We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ruth Stevenson-Owen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ruth below.

Ruth, looking forward to hearing all of your stories 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.

My first big client wanted 9 hours a week, cleaning and managing their house. It was exactly the thing I had been looking for to build on. My husband managed the handyman side of our housekeeping and handyman business, and he loved his work. I didn’t love housekeeping. Although I loved the clients I had picked up through word-of-mouth and posting on the Nextdoor app, for me the work was simply the best paid work I could get that had a flexible enough schedule so that we could still take care of our young children.

When I started managing the client’s house, I knew that solely based on these hours alone, I could start hiring just one person to do the cleaning for me while I went out to find more clients. The problem was that I had a serious mental block about hiring someone. I don’t know if it was lack of confidence in becoming an employer, or the fact that I had always hated the weird and unnatural dynamic between employer and employee. I could never discipline anyone! I didn’t want to. What if someone was late and I couldn’t explain to them how much it pained me for us to be late for a client? I was the least confrontational person I knew, and could not handle the stress of having to ‘manage’ anyone.

After a few months of mental turmoil, I met with a friend who I knew WOULD be a good manager. She was a very honest person, and I explained to her that if I got HER to hire people instead of me, that maybe it would work. She pushed me to explain my company values (she’s super corporate) and I decided that it was honesty, authenticity and most of all, kindness. I wanted the people who worked for us to always feel safe, to be able to tell us when they didn’t feel comfortable, to be able to wear what they wanted to at work and to be given the benefit of the doubt if they showed up late once or twice.

I knew I wasn’t going to make much profit immediately with a manager to pay as well as cleaning staff, but this is how things happened organically and made sense to me. My newly appointed manager put out an advert on Facebook under my business page, which is linked to my personal page. She asked if I would mind if she posted on a few of the mom groups I was part of, as the job was very flexible and may be desirable to mothers. She literally could not have had a better idea. The post instantly started to attract exactly the kind of people we were looking for. Funnily enough, not cleaners, but mothers!

My manager had taken over the cleaning (after a lot of training from me) so that I could pay her from jobs and she could learn what she was going to have to train people on. I had steady monthly and bi-weekly clients which we handled together so that she could pick up the nuances of each house and also get an idea of how to standardize the cleaning and make checklists. We interviewed our first candidate after about one month of training my manager, and I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect person for the job. She was looking for around 15 hours a week. We could start her off with 9 – our big weekly client. She trained on the house and completely took over it, and obtain the rest of her hours doing the bi-weekly and monthly cleans with my manager. I was free to go out and find work!

Alongside the handyman contingent of our business, this worked extremely well. My husband could take on more jobs and bigger projects, as I was free to look after the kids (whilst also trying to find more work at the same time!). The handyman work bank rolled the cleaning side while we trained people to clean and paid for a manager to handle all the day-to-day scheduling, payroll, problems etc. When the handyman side was busy on a 2 week project and wasn’t getting paid until the job was completed, the cleaning side gave us the cash flow we needed to run our home and the business.

We have hired 4 cleaners now (mostly mothers) and 2 more handymen. Now my husband also tries to stay away from the jobs and stays at home with me to provide childcare, run the business and formulate strategies to get more clients.

Ruth, 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?

Home & Happy is the marriage of handyman and housekeeping services. This means that, if required, we can be a one-stop-shop for clients who are looking for both repairs and cleaning projects at the same time. My husband has always been ‘handy’ and I have always enjoyed the ‘before and after’ feeling that you get when you transform a space from dirty and messy, to clean and organized.

I started cleaning to make money while I was traveling in my 20s. It is a way of earning money that transcends language barriers, so I’ve cleaned in Spain, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and now the US. When I had kids, it was the perfect thing to return to in terms of its flexibility. A year after I had my youngest, we set up the business in the hope that we would be what many are not in these industries…reliable.

We have never canceled a cleaning or handyman project yet. We never turn up late or not ready for the job at hand. We are becoming locally well-known for our reliability, punctuality and fast response time. As our company grows, we are also starting to understand why other businesses find it hard to stay reliable. There are so many areas that need constant attention, and the addition of staff makes it all more of a juggling act.

We have our family around us, supporting us with on-hand childcare and help with bookkeeping. This is not the same for everyone, and I have so much respect for anyone doing this without a huge network of supporters cheering you on.

If reliability is number one when I think of what we offer to our clients, number two is kindness. As we have hired more staff, we have realized the enormous importance of kindness to people we come into contact with. We genuinely want everyone to feel completely safe during their work day, and this means always showing the utmost appreciation and respect for who they are and what they do. Our staff act in kind, and are respectful and understanding with our clients. Our staff have forged such strong connections with our clients, that I very often get the feedback, ‘Can I please have her/him next time!?’ This is such a pleasure to receive, and I feel like very often our employees treat our business as if it were their own.

The addition of staff has made us able to take on bigger projects too. Tiling, flooring, deck work, window installation and large painting projects are all in our arsenal now. We have a solid client base of property managers who use us to turn rental properties between tenants.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

‘If you want anything doing right, do it yourself’. To truly believe this statement, which is something I was told by well-meaning cynics when I was growing up, is the undoing of every person who wants to grow their business. You have to let go, and allow other people to shine at doing what you used to do. A lot of the people that I have hired, do it better than me!

Don’t micromanage people either. Let them find their way and be honest about your fear of them messing things up, but in a way that allows them to understand that, although you fear it, you trust them to do it differently than you. People perform amazingly well when they are trusted and given the freedom to do things their own way.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I used to teach business English as a second language to the employees of international companies. I worked for Rosetta Stone, and enjoyed telling people what I did, because it sounded pretty cool and made me feel clever. When we started the business and I was cleaning houses on my own, I hated to tell people what I did. There is a terrible stigma attached to being a cleaner, and you can see that people are sometimes even embarrassed that they asked when you give your answer! I knew that the pivot from teaching to owning a cleaning business was going to afford me so much more flexibility, time with my kids and, eventually, money. However, it was still a difficult part of small talk to navigate, and took me a moment to be able to say it with pride.

Contact Info:

• Website: homeandhappy.us
• Instagram: @homeandhappyagain
• Facebook: Home and Happy Again