From a trunk full of cleaning supplies to Crum Cleaning.
Fourteen years ago, Crum Cleaning was not a company with employees, equipment, systems, or hundreds of jobs a month. It was me, a little car, a trunk full of cleaning supplies, and an idea that was still covered in spiderwebs.
I had spent years working for other people in restaurants, retail, emergency medical services, real estate, and customer service. I had served tables, managed departments, responded to emergencies, trained medics, supervised teams, and helped organizations solve problems. I learned something from every one of those jobs, but eventually, one thought kept coming back to me:
If I can work this hard building someone else’s dream, what could happen if I put that same effort into building my own?
That question eventually became Crum Cleaning.
I Wanted to Build Something of My Own
When I started seriously thinking about entrepreneurship, I was working in the restaurant industry. I had been there for several years, and restaurant work teaches you a lot about people. It also teaches you that no matter how clean you think a table is, someone will somehow find a sticky spot.
I enjoyed serving people, but I had a growing desire to create my own future. I wanted my own business and the freedom to build something around my own values. I wanted to work toward my own goals instead of spending all my energy helping someone else achieve theirs.
I also wanted to build something that might one day become more than a paycheck. Maybe it could help provide for my retirement, become something my godchildren might want to carry forward, or someday become employee-owned. Maybe it could eventually be sold to someone who believed in what we had created and wanted to continue it.
I didn’t know exactly what the ending would look like. I just knew I wanted to give it a shot.
Service Had Already Been Training Me
Looking back, cleaning might seem like a very different career from emergency medical services, retail, restaurants, or real estate, but they all had something important in common: service.
I started at Taco Bell and later worked at Walmart, where I moved into a customer service manager position. I became a volunteer firefighter, earned my EMT license, and eventually became a paramedic. I spent about 12 or 13 years in EMS, eventually becoming a field supervisor and instructor, working on protocols, ordering, supplies, processes, and all the behind-the-scenes details that keep an operation functioning.
I even spent some time in real estate before the big housing crash in 2008. So apparently, before I cleaned houses, I had already tried just about every career that involved answering the question, “How can I help you today?”
Each job taught me something different. Restaurants taught me urgency, hospitality, and how to smile even when somebody asks for ranch dressing for the fourth time. Retail taught me customer service. EMS taught me how to stay calm when things go sideways. Leadership taught me responsibility, training taught me the importance of systems, and real estate taught me about relationships, competition, and sales.
Together, all those experiences taught me one lesson that still matters today:
Trust has to be earned.
The Business Plan Started at the Library
Once I decided I wanted to become an entrepreneur, I had to answer a fairly important question: What business was I actually going to start?
I started researching restaurants, bars, and other businesses, and eventually, cleaning caught my attention. The startup cost was relatively low. I wasn’t going to need hundreds of thousands of dollars, venture capital, or a giant bank loan. I didn’t need to pitch investors with a 48-slide presentation persuading them no one mopped faster than me.
I needed cleaning supplies, transportation, customers, and a willingness to work.
I already had or could easily get three of those. I figured I’d work on the fourth (spoiler: customers).
So I went to the library and checked out a book about writing a business plan for a cleaning company. I started doing the numbers, looking at expenses and pricing and thinking about supplies, customers, scheduling, and what it might actually take to make the idea work. Turns out, “buy some Windex and hope for the best” isn’t much of a business plan.
Then I did what entrepreneurs have probably been doing since the beginning of time: I talked to my friends.
A Front Porch, a Bottle of Wine, and a Business Name
There is nothing quite like sitting on a front porch with your closest friends, sharing a bottle of wine, talking about dreams, and convincing each other that your latest idea might actually be brilliant. The wine may have helped with that last part.
We brainstormed, talked about names, and threw ideas back and forth. Somewhere in those conversations, Crum Cleaning began to take shape.
My name gave us a natural play on words: Crum. Crumbs. Cleaning.
And eventually: Leaving No Crumb Behind.
It fit! It had personality and, most importantly, it gave the idea an identity. Suddenly, this thing I had been researching was no longer just “maybe I’ll start a cleaning business.” It had a name.
And once something has a name, it gets a lot harder to pretend you aren’t actually going to do it.
The Early Days: One Car and a Lot of Supplies
Crum Cleaning did not begin with a warehouse, a fleet of vehicles, or employees wearing matching uniforms. It started with me, my little car, and a trunk full of cleaning supplies. There wasn’t much room left for groceries.
I experimented with natural cleaning products such as vinegar, baking soda, and alcohol because I was interested in creating a less toxic cleaning approach. For a while, my car smelled like I was simultaneously cleaning a kitchen and making a Cobb salad.
Slowly but surely, things came together. The business, I mean, not the Cobb salad.
I used Facebook, relied heavily on word of mouth, told people what I was doing, and got to cleaning. One customer became two, two became more, someone told a friend, and that friend told someone else.
I wasn’t able to simply quit everything and become a full-time cleaning-business owner overnight, though. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I hustled. I continued waiting tables, worked private parties, and took whatever work I needed while building Crum Cleaning on the side.
I was working to pay today’s bills while trying to create tomorrow’s business.
So I decided to take a big leap.
The LivingSocial Experiment
At the time, LivingSocial was a major platform for local deals, so I decided to place an offer. Customers could purchase three cleaning visits, with one cleaning each month.
It seemed like a good idea.
Then I sold more than 60 of them!
That’s when I discovered an important business lesson: Selling 60 packages feels fantastic right up until you realize that somebody actually has to perform all those cleanings.
And that somebody… was me.
For roughly the next three months, I worked six days a week, cleaning three houses a day by myself. House after house, bathroom after bathroom, kitchen after kitchen. By the end of those days, I wasn’t just leaving no crumb behind. The crumbs were following me home — and into my dreams.
Financially, it was challenging too. Because of how the deal was structured, I was essentially making around $8 an hour during those months while waiting for the larger payment on the back end. My landlord gave me grace when I wasn’t able to keep up with rent immediately, and I kept working, cleaning, and showing up.
Eventually, the LivingSocial payment came through, but something even more important had happened along the way: some of those customers stayed. They became recurring clients, and the business finally reached a point where I could sustain enough work to do Crum Cleaning full-time.
That promotion was exhausting, but it helped turn an idea into a real company.
Of course, getting Crum Cleaning off the ground turned out to be only the beginning. Building a company brought a whole new collection of lessons — including some expensive mistakes, a growing team, hundreds of customers, and the realization that what we were really providing wasn’t simply cleaning.
More on that part of the story in an upcoming blog — stay tuned!
— John Crum, Founder & Owner, Crum Cleaning