The Three Stakeholders Every Cleaning Business Owner Must Balance
Every cleaning business is really three businesses in one. It has to work for the people who do the cleaning. It has to work for the people who pay for it. And it has to work for the company itself.
During a recent Smart Business Moves session, "Protecting Profit in a Shifting Market," Tom Stewart and Liz Trotter kept returning to that idea. They covered inflation, the economy, and pricing. But nearly every topic traced back to one framework: a cleaning company only performs well when all three stakeholders get what they need.
"The information we're sharing with you affects your three primary stakeholders," Stewart told the session. "It affects your cleaning professionals. It affects your customers, and it affects your business." As he put it: "There's no win-lose here."
The Three Stakeholders
Employees. Technicians and cleaning professionals do the hard work that generates every dollar of revenue. Stewart described them simply as the people who "get out of bed every morning" to do the job. They need fair pay, predictable schedules, and a workplace that respects their effort.
Customers. Clients pay for reliable, trustworthy service. They need to feel like they're getting real value. But meeting their needs can't come at the expense of the other two stakeholders. Underpricing to keep customers happy just moves the strain somewhere else.
The business. The company itself has needs too: profit, cash flow, and the capacity to keep operating. Trotter pointed out why owners neglect this stakeholder most often. They're so focused on employees and customers that the business's own financial health becomes an afterthought — until it can't support either one.
There's No Win-Lose — Only Balance
You can't sacrifice one stakeholder to benefit another and call it success. Underpay employees to protect margin, and turnover eats the savings. Underprice customers to win loyalty, and the business can't fund payroll. Squeeze the business for short-term cash, and employees and customers both feel it eventually.
That's why Stewart and Trotter treated profitability as an obligation, not a luxury. "You're not greedy by being profitable," Stewart said. "You have an obligation to be profitable, because that's how you take care of your stakeholders." He added a key caveat: "If you're not profitable, you can't help anybody, including yourself."
This isn't just a cleaning-industry talking point. Management theorist Peter Drucker made a similar argument decades ago. He described profit as "like oxygen" for a business. It's necessary for survival. But it isn't the reason the business exists. Drucker's point was simple: profit isn't the purpose of a business, any more than breathing is the purpose of a life. Still, without it, nothing else is possible — not paying people well, not serving customers, not growing.
Trotter added a note of realism, too. Some businesses are already profitable enough. "If you are comfortable and you are as profitable as you want to be, what's wrong with that?" she said. This framework isn't a demand to squeeze every dollar out of the business. It's a way of noticing when one stakeholder has quietly been left out.
Why This Balance Is Harder to Hold Right Now
Stewart and Trotter spent real time on why this framework matters more today. All three stakeholders are being squeezed by the same pressure at once: a shifting economy and rising costs.
Stewart pointed to the so-called "K-shaped economy." In this split, higher earners with investments are doing fine. Lower-income households are increasingly stretched. "The bottom half of the K is just going to struggle as they burn through savings," Stewart said. Gas prices, housing costs, and inflation are compounding for that group — and that group makes up a meaningful share of any cleaning company's customers.
Stewart pointed to one concrete signal of that strain. "I saw a number from Walmart come out last week," he said. Walmart shoppers, he noted, are now "buying less than ten gallons of gas at a time" — the first time that's happened since COVID. Walmart's own CFO confirmed the trend on the company's earnings call, calling it "an indication of stress" among lower-income shoppers especially.
That's not a household about to cancel its cleaning service outright. It's one more likely to ask for biweekly instead of weekly, or push back harder at renewal time. For a cleaning company, that shows up first as softening frequency — long before it shows up as outright cancellations.
The inflation data backs this up. Pre-pandemic, the average annual inflation rate ran around 1.5%. Today it's running north of 3%. "That's over twice as high as it used to be," Stewart said.
This kind of sustained cost pressure isn't temporary. It affects the wages needed to retain cleaning professionals, just as it affects household budgets. Stewart's warning was direct: if a business doesn't adjust its pricing for that reality, "one day you're going to wake up and find out you're cleaning a whole bunch of homes and not billing enough to make it work."
That single line connects the three-stakeholder framework and the inflation conversation directly. Rising costs squeeze employees, who need higher pay just to keep up. They squeeze customers, who feel every price increase more when their own budgets are tight. And they squeeze the business, whose margins erode if pricing doesn't move with costs. Ignoring the pressure on any one stakeholder doesn't protect the other two. It just shifts the damage.
Prepare Before the Storm, Not During It
Stewart used a hurricane analogy that landed well with the audience. Preparing for an economic downturn, he said, is like boarding up windows and laying sandbags before a storm makes landfall. It's real work. And if the storm never comes, it can feel like wasted effort.
But unlike a hurricane, this prep work pays off either way. "Even if the storm doesn't come... you're going to be happy you did it, because you're going to be more profitable," Stewart said.
Trotter added the competitive angle. "Not everybody's doing it," she said. Because of that, owners who prepare get "a leg up just for looking at it, thinking about it, making some changes." Fixing underpriced accounts and applying overdue rate increases now builds room to maneuver later — whether or not conditions actually worsen.
A Simple Owner Exercise
Try asking these three questions honestly about your own business:
- Are your employees better off because they work here?
- Are your customers better off because they hired you?
- Is the business financially stronger because of how you operate?
If the honest answer to any of these is no, that's where the work starts. Given current cost pressure, it's worth starting now — before rising expenses force the question for you.
The Bottom Line
The best cleaning companies don't choose between employees, customers, and the business's own health. They build pricing and staffing decisions that let all three hold up together.
That's exactly why Stewart and Trotter kept returning to this framework. Their session was, on paper, about inflation and economic data. But the underlying message was simpler: know which stakeholder is being shortchanged, and fix it before it becomes everyone's problem.
FAQs
A: The three stakeholders are the employees who perform the work, the customers who pay for the service, and the business itself. The business needs profit and stability to keep functioning. A cleaning company only performs well when all three get what they need at the same time.
A: No. Profit is what lets an owner take care of employees and customers in the first place. Without it, a business can't fund better pay, better tools, or better service. Protecting profit is about protecting everyone the business supports, not personal greed.
A: Rising costs put pressure on all three stakeholders at once. Employees need higher pay to keep up with their own cost of living. Customers feel every price increase more when their budgets are stretched. And the business's margins shrink if pricing doesn't move with rising expenses.
A: The K-shaped economy describes a split where higher-income consumers keep spending comfortably while lower- and middle-income consumers feel squeezed by inflation. Since a cleaning company's customer base often spans that whole range, this split can affect frequency and price sensitivity even while overall business volume looks stable.
A: Ask three honest questions. Are your employees better off because they work for you? Are your customers better off because they hired you? Is the business financially stronger because of how you operate? A "no" to any of these points to where the imbalance is happening.
A: A well-timed rate increase protects all three stakeholders together. It funds competitive pay for employees, preserves service quality for customers, and keeps the business healthy enough to keep operating well. Underpricing to avoid customer pushback tends to erode the other two stakeholders instead.
A: Before signs of a downturn are obvious, not after. Fixing underpriced accounts and applying overdue rate increases during a calmer stretch puts a business in a stronger position either way. Most competitors won't have done the same prep work.
Author
Recommended Reading
There's more to explore — here are a few posts worth a look.
Our first pick is K-Shaped Economy: What It Means for Cleaning Companies, which breaks down a more in depth look at the way that employees and customers are both split across the K.
You'll probably also like Protecting Your Cleaning Business from a Recession, which covers the tactical follow-through of addressing the needs of all three stakeholders - rate increases, credit lines, receivables, and more.
Another good read is Inflation Is Lower. Prices Aren’t. What That Means for Your Cleaning Business, where you'll find the three stakeholders in the context of inflation and the consumer price index, including a deeper breakdown of price increases vs. price adjustments.
Finally, there's Customer Attrition Rate: The Red KPI That Decides Whether You Grow or Shrink, where you'll find the point hat "satisfied technicians keep customers satisfied" and directly echoes the connection between the employee and the customer stakeholders.
