Fourteen years of Crum Cleaning: what we’ve built along the way.
Haven’t read Part I yet? I’d start there — here’s the link!
Getting Crum Cleaning to the point where I could finally make it my full-time job felt like a huge milestone. And it was.
But as I would learn pretty quickly, starting a business and building one are two very different things.
Entrepreneurship Is Not a Straight Line
When people see an established business, they sometimes assume it grew according to a nice, tidy plan.
Mine definitely did not.
If entrepreneurship were a cleaning job, it would be the house where somebody says, “It’s really not that bad.”
Then you walk inside.
Over the years, there have been great decisions and terrible ones, successes and failures, things we tried that worked immediately, and things we probably should have thrown in the trash much sooner.
One example was our attempt to add floor restoration. We spent money on equipment, invested labor, paid franchise expenses, and spent nearly two years trying to make that part of the business work. Eventually, we had to admit something every entrepreneur hates admitting:
This isn’t working.
So we stopped.
That doesn’t mean the entire experience was worthless. Failure teaches you. Sometimes it teaches you what to do and sometimes what not to do. And sometimes it teaches you that just because you spent a lot of money on a machine doesn’t mean you have to keep it around until it becomes furniture. That’s what the MaxxFit 3000 in the basement is for.
You learn, adjust, and keep going.
Now that’s the kind of grit you want!
Fourteen Years Later
Today, Crum Cleaning looks very different from those early days. We now have a team of around seven people. Last year, we generated more than $400,000 in business, and we clean roughly 150 to 180 jobs in an average month.
We’ve expanded beyond traditional residential and commercial cleaning to include carpet cleaning and ceiling and wall cleaning. We’ve experimented with new services, improved our systems, learned what works, and also learned what definitely does not work.
And we’re still learning about payroll, hiring, training, scheduling, leadership, processes, customer communication, quality control, equipment, marketing, and everything else that comes with running a growing company.
Every time you clean up one set of business problems, another mess seems to appear. Unfortunately, none of those messes can be handled with a mop.
But I guess that’s what they call growing pains!
This Business Was Never Built by One Person
Crum Cleaning may have started with me, but what it has become was built by a lot of people.
Our employees have played a huge role: the people who show up every day, clean when they’re tired, solve problems, care about customers, and represent Crum Cleaning when I’m not there.
Leadership inside the company has also helped us build stronger systems and better processes. Jené Lamb-Essig, our operations supervisor, has contributed significantly to helping us organize, improve, and move the company forward.
As we’ve grown, I’ve had to learn another important entrepreneurial lesson. At some point, you have to stop being the person who cleans everything, schedules everything, fixes everything, answers everything, and knows where every bottle of glass cleaner is located (although I still like to know where the glass cleaner is).
You have to build a team.
Building a good team might be harder than getting soap scum off a neglected shower door, but it is also far more rewarding.
Our Customers Built Crum Cleaning Too
There is another group that deserves a huge amount of credit for this story: our customers.
Some customers have been with us for years. Some referred friends and family. Some gave us chances when we were still figuring things out. Some told us when we did a great job, and some told us when we didn’t.
Both helped us improve.
Word of mouth played a major role in building Crum Cleaning, and over time, I realized that the most valuable thing we were building wasn’t just a customer list. We were building relationships.
A transaction is, “Clean my house.” A relationship is, “I trust you in my home.”
A transaction is, “Here’s a commercial cleaning job.” A relationship is, “I know I can call you when I have a problem.”
Our value of creating relationships didn’t come from a marketing meeting. It came from experience. This business grew because people trusted us enough to tell someone else, “Call Crum Cleaning. They’ll take care of you.”
Eventually, I Realized We Weren’t Really Selling Cleaning
When I started Crum Cleaning, I thought I was selling cleaning. It took me a while to realize that cleaning was only the tool.
Customers were actually coming to us because they had a problem. They were short on time, overwhelmed, moving, running a business, or trying to keep up with their family. They needed their office ready for employees or their facility ready for customers. They needed something off their plate.
Or possibly something sticky removed from their plate.
That’s when our purpose became clearer:
Taking Away the Pain with Cleaning Solutions.
We aren’t here simply because dirt exists. If dirt disappearing were enough, vacuum cleaners would have already put us out of business.
We’re here because people need help, and cleaning is the solution we happen to know really well. Our goal is to understand what is causing the customer stress and find a way to remove some of that burden.
That philosophy connects everything I’ve done throughout my career. Whether I was working in customer service, restaurants, EMS, real estate, or cleaning, the question has always been some version of: How can I make this situation better for someone else?
The Values Behind the Business
As Crum Cleaning has grown, we’ve become more intentional about the values that define how we want to operate.
Working Hard to Spark Joy
Cleaning is hard work. There is no magical cleaning fairy living in our supply closet. And if there is, we need to have a serious conversation about her job performance.
The results come from people showing up and doing the work, but the goal isn’t simply hard work. We want that work to create something positive.
A customer walks into a clean home. An employee walks into a cleaner workplace. A property manager has one less problem. A family gets a few hours of their weekend back.
Sometimes joy looks like a sparkling kitchen. Sometimes it looks like somebody realizing they don’t have to clean that kitchen themselves.
I’ll take either one!
Integrity
Do what you say you’re going to do. Show up, treat people’s homes and businesses with respect, own mistakes, fix problems, and protect trust.
None of that is complicated, but doing it consistently is essential even if it isn’t always easy.
Authenticity
We’re real people. We make mistakes, learn, grow, laugh, and sometimes probably talk to ourselves while vacuuming.
We don’t need to pretend the business journey has been perfect because it hasn’t. The goal is to be genuine, responsible, and constantly improving.
Clear Communication
A surprising number of business problems can be traced back to somebody assuming another person knew something they absolutely did not know.
That’s why we communicate with customers, employees, and leadership about schedules, expectations, changes, and problems. Cleaning may involve removing clutter; good communication helps prevent organizational clutter.
Creating Relationships
Relationships are the reason Crum Cleaning exists today. Friends helped shape the original idea, customers referred other customers, employees helped us grow, mentors and books taught me, networking created opportunities, and other business owners shared lessons.
Somewhere along the way, that taught me that business isn’t really business-to-business or business-to-consumer.
It’s people serving people.
Was It Worth It?
Owning a business has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. There have been long days and seven-day weeks, mistakes, money lost, expensive lessons, and plenty of moments when I’ve wondered whether getting a nice quiet desk job would have been easier.
Then I remember that I probably wouldn’t last very long at a quiet desk.
When I look back at the beginning and compare it with where we are today, I see something I am incredibly proud of. A business exists where once there was only an idea. Employees earn a living from it, customers depend on it, relationships have grown from it, and we’ve created opportunities.
We’ve learned. We’ve evolved. We’ve also made plenty of messes along the way.
Fortunately, cleaning up messes is sort of our specialty.
The Future Is Still Being Built
The original reason I started Crum Cleaning was simple: I wanted to create my own future.
Fourteen years later, I’m still doing that. The difference is that now there are a lot more people invested in where Crum Cleaning goes next.
I want to build a company that serves people well, where employees have opportunities and customers know they can trust us. I want a company built around relationships, willing to try new things, willing to admit when something isn’t working, and with enough grit to keep moving when things get difficult.
Someday, maybe Crum Cleaning will continue long after I am no longer the person steering it. Maybe family will carry it forward. Maybe employees will own it. Maybe another entrepreneur will take what we’ve built and grow it into something even bigger.
I don’t know which of those paths we’ll eventually take, and I’m okay with that. Fourteen years ago, I didn’t know where a little car full of cleaning supplies would take me either.
And to think, this entire saga started with a business idea, a library book, a front porch, friends and a bottle of wine.
Not bad for a company built around crumbs!
We may have started by leaving no crumb behind. But what we’ve really been building all these years is something worth leaving behind.
— John Crum, Founder & Owner, Crum Cleaning