For the first couple of years the teaching happened by accident. I answered questions in Facebook groups for cleaning company owners. I wrote a long guide on Reddit about starting a local business. People sent messages and I answered them, often at odd hours, because my morning was their evening.
One message from that time has stayed with me. A stranger on Reddit wrote to thank me for the guide. It had given them, they said, the knowledge and confidence to finally stop working for someone else and launch their own business: a cleaning company, in the town where they lived. They had a question about pricing, and apologised in case that was private.
It wasn’t private. That was rather the point.
Business school, with a business at the end
In 2018 I launched the Local Business MBA to teach the whole thing properly, in public. It began with a simple question: what would business education look like if the final project were a company you owned? A traditional MBA can cost around two hundred thousand dollars and leaves you with a credential. I wanted something that left you with a business, not the debt.
The programme teaches the sequence I wish I had understood at the start. Choose practical demand. Launch simply. Build reliable ways of finding customers. Make the delivery repeatable. Hire carefully. Then, gradually, remove the owner from routine decisions. It is the order in which Think Maids learned to run without me, minus most of the mistakes.
What the students taught me
I expected to teach. I didn’t expect how much the students would teach each other, and me. The private student chat became as valuable as the course. People posted their first booking at midnight. They asked how to hire cleaners as a team or handle a first-time deep clean, and more often than not someone in Australia would answer someone in Texas before I got to it.
The first bookings were my favourite messages, because they were never really about money. A student in Bristol sent me a booking confirmation with the customer’s details scribbled out and three flexed-arm emojis: a first legitimate job, which had come in organically, simply from having a website. Another student’s first cleaner was a friend who had just been laid off.
The second wave of messages was about confidence. A student in Australia booked out the last available slot using the Google strategies from the course, with every client on the new, higher rates, and nobody blinked. A student in New Jersey found a fifty-eight-thousand-dollar opportunity doing the final clean for a new apartment building, through the Craigslist lessons. A student in Austin wrote that they were so busy they needed more cleaners, badly.
The first bookings were never really about money. The second wave was about confidence.
Foundations first
One thing students said surprised me, because it was the part I worried would bore them. They liked being made to go slowly. One wrote that they loved the emphasis on taking your time through the foundation steps, because the momentum from small, consistent bites is real. They refused to build a team until they had documented their systems, separated the business phone from the personal one, and tidied up the website.
The same student wrote that their family had started to dream about moving to London once the business could be run remotely. I think about that line a lot. It is the whole course in a sentence.
The slow way
I also learned how I wanted to run a course. Many course creators launch every month or every quarter. It never gives students long enough to show what the work actually does, because real growth in a service business takes longer than a launch cycle. I ran a very long beta, made the material ridiculously thorough, took the feedback seriously, launched once, and let people find it over time. I now give that advice to other people building courses, usually with an apology for how long it takes.
The business, in other words, is the course of study. The course is only the map.
Where it is now
More than 250 students in sixteen-plus countries have been through the Local Business MBA. The classroom and the community now live together on Skool. The advice has been updated many times and the platforms have changed completely. The principles have barely moved.
I still answer questions. The difference is that now, more often than not, a student gets there first.