Perhaps no one has contributed more to the success of House2Play than Jessica Hendrix of At Ease Cleaning Company. Jessica is the heart and soul of our Lake of the Ozarks operation. She is no ordinary cleaner.
Individual hosts and traditional property management companies handle cleaning in various ways. If you are starting out as a host, you might typically see someone posting on a Facebook group looking for a cleaner. You will get several different responses, and the new host will typically go with a solo cleaner who is priced very reasonably.
You get your first booking! Yay! You text your cleaner, she acknowledges, and cleans the property. It’s now ready for your next guest, and you Venmo your cleaner the money for the job. Easy, right? Not so fast.
What happens when your cleaner is sick? Who is your backup cleaner that is willing to take a last-minute job because the cleaner you wanted to use is sick? What if you have three different properties? Does it seem feasible to text your cleaner about three different bookings across three different properties with three different checkout dates? If you have two turnovers on the same day, can your cleaner get to both jobs within a narrow 6-hour window? How is that Venmo accounting working out for you? Do you pay her for all three jobs at once? Every time she leaves the job site?
What a mess you’ve gotten yourself into. That is not how professional organizations that intend to grow operate. Jessica herself cleans my property sometimes. She is the best at what she does, but she can only be at one property at a time. However, Jessica is also a likeminded entrepreneur who runs a professional cleaning company.
She manages a full staff of cleaners and can scale up and down through the seasons. If someone calls in sick, she has a plan for that. I do not text Jessica when I have a job for her. She integrates with our technology and automatically accepts jobs through her calendaring system. We typically have no interactions between guests because of the system we have set up together. She replaces consumables like toilet paper and guest snacks. She invoices me monthly, so I have one accounting transaction with her per month.
Does your cleaner do that?
Here is the dirty secret: your property manager is charging you anywhere from 20-35% of your revenue. Whether your property makes 20K a year or 200K a year, my overhead is the same for you. But the extra work on that 200K property shifts down to Jessica, who has more beds to dress and more guests to clean after. These are the properties we specialize in, and we do not need 35% of your revenue to make our business profitable.
This is one of the many factors that sets us apart. Both At Ease Cleaning Company and House2Play are ready to manage your luxury lakefront rental!
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