Most business origin stories begin with a gap in the market. Mine begins with a gap of about seven thousand miles. The woman I wanted to build a life with was in Japan. I was in Washington, D.C., finishing university, and the arithmetic was simple and unkind: nobody was going to employ me in America and let me live on the other side of the world.
So the income would have to be built rather than found. That was the whole business plan, and it was less a plan than a condition. Whatever I started had to work from anywhere, or it did not work at all.
Choosing something unglamorous
I looked at the ordinary part of the economy: cleaning, lawn care, junk removal, the services every town needs and nobody writes songs about. They had a useful split in common. The work itself happens in a house on a particular street. Almost everything around the work, from the enquiry and the quote to the booking, the reminder, the reschedule, the payment, the follow-up and the hiring, happens on a phone or a screen.
Cleaning won because the complaints about it were so consistent. Ask people about their last cleaning company and you hear the same three things. They didn’t turn up when they said they would. Booking them was a chore of phone tag and vague quotes. And somewhere along the way something felt less than honest: a price that moved, a clean that was skimped, a problem nobody owned.
None of those are cleaning problems. They are operating problems, and operating problems, I suspected, could be solved from a desk anywhere.
Seven hundred dollars
In my final semester I started Think Maids with seven hundred dollars. That does not buy much, which turned out to be a good discipline. It meant starting with the things a customer actually touches: a clear website where you could book and pay online, a price you could see before anyone came to your door, and a phone that was answered quickly.
We aimed to reply to every enquiry within three to five minutes, by phone, email or text, whichever the customer preferred. You could book online, move or cancel a clean without a lecture, and leave notes about the dog or the key under the mat. None of it was clever. All of it was rare.
None of it was clever. All of it was rare.
The first customers
The first customers came from the places people were already looking: Google, and lead marketplaces like Thumbtack. I treated the first clean as marketing rather than profit. We discounted it, gave a smaller discount on the next couple, and followed up properly afterwards, because a cleaning customer is only worth having if they stay. I was willing to lose a little money on the first one to three cleans. The regulars paid for everything else.
We also kept following up long after most companies would have given up. People who don’t book today still have houses tomorrow, and we were still touching base with some leads two years after they first enquired.
The platforms have changed a great deal since then, and I wouldn’t copy the tactics line for line today. The principle holds: be findable where people already look, make the first yes easy, and treat keeping customers as the real business.
Designing for absence
Here is the part that mattered most, though I only understood it later. Because I knew I would not be there, I could not build the company the usual way. The usual way is that the owner is the system: the person who takes the difficult call, covers the missed job, and remembers how everything works. It feels responsible. It also teaches the business that it cannot cope without them.
I didn’t have that option, so every recurring decision needed an answer that lived somewhere other than my head. How we answer the phone. What we say when a clean runs over. When we refund. Who covers a sick cleaner. Each question that reached me twice became a written answer, and the company slowly moved out of my head and into pages other people could run.
Then Japan
A few months after graduation I moved to Japan. The company stayed in Washington. I worked from a desk overlooking a small Tokyo park, and customers had no idea. More to the point, they had no reason to need one. Think Maids went on to become a national cleaning company, and in eight years of running it I never met a customer.
People sometimes ask whether it was stressful, running a company from a time zone where everyone else is asleep. Sometimes, yes; we will get to Halloween. But the distance did something useful. It made cheating impossible. Every shortcut an owner normally takes by being there, I had to replace with a system, a person or a page of instructions.
I didn’t set out to invent a model. I set out to be with someone, and the business had to be built around that. It still seems the right way round.