How Maid Brigade Westchester Built a 29-Year Cleaning Business on Company Culture

Who runs Maid Brigade in Westchester and Hartford?

Robin Murphy and her husband own a Maid Brigade franchise with two offices. One is in White Plains, New York and covers the suburbs north of New York City. The other is in Manchester, Connecticut and cleans homes around Hartford. They had just celebrated 29 years in business when this episode was recorded.

They opened in 1996, when the playbook was simple. They mailed a three-fold flyer and the phones rang off the hook. Then came the phone book, where the rule was to buy the biggest ad you could afford. By 2001 the company was doing more than $2 million a year.

Robin does not describe those years as easy. “I was a cowboy and didn’t understand a lot of the rules,” she said, naming overtime as one of them. The company had to learn to do things the right way.

Is it harder to find cleaning customers or cleaning staff?

It goes in cycles, Robin said. In the early days both came easily. Then there were many years when hiring was very hard. Today the company has a wait list of people who want to work there, and she credits that to culture more than to the job market.

That culture is recent. Only a few years ago, she said, nobody wanted to stand and smile when the office asked for a staff photo. Now when they ask for two volunteers to film something for social media, six hands go up.

What does Maid Brigade Westchester do for its staff?

It tries to remove everything that gets in the way of cleaning well. Robin thinks of the business as having two equally important groups of customers: the people who pay for the service and the people who deliver it.

What that looks like in practice:

• An office built for the teams, with a full kitchen, a coffee and beverage bar, a stocked refrigerator and a flavored water machine. Everyone has a company water bottle and mug.
• Family dinner every Friday. The office staff cook for the cleaning teams as they come back in the afternoon.
• Fuel delivered to the office. A local towing operator comes a couple of times a week to fill the cars, so teams go straight from job to job. The program was in its third month.
• Short daily training. Beyond onboarding, staff get a 30-second, TikTok-style video each morning with one thing to keep in mind, often funny.
• Things to be proud of. To celebrate an award, the company ordered matching Adidas tracksuits with its logo.

The awards followed. The company won Best Places to Work two years in a row, and Westchester Magazine named it best house cleaning company.

How does that show up for customers?

In trust. Robin told two stories. In one home, a baby being cared for by a relative stopped breathing, and one of the cleaning pros gave the baby CPR. In another, a customer away on business asked whether the team could take her son’s prescription medication to his school. Robin’s husband drove it over himself. The school would not accept it, but she said the request alone meant a lot.

Customer churn is low, referrals are constant, and customers who leave often come back. When the company started collecting more reviews, some clients wrote that they had used Maid Brigade for more than 10 years. Robin checked, and for one it had been 21 years. For another it was 26.

Where do new cleaning customers come from now?

From doing many ordinary things well. The company runs some digital and print advertising, sends email, wraps its cars and follows up fast by call, text and email. It spent a lot on Google Ads last year, pulled back this year, and Robin said the result has been “totally fine” because the business has years of search history behind it.

One newer habit: every day, staff send photos from the homes they are cleaning, nothing personal, and the office posts them as check-ins on the Google Business Profile so Google knows the towns they serve.

Reviews had been the stubborn part. The company asked after every visit and customers agreed, then forgot. That changed in two weeks once the follow-up was automated.

What would she tell someone starting a cleaning business?

Know which customers you want and what you are worth. “You can’t be everything to everybody,” Robin said, and chasing cheap jobs does not help in the long run. She would not hand over a playbook, because no two owners would run it the same way, but she recommends franchise systems and industry groups, and said she is friendly with her local competitors.

Her company’s own early decision was to clean green. In the first year staff were getting sick from ammonia and bleach, so they found another way and kept it.

Her goal now is bigger than revenue. She wants people to stop seeing house cleaning as a luxury or as unskilled work. “It’s health care,” she said.