Cleaning Company Playbook is an independent site for owners of house cleaning companies who want more recurring clients without signing a contract to find out whether the marketing works.
Who writes it
Steve Meitler is the editor. He has spent years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, residential cleaning companies among them, and has watched enough owners buy leads at $45 a piece for one-time cleans to be suspicious of anything sold by the lead. Everything here is written so an owner can check it, do it alone, and skip the sales call.
Where the benchmark numbers come from
The benchmark report is built from public Google Business Profile listings. We run Google Maps searches for house cleaning services in every US state, capture the public fields on each listing (review count, star rating, whether a website is linked, hours, primary category, location), remove duplicates by Google place ID, and compute the statistics. Nothing behind a login is touched and no reviewer names or personal details are stored. The dataset currently holds 45,428 listings across 51 states and refreshes monthly.
Two honest caveats. At this scale collection errors happen, so treat every figure as accurate within a point or two rather than to the decimal. And the residential cleaning category is messy: solo cleaners, two-person husband-and-wife crews, franchises and commercial janitorial firms all sit under the same Google category, which is part of why the median review count is so low.
Editorial rules
- No pay-to-play. No software company, franchise or marketplace can buy a mention, a link or a recommendation here.
- Every number traces either to our own dataset or to a primary source such as Google's published documentation. Opinions are labeled as opinions.
- Guides are written for an owner who is still cleaning houses two days a week. If a step cannot be done in an evening or handed to an office manager, it does not go in.
- Guides get updated when platforms change, and the update date is shown on the page.
How the free trial works
The site is paid for by the marketing work we do for cleaning companies. Every service is offered as a free 14-day trial because an owner should watch the phone ring before paying anyone. You text or call, say which service you want to try (Google Ads, Meta ads, AI search optimization, local SEO and Google profile work, a website, social media, review generation, missed-call text-back, email and SMS, bookkeeping, or appointment setting), and it gets set up inside your own accounts, usually within 48 hours of a short setup call. It runs 14 days. No card is taken, nothing renews, and nothing is charged during the trial. At the end you keep it at a price quoted before it started, switch to a different service, or walk away and keep whatever was built.
Text or call (385) 832-6175, or start on the free trial page. More on the FAQ.