I Bought a Business That Was Making $5,000 a Month. Then I Used This 2-Step Process to Hit $100,000 Monthly in Under 2 Years. Justin Ducharme emailed business brokers to find the right fit, then bought his first company in 2023.
By Amanda Breen Edited by Jessica Thomas
Key Takeaways
- Ducharme and his fiancée Amerie Novosad bought WHB Cleaning for $125,000 and paid $15,000 for a van in 2023.
- With a three-phase strategy and repeating two-part process, they plan to grow beyond the business's current $100,000 monthly revenue.
This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with San Diego, California-based business owner Justin Ducharme. Ducharme and his fiancée Amerie Novosad bought the residential cleaning service business WHB Cleaning in 2023 and have grown it into a $100,000-per-month operation. Learn how, here.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Justin Ducharme
I wouldn't say I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur right away. Frankly, I was not very good in school. I was always hyperactive, goofing around. The one thing that really kept me focused was sports, so I was an athlete growing up. That led me to go to college for one year and play basketball. And I just couldn't get with the school part. I wasn't good at it. All I wanted to do was play basketball. My grades were falling behind, so I figured it wasn't really for me.
Shortly after that, I decided to get into sales. I don't know if it was a hunch, someone told me or just some intuition, but I figured I could take my passion for sports and put that into sales. I first worked at a gym selling memberships. I sold insurance for a bit, then I met my fiancée, who'd been selling cars for several years. She was super successful and had a bunch of rental properties. So I'm like, Oh, I need to get into cars. We started selling cars together and ran a dealership for just under four years. We did really well, earning pretty high six figures together.
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My fiancée and I are from Canada, but we wanted to move to the U.S., so we did some research and found out that we could move to the U.S. if we had an investor visa. By that point, we'd saved a bunch of money, and we had to spend a minimum of $100,000 to buy a business. I did a few months of research on what type of business would work best for us and determined a cleaning service could be a good fit.
"We paid $125,000 for the asset and $15,000 for a van, so our investment was $140,000."
I used a website called California Business Brokers to find the business. I probably emailed about 100 brokers to see if they had any residential cleaning businesses for sale. I heard back from five or six, did my due diligence on those companies and landed on a small company based in San Diego, California, that was doing about $5,000 in revenue per month. Now, we've grown that to over $100,000 a month in the last eight or nine months here.
In 2023, we paid $125,000 for the asset and $15,000 for a van, so our investment was $140,000. Looking back, the company was probably only worth $60,000 at most. During the due diligence process, I didn't realize that the owner was doing most of the cleaning.
When we bought the business, it had three employees and about 25 recurring clients. Two of those three employees stayed with the company, and one of the three still works with us. Today, we have 42 cleaners and just over 300 recurring clients.
"We moved through strategic phases to achieve that growth and success."
We moved through strategic phases to achieve that growth and success. First was really learning the business. I knew I had to learn absolutely everything there was to know about running a cleaning business, so I decided to put on every single hat. But I became the biggest bottleneck of all time, and that prevented growth. I was burnt out — but the rainbow in the rain was that I knew the business inside and out. By then, we were bringing in about $30,000 a month.
In stage two, I focused on building out systems and processes to scale. I was in a business networking group where different business owners come together and give referrals and advice, and there was a woman in the group who recommended that I try a system called Jobber. At the time, I handled appointment reminders, invoices, cleaning management and clocking in/out manually. Within days of signing up for Jobber, I offloaded every single one of those processes without hiring a virtual assistant. It allowed me to dial up marketing and reach $75,000 a month.
Stage three was all about delegating sales and customer success. We've continued using Jobber to help us scale, but we also started hiring virtual assistants to manage customers. Now, I don't talk to customers anymore or do sales. And it's gotten us to $100,000 per month.
"Your systems and processes have to be able to handle double what you're currently doing."
My theory on business is that your systems and processes have to be able to handle double what you're currently doing. So, over the past few months, we've built our systems to be able to handle about $200,000 in monthly revenue. Now, all we have to do is turn up the taps on our sales and marketing, and our systems are going to be able to handle that growth. It's going to be a pretty easy transition for us to get to that next $200,000-a-month phase. We should be there in three or four months.
Then, we're going to have to figure out how we can build out the systems to handle $400,000 monthly revenue. That's a two- to three-month process, and once we build out those systems, we'll be able to turn up our sales and marketing again. It's literally a two-step process, repeated over and over.
Entrepreneurs in the service business — or anybody who's thinking of buying a business — should start with the end in mind: What do you want your business to look like in two to three years? A lot of people do it the wrong way, like I did, by doing everything themselves in the beginning. But they become a bottleneck and stop growth.
If I could go back, I would have started with building out the systems. If I had done that, we'd be twice as far as we are now. So my advice would be to take yourself out of the business from day one. That way, you can build the business, not run the business. In other words, all of those manual tasks that have to be done in the early days — just have systems in place that do them for you so you can focus on growth.
