From a COVID Check to a Cleaning Company: Starting a Cleaning Business Lessons From Nicole Aquilina of Dust of Glory
Nicole Aquilina’s lesson in starting a cleaning business begins at what she calls rock bottom. Fired from an office job right before the holidays, newly saddled with her first mortgage and a couple of kids to provide for, she spent about a month on the couch stewing on it. Then came the epiphany that built everything after: her life was up to her. She wrote the script. So she took one of the only resources she had, a COVID-era unemployment check, bought some vacuums and gear, and formed Dust of Glory.
Four years later, the Howell, Michigan company serves residential and commercial clients across Livingston and Oakland Counties, has grown entirely out of her own pocket with no loans and no investors, and generates more leads than it can currently staff. On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, Aquilina walked through the whole arc with the kind of candor that makes her story useful: the jobs that trained her without her knowing it, the deliberate decision to shrink from seventeen employees to seven, and the one problem no amount of clever marketing has solved yet.
The jobs came first. A Home Depot head cashier stint, waitressing she cheerfully rates “the worst of the worst,” and, crucially, an office role at a janitorial supply company, where she absorbed product dwell times, commercial vacuum knowledge, and a daily view of self-employed cleaners living the boss life she wanted. Getting fired from that job hurt; it also handed her the industry education her company now runs on.
The $20-an-Hour Car Ride That Changed Everything
The final push came from a few days cleaning for a friend who owned her own company. Twenty dollars an hour, cash, and one ride home where Aquilina asked what her friend charged and how the sales process worked. Five or ten minutes of conversation later, the math was undeniable. She quit, with a little guilt and a lot of certainty, the next day.
Her first customer arrived within a day of starting: a gentleman living alone who wanted a deep clean and patiently let a brand-new business owner spend twelve or thirteen hours doing it. He loved the result, and Aquilina discovered the part of the business that still fuels her: the reward of serving people. Seniors who cannot bend down or reach up, whose families do not come to help, who count on the visit every two weeks, became the heart of the work.
“It wasn’t always just about making money for me. I was able to really help people through my company and change lives that way.” – Nicole Aquilina
From 17 Employees to 7, On Purpose
Dust of Glory scaled fast enough to reach seventeen employees, and Aquilina is honest about what that volume did to a self-funded founder still wearing every hat. Every people-problem multiplies: the requests off, the life events, the invoicing, the client communication across ninety recurring customers instead of fifty. Without a manager hired, and she admits she was ready for one a year before she acted, the owner simply spreads thinner.
So she did something most growth-obsessed owners never consider: she deliberately scaled back to seven. “A good business knows when to slow down,” she says. The pause is strategic, a window to build processes and systems, work hands-on with her team, and protect quality for the clients she has before chasing more. The alternative, she is sure, was burnout and a plummet. The slowdown is temporary; the systems are permanent.
Week one for a new cleaner at Dust of Glory teaches the company’s real product. “Cleaning isn’t really about cleaning. It’s about client relationships.” A cleaner giving one hundred percent might still be an eighty percent quality cleaner, she tells new hires, and a genuine relationship with the client can matter more. Retention runs on the same philosophy: she describes herself as coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, first to apologize when she oversteps, and she borrows her favorite leadership lesson from a sub shop boss someone once told her about, the one every employee loved because he always made sure they got the time off that mattered. Hams at Christmas, turkeys at Thanksgiving, and birthday facials, because cleaners’ skin takes a beating, round out a culture she calls family-like and admits is never finished.
A Cluttered Desk Is a Cluttered Mind
Ask Aquilina why cleaning matters and she goes straight past appearances to psychology. A cluttered desk, she argues, is a picture of a cluttered mind. Disorganization breeds chaos, chaos drags mood down, and the disorganized pay a double penalty: they lose personal time searching for what they need, then stew in the frustration of not finding it. Order works the opposite way, keeping goals visible and days on track, which is why she compares a systematically cleaned home to a planner. The greats all say to write your thoughts down to make them real; a maintained home is the same discipline, done repetitively enough that nothing ever becomes overwhelming at once.
It is also her answer to what a cleaning service actually sells. Not sparkling counters, but headspace.
What Is Working Now: Jobber at Midnight and Kiosks at Kroger
Against competitors running on Google Calendar or pen and paper, Aquilina’s differentiator is a professionally run client experience. She uses Jobber as a true customer management system, with automated on-my-way texts and scheduled email reminders, and she has elevated its client hub into part of the service itself: clients see every upcoming visit, and when they think of adding a bedroom at midnight, they click, request, and get a confirmation the next day. For busy families and business owners, removing the call-text-email friction is the sale.
The lead generation is pure scrappy creativity. Her best channel is one most marketers have never pitched: TerraBoost hand sanitizer kiosks inside Kroger stores in Howell and Hartland, which deliver what she describes as a tremendous, constant flow, two to three leads a day. A local real estate company’s closing folders put Dust of Glory in front of every new homeowner, producing steady relocation cleans. Add high school freshman T-shirts carrying the biggest logo on the back three years running, charity golf outings supporting Michigan families facing cancer, the website producing leads all the time, and word of mouth amplified by Facebook and Instagram tags, and the result is the rarest marketing position in home services: zero room for growth.
She also won her favorite commercial story on quality rather than price. A Michigan community bank chose her bid at the highest price among competitors, and a year later its chief executive personally called to say he had never had a cleaning company do such a good job, that other vendors generated complaint emails while hers generated compliments. When the annual pricing review later demanded two rate reductions and two additional locations well outside her service radius, she held her floor and gracefully lost the work to a lower bidder she respects. The lessons stuck: commercial is bid-driven no matter how loved you are, a cleaning company should stay within about fifteen to thirty minutes of home base, and a two thousand dollar monthly office overhead prices differently than a home-based operation.
The Lesson: When Leads Aren’t the Problem, Market for People
Asked how much room she has to grow, Aquilina’s answer is the episode’s most honest moment: “I have zero room for growth right now. It’s a people problem. I can’t find anyone who wants to do the job.” She lost two cleaners the week of the recording, competes locally with Amazon paying twenty-four dollars an hour, and knows the discipline the industry demands, a cleaning company should always be hiring, one or two interviews a week minimum, even when the redundancy is exhausting. Her hiring has evolved to five character-first questions, because she can teach anyone to clean, but she cannot fix honesty, reliability, and showing up.
That inversion, abundant demand and scarce labor, is increasingly the real growth constraint across home services, and it reframes what marketing is for. The same visibility engine that attracts customers attracts employees: a strong Google Business Profile and review base that makes a company look like a place worth working, a website that sells the culture as hard as the service, and content that shows real people doing respected work. That is the broader machine the team at Everyday Media Group builds for home service businesses, visibility that compounds in both funnels, plus the answer-first foundations that will matter when Aquilina executes her planned pivot toward commercial clients, who research vendors online long before a bid request goes out. Her offline creativity already outperforms most digital budgets. Pointing the same instincts at both audiences, customers and candidates, is how the people problem starts to bend.
Key Takeaways From Nicole Aquilina
- Slowing down is a growth strategy. Scaling back from 17 employees to 7 bought the time to build systems before burnout, because a good business knows when to slow down.
- Hold your pricing floor. She won a bank at the highest bid on quality, got a personal call from the CEO praising the work, and still walked away when re-bids demanded rates and radius she could not serve profitably.
- Hire for character, teach the skill. Five character-first interview questions replaced can-you-clean screening: “I can teach you how to clean. I can’t fix honesty and reliability.”
About Nicole Aquilina
Nicole Aquilina is the owner of Dust of Glory, a residential and commercial cleaning company founded in 2021 and serving Livingston and Oakland Counties from Howell, Michigan. Self-funded from a single COVID-era unemployment check, the company has grown into an established local brand known for its client experience and community sponsorships. Learn more at https://dust2gloryllc.com/.
Ready for Visibility That Works Both Funnels?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses build visibility that attracts customers and candidates alike: SEO, answer-first websites for AI search, Google Business Profile and review management, and lead tracking that shows what every channel returns. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the owners behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation at connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
