MaidThis Franchise Update: How I Increased Revenue By Raising Prices & Opening New Franchises
This is a follow up story for MaidThis Franchise. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hey! My name is Neel Parekh, and I am the Founder and CEO of MaidThis® Franchise.
MaidThis started as a fully-remote local cleaning business based in California that helps residential homeowners and short-term rental hosts (Airbnb, VRBO, etc.) with their cleaning needs. Since then, I’ve transformed MaidThis into a full franchise offering to help others copy the blueprint and start their MaidThis location and travel the world.
I started from scratch with one cleaner in Los Angeles, making $400 per week, and now we gross over $100K/mo for our Home Office locations and more with our franchise locations. We’ve expanded from 1 corporate location to 4 locations across the U.S. and are aiming to add a few more this years.
Since starting, MaidThis has generated almost $10 million in total revenue while having a fully remote office team.
For 5 years, I ran my local business completely remotely and lived the “digital nomad” life. I traveled to 35+ countries and figured out how to run a local business completely remotely.
I believe that local businesses are one of the biggest hidden gems for business opportunities - the competition is unsophisticated, and you’re not competing against the entire world as you might be in eCommerce, online marketing, etc. Since we’ve cracked the code on how to run the business remotely, franchising the concept seemed like the next logical step to growth.
MaidThis is the first and only vacation rental cleaning franchise that exists. The coolest part (to me) is that the franchise offering can be run from anywhere in the world - it’s low cost and uses all of the same systems & tools that I used to set up my own remote local business.
We have 2 franchise locations now, one of which came from someone who read my original story on StarterStory! The goal for 2022 is to add 4-6 more locations.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
In 2021, our corporate-owned locations were consistent in revenue year-over-year.
Learn which 1-2 marketing avenues work best for your specific local market and hone in on those. Once you optimize those, move on to the next and next and keep going from there.
The demand for cleaning has never been higher, so we raised prices twice and were booked up almost every day. Our phone conversion rates are 50-60%, and the average revenue amount per job has gone up.
However, despite the increase in demand and price hikes, the labor shortage in the U.S. in 2021 made it tough to expand and stunted our growth. Since then, the labor markets have opened up, and we’re gearing up for one of our best sales years ever in 2022.
Systems Improvements:
A lot of time was put into improving our systems and tracking, which makes our corporate and franchisee’s operations way more sophisticated and efficient.
We created a pretty badass new marketing dashboard to automatically track our main key performance indicators and marketing spend:
Example of the marketing dashboard we’ve created:
We’re still very heavy into digital marketing as our lead gen source for sales. The real secret for local business marketing is to learn which 1-2 marketing avenues work best for your specific local market and hone in on those. Once you optimize those, move on to the next and next and keep going from there.
However, I’ve come to realize the power of local in-person networking in smaller markets. This includes more high-touch networking joining local Business Networking Groups, running cold email + cold call campaigns to build relationships in the local market, and more.
Out of necessity from the labor shortage in 2021, I also spent a lot of time revamping our cleaner recruiting funnel. We figured out the exact numbers in the funnel we needed to hit to be fully optimized and figured out how to find this labor.
The main metrics we track:
- Cost Per Qualified Lead: we want this under $4
- Pick-Up Rate On 1st Call: 90%+
- Show Up Rate to 2nd Round Video Call: 50%+
- Success After Onboarded
This recruiting tracking dashboard we created helps me know the health of our recruiting, which is the #1 most important funnel for any home services company.
In short - we know our numbers better than ever now and rolled this out to franchise locations.
MaidThis Franchise National Expansion:
On the MaidThis Franchise end, we added 1 new location in Myrtle Beach!
Dan Blaker read about the MaidThis Franchise opportunity from my first article in StarterStory. He reached out and is now the proud owner of MaidThis Myrtle Beach and crushing it!
Here’s a photo of us during the grand launch of MaidThis in Myrtle Beach:
Dan has since left his job and is working on his MaidThis franchise business full time (100% remote).
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
My priority on customer acquisition during the first years of business was all wrong. The challenging years of 2020-2021 exposed that. I got completely blindsided by what was going on in the labor markets.
It’s become very obvious that the most important funnel for home services is not how to get customers - it's how to get labor. The cleaner recruiting funnel is 10x more important than the customer funnel.
The best decisions I made in the last year were to bring on additional help to get priority tasks off my plate and onto people smarter than me. We brought on a Recruiter and a Marketing Coordinator internally, who are in charge of both cleaner and customer funnels.
If you can time collapse your progress simply by paying to learn from someone else’s successes and failures, do it. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and money on trial and error.
On the franchise end, I’ve been growing the lead base of franchise prospects through utilizing social media. I’m normally more of numbers and a traditional marketing guy - social media is not my forte.
However, I’ve realized that people want to buy from people and will gravitate towards stories and personalities over a pure ad and ROI approach. The power of human connection in marketing is understated.
Twitter has been huge for networking and leads gen - I’ve started to post massive threads about business and my travel stories while building MaidThis to garner interest in the franchise opportunity.
Example of a travel story thread from my Twitter below:
I also launched a podcast called The Remote Local Podcast, which teaches people how to start their own remote company through the hidden gem of local businesses. While this hasn’t been a huge lead source for leads, it’s helped me tell my story and give interested people more background.
Social media and putting your story out there helps pre-qualify leads, so they come in much warmer after having heard your content versus a normal ads-based marketing funnel.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
My corporate locations mostly run independently without much involvement from me, so my main focus is on expanding the franchise model across the U.S.
My goal for this year is to add 4-to 6 franchise locations, and in 5 years I would love to have between 20-30 franchise locations.
I feel my strength is in business development and support, so I want to focus my time and energy on developing new marketing strategies for our franchisee locations and creating the best support system possible for them.
I’ve been expanding out our support system for franchisees to include: a dedicated account manager for marketing support, all website/tech stuff handled and optimized, email & social media marketing done for you, weekly coaching, and way more.
A side goal is to acquire another residential cleaning company (that can be managed remotely, of course!) and implement the MaidThis system to provide more efficiencies. I feel the home services niche is extremely untapped and ripe for disruption, so I plan to double-down on expansion here.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
Interestingly enough, the most impactful books for me in the last year had nothing to do with business:
THIRST - by Scott Harrison: What an incredibly inspiring book. This dude is my hero. Scott left his career as a nightclub promoter to start a charity: water, a foundation that drills wells to provide clean water to remote locations in Africa. This book was the reason MaidThis Franchise started our KIVA micro-loan program (we give a microloan based on the # of bookings we have in a month).
SURRENDER EXPERIMENT - Michael Alan Singer: Story of a hippie/yoga dude who follows the flow of life and ends up running a $400M+ revenue public company. I admired his spiritual approach to life and how he ties this into how his career turned out with exact examples. My key takeaway: follow the flow of life and let serendipity take hold.
I WILL TEACH YOU TO BE RICH - Ramit Sethi: Why this book rocks: it shows how SIMPLE and consistent investing is almost always the best move. I appreciated how Ramit pushes the reader to identify their version of "a rich life." The book simplifies an otherwise complex investing world. I feel like if you implement these lessons, you’re 90% of the way there with personal finances.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
You don’t have to go to this alone. In the beginning, I was running around in circles trying to figure things out, which involved hours on Reddit forums, getting involved in Facebook groups, etc. While I felt productive, in hindsight, all of these online forums were a case of the blind leading the blind.
If I had a mentor, coach, or system to follow, I would have saved a ton of time and money on faulty mistakes and accelerated my growth.
If you can time collapse your progress simply by paying to learn from someone else’s successes and failures, do it. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and money on trial and error.
Also, don’t be outcome dependent on your happiness. If your business isn’t working despite everything, think about it as just a stepping stone to teach you the skills to do something even greater. The process of learning “how to do business” is more important than the outcome of any single endeavor. There are so many ways to make money; there isn’t a need to be hardened with only one method if it’s not working out.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
I’m on the hunt for talented and motivated people and would love your help finding them!
Are you a badass social media/brand manager? I’m looking for someone who can help promote MaidThis Franchise across social media channels to get more franchise prospects. This person would be self-directed and come up with new ideas to get the opportunity out there!
Want to help me run a local business? I’m on the hunt for someone who can help run new locations for me as part of the MaidThis team. My goal is to acquire other local businesses, and I’ll need someone interested in being part of that process and learning how to run a local business. This can lead to even bigger opportunities within MaidThis Franchise expansion.
Want to run your own local business using my blueprint and build your freedom? I'm looking for our next franchisee and would love your help finding the person! This would be someone interested in following an existing blueprint to start their own remote local business. Side-hustlers welcome.
Where can we go to learn more?
- If you’re interested to learn more, check out our website
- Feel free to subscribe to my podcast, The Remote Local Podcast
- I’m active on Twitter (DMs open!), and you can read about business threads/travel stories there
- If you prefer to get your content from newsletters, you can get my thoughts and write-ups weekly by subscribing to my newsletter
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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