Yesterday I had the pleasure chatting with Malinda Williams, one half of the two women behind Cincy Clean. You know you’ve hit it off with someone when you feel like you could talk with them forever about everything from business to blogging to organization, etc. That is exactly what happened when we met up at the Coffee Emporium Friday. Malinda is one of Faith’s best friends (Small Business Saturday: Faith and the mobile spray tan and Coffee with Faith: local entrepreneur and comedian) and her business partner in Cincy Clean. Faith Mueller is someone I’ve featured several times on the blog. She runs two businesses: Cincy Clean and Cincy Spray Tan. Malinda’s role is mostly in customer service and social media management.
The business was started a little over a year ago. Faith had hired a house cleaner and had a great experience. She felt like a cleaning business would be a successful idea she could get behind. Furthermore, several of Faith’s family members clean houses, so she was familiar with house cleaning. So she wrote up her business plan, which included a business partner. She and Malinda had been best friends since high school, so she offered the partnership. At the time, Malinda was between jobs. While the idea of starting her own business was scary, she just decided to go for it.
Cincy Clean is basically a user-friendly cleaning service. A person could book a cleaning from their phone or laptop directly on the Cincy Clean website. Malinda said that busy people are who they target. They want to be able to provide a service to make people’s lives easier. They hope that through technology, they can reach a new group of people who might not have hired cleaners in the past.
“We want people to go online, order a service and before they know it, their house is clean and they didn’t have to do anything other than click a few buttons,” she said. “Why wouldn’t people want to do that?”
The prices are reasonable. She compared it to paying a phone bill. A clean house is a necessity that people should want to pay for each month. The rates are based on how many bedrooms a house has and they also offer green cleaning at no extra charge.
“People always ask about the green cleaning. It’s very popular,” said Malinda.
Currently they have about 10 part-time house cleaners working for the business. They get as many as 80 bookings a month. Their goal in this next year is to double that number.
Overall, Malinda enjoys the flexibility that owning her own business gives her. She has a three-year-old son who she has 50/50 shared parenting of with his father. So during the times he is with his father, she works as much as she can. During the times when she has him, she can either choose not to work or work on things from home.
“I can fix my schedule to make my life revolve around him,” she said.
She said it feels both great and scary to be a female entrepreneur. She enjoys running a service-oriented business because initially, there was not a lot of start-up capital involved. She also feels like it’s important to offer people the best cleaning service possible.
To learn more about Cincy Clean, visit their website here. Also, you should check them out on Facebook here.
