King of Maids was founded in Chicago, IL, in 2013 by my best friend and me. We agreed to start a home cleaning service with a combined investment of $6,000. We didn’t know if that was enough, nor what to expect when starting. We were 19 then and had 0 experience, but we were hungry to make it.
When we started, we researched and concluded that we must figure out a way to be better. It came as a shock that when we wanted to get pricing on a cleaning, we’d call 10 cleaning services, and 8 or 9 of them wouldn’t pick up the phone. The ones that did, made it so hard to get pricing that it made us cringe. We were Millenials, so we were very used to convenience and technology. I didn’t understand how a service like Uber could give you a quick quote and a convenient way to book a ride, but a cleaning company was forcing someone to come over to see the property and provide pricing. When asking for an estimate, there was ‘no way’ to even give a rough estimate without visiting the property. That’s when we knew there was an opportunity in the market for something like King of Maids. Our goal became clear; provide the best cleaners and experience using technology.
We decided to start building the technology that would later become home to thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide. Piece by piece, we would build out a software for King of Maids. We didn’t have a lot of money, nor did we have investors, so we started with a simple online booking form. Then that led to a full out CRM and management software. Then it led to BookingKoala, which forever changed my life.
BookingKoala is a must when starting and scaling a service business. It makes your life so much easier, and it makes your service better for your Customers and your Providers. I always wished that I had this software fully built out on day one of starting King of Maids. It makes me wonder how much faster we could’ve reached our goals. For example, our reviews feature wasn’t released till we were several years in business. We took feedback and tracked it manually, adding many hours of work every week. After releasing internal reviews, King of Maids became better, and our lives became easier.
From the image above, you can see that King of Maids Chicago has amassed over 9,000 reviews since we released internal reviews. This is done automatically when a Customer reviews us from an email or when they visit their account. These reviews are crucial in deciding which Providers we keep and which get the most jobs. We have a very high rating, and we can thank the system for that. If someone falls below our standards, we quickly remove them from the platform. It’s 99% fully automated, and we know our services are the best in the area. That is just one HUGE example of how the technology we set out to build back in 2013 allows us to have the best Providers and the best user experience.
You can click here if you’d like to learn more about the features that made our services better. I made a separate blog post detailing all the fantastic features we use and how it helps us grow and provide better services to our clients.
Filip Boksa
CEO and Co-founder at BookingKoala, home to thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide. Grew his first business King of Maids, to over 5 million by 22 with $6,000 and no outside funding. Today focuses on helping businesses through BookingKoala.
