have been many hiring mistakes. It’s just so important to find people you can trust! We’ve also learned that not every client opportunity is a fit for our business, and have become more selective with cleaning projects we will accept.

Growth is a journey, not a leap.

Kayli , 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?

We are Kayli and Kevin Kinkaid, a husband-wife team that own and operate an eco-friendly cleaning business in Kansas City. We do residential, short term rental, and small- business cleaning.

We absolutely love cleaning and we care about doing it in a safe, non-toxic manner. We saw a gap in the cleaning market in KC, and decided to start our business in 2014.
We hit that small business sweet spot between a big-business cleaning service and one-person operation.

Our objective is to keep our business small, trustworthy, and efficient in order to provide our clients a high standard of cleanliness.

Kayli provides extremely good communication between our cleaners and our clients and is able to accommodate most requests quickly. We strive for a very friendly, personal service environment.

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

I think that we are different than a lot of cleaning services because we are so personal and great with communication. I get back to people very quickly.

We provide really high standards of cleanliness. No one is perfect and our cleaners have off days just like anyone else, but I let our clients know right off the bat to PLEASE let us know if something is missed and we will fix it right away.

We encourage open communication between our staff and our clients so that everyone is happy! We are very flexible and accommodating.

We are also very trustworthy. Our employees trust us and so do our clients. We have a strenuous training process to make sure our employees are ready to work alone.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Treat your employees like valued human beings. For us, mental health and personal life come first!

If our employees need a day off, it’s always granted.

We try to be understanding in every situation and not stress the small things.
We offer lots of extra opportunities and bonuses.

We also give our employees a lot of freedom and autonomy, which I think cultivates trust and high self-worth.
They’re all amazing people and have been trained well, so know what they’re doing and how to manage their own time. We don’t like to micro manage- I don’t think that’s fun for anyone.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.kinkaidcleaning.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/kinkaidcleaning
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/kinkaidcleaning
• Other: [email protected]