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I cleaned my first bathtub as a professional and it took me 2 hours and broke me 😳 I want to tell you what I figured out in my first 6 months of running a cleaning business, because I think a lot of women starting out are about to make the same mistake I made. I started my cleaning business in October. I had been working in corporate sales for 11 years and I was burned out in a way that I could not explain to my husband or my therapist or myself. I had savings. I had a flexible schedule because my kids were both in school full time. I had a friend who had been running her own cleaning business for 6 years and was making more than I had been making in sales without the meetings and the email and the office politics. I quit my job in September. I spent 3 weeks doing research. I bought insurance, I registered an LLC, I got a few cleaning supplies from Sam's Club, and I posted on the neighborhood Facebook group offering my services. My first job came in 5 days later. A 2 bedroom apartment near my house. The client had just gone through a divorce and needed help getting the place ready to show to a real estate agent. I want to walk you through what happened in that first apartment because the bathtub broke something in me that I had not known was breakable. The apartment overall was not bad. The kitchen took me 90 minutes. The bedrooms took me 45 minutes each. The living room took 30 minutes. I was on schedule. I was feeling good. I was thinking about how I was going to bill her for the job and what I was going to tell my husband about my first paycheck. Then I got to the bathroom. The bathtub looked like the picture on the left. The bottom was yellowed with a darker ring around the drain. There was a faint hexagonal pattern across the lower portion where a non-slip bath mat had clearly been suctioned for years and had left its imprint in mineral deposits and soap scum. The walls of the tub had vertical streaking from soap residue. The caulk seams had mildew in the corners. The grout had dingy darkening along the bottom row. I had brought Bar Keeper's Friend powder and a Scotch scouring pad because that was what my friend had told me to use on porcelain. I had brought a $24 stiff bristled brush. I had brought a Magic Eraser. I had brought a spray bottle of Method bathroom cleaner because the bottle was pretty and I had liked the smell when I bought it. I started at 2:15 PM. I sprayed the Method on the tub. It did almost nothing. I switched to the Bar Keeper's Friend, scrubbed for 30 minutes with the Scotch pad, and the bath mat imprint lightened by about 40%. I tried the Magic Eraser on the hardest areas and it disintegrated into gray crumbs in the tub within 4 minutes. I went back to the Bar Keeper's Friend with the stiff brush. At 3:45 PM I was still scrubbing. My right hand was cramping. The skin on my fingertips was raw because the Bar Keeper's Friend powder is mildly acidic and I had not been wearing gloves consistently. I had broken the cleaning into 3 different passes with different products and the bath mat imprint was lighter but not gone. The drain ring was still there. The caulk corners were still dark. At 4:30 PM I texted my husband that I was going to be late. The tub was finally acceptable. Not great. Acceptable. I had spent 2 hours and 15 minutes on a single bathtub. I sat on the closed toilet lid in the client's bathroom and I did the math. I had quoted the client $180 for the whole apartment. I had been there for 4 hours and 30 minutes. My effective hourly rate, including the bathtub, was $40 an hour before taxes and supplies. The bathtub alone had cost me about 50% of my actual labor cost for the day in time and physical effort. If I had 3 more clients with bathtubs that bad in a week, I was going to lose money on supplies and burn through my hands within a month. I drove home and I cried in the car in the driveway before I went inside. I posted on Reddit that night. I want to be careful here because I am not going to link the post. I asked a cleaning subreddit how to make bathtubs less miserable. I got 327 comments. Most of them were variations of the same advice. Bar Keeper's Friend. Bleach. Ammonia. Magic Eraser. A pumice stone. Different scrub brushes for a drill attachment. I had ruled out bleach and ammonia in my original post because I was thinking about exposure over time. I planned to clean 4 to 5 houses a week for the next 10 years. If I was inhaling bleach fumes in small enclosed bathrooms for that long, I was going to develop respiratory problems. I had watched my mother in law cough for 20 years from a lifetime of grocery store cleaning products and I had decided early on that I was going to find another way. A few of the comments were thoughtful. One in particular stuck with me. A woman named Diane, who had been running her own cleaning business for 26 years and who was now in her 60s, replied with a long comment that she eventually moved into a DM because it was getting too long. She said something I want to repeat here because it is the part that changed my career. She wrote, "The reason cleaning is miserable for you right now is that you are using products designed for homeowners. Homeowner products are formulated for occasional use on a single household. You are doing 4 houses a week. You need professional chemistry, which is not the same thing as professional packaging. The supply store products with the industrial labels are often just homeowner formulas in bigger bottles." She offered to talk on the phone. I called her the next morning. 😳 I want to walk you through what Diane explained because the order matters. Diane had been cleaning houses since 1998. She had started the way I had started, with Bar Keeper's Friend and a Scotch pad and her own raw hands. She had given herself contact dermatitis on her forearms within the first 8 months. She had switched to gloves. She had switched products multiple times. She had tried every commercial cleaner her supply distributor pushed at her, including the ones with warning labels she had been embarrassed to read. In 2009 she had started cleaning for a woman in her 80s who had emigrated from the Dominican Republic in the 1970s and had cleaned houses on the Upper West Side for almost 30 years before she retired. The woman's name was Rosa. Rosa had watched Diane clean her own bathtub during their first visit and had asked her, gently, what she was using. Rosa had told her that the women who cleaned houses on the Upper West Side, the houses with marble and antique brass and porcelain that cost more than the cleaner's annual salary, did not use what Diane was using. They used a category of product that the chemical companies had stopped advertising in the 1950s. The active ingredient was undecylenic acid, a fatty acid derived from castor oil. Before World War 2, it had been the standard antimicrobial cleaning agent in American households. After the war, the petroleum industry replaced it with synthetic detergents because synthetics could be patented and a natural fatty acid could not. The chemical companies put their advertising money into the synthetics and the original molecule quietly disappeared from supermarket shelves. 🫧 It survived in two places. Pharmacy textbooks, where it remained the medical-grade treatment for fungal infections. And the cleaning supplies of professional housekeepers, who had been taught by their mothers and grandmothers to use what actually worked on the surfaces they were paid to maintain. Rosa had told Diane where to order it. Diane had been using it for 15 years. She told me the brand was X-All. She told me I could order it directly from the company. She told me that for my purposes, as a working solo operator with bathtubs in my future, the tablet format was the right choice because I could mix a fresh spray bottle for every job and not worry about a giant jug taking up space in my car. She also told me one thing that mattered more than the product. She said, "The product is half of it. The other half is sequencing. Most new cleaners are using the wrong product AND doing the steps in the wrong order. Fix both and a bathtub is a 25 minute job, not a 2 hour job." 😳 She walked me through her bathtub sequence on the phone. I wrote it down. I want to share it with you because it is the most valuable thing anyone has taught me about cleaning. Diane's bathtub sequence, which I have used for 5 months now and which has changed my business: Step 1. Pre-rinse the tub with hot water to soften the deposits. 30 seconds. Step 2. Spray the X-All solution across the entire tub surface, starting from the top of the wall and working down. The acid penetrates the mineral deposits, the surfactant lifts the soap scum, the oxidizer breaks down the organic residue. All 3 things happen at once. Let it sit. 6 to 8 minutes. Step 3. While the X-All is working on the tub, deep clean the toilet and the sink. Do not stand there watching the spray work. Use the dwell time. This is the part most new cleaners miss. 8 minutes. Step 4. Come back to the tub. Wipe with a microfiber cloth from the top down. The deposits will lift on first wipe in most cases. Stubborn spots get a second spray and a 4 minute dwell. 6 minutes. Step 5. Rinse the tub with hot water. 30 seconds. Step 6. Treat the caulk seams with the X-All spray and a small detail brush. Let it sit while you do the floor. 5 minutes. Step 7. Wipe the caulk seams and any remaining detail areas. Final rinse. 4 minutes. Total bathtub time: 25 minutes including dwell time, during which I am cleaning other parts of the bathroom. My first bathtub had taken me 2 hours and 15 minutes. Diane's sequence took 25 minutes. I have cleaned 47 bathtubs since I started using Diane's system in November. My average bathtub time is now 24 minutes. My hands have stopped cramping. My fingertips have healed. I have not had a single complaint from a client about a bathtub I cleaned. I have raised my rates twice. I am booked solid for 4 weeks out. I want to tell you the cost math because this is the part that matters most for a new cleaning operator. I had been spending about $42 per job on cleaning supplies in my first 2 months. Bar Keeper's Friend, Method spray, Magic Erasers I went through fast, a stiff brush I had to replace every 6 weeks, microfiber cloths, gloves. I am now spending about $14 per job. The X-All tablets cost $19 a box and a box lasts me 5 weeks at my current volume. I still use microfiber cloths and gloves. I have stopped buying Bar Keeper's Friend entirely. I have stopped buying Method. I have stopped buying Magic Erasers. My supply spending has dropped by two thirds and my cleaning quality has gone up. If you do the math on labor savings, the picture gets dramatic. I have saved approximately 90 minutes per bathtub by switching to Diane's system. Across 47 bathtubs that is 70 hours of recovered time. At my current billable rate of $65 an hour, that is $4,550 in recovered labor capacity in 5 months. From a $19 box of tablets. I am writing this because Diane wrote me back on Reddit when I was crying in my car at 5 PM and she gave me the information that made my entire business sustainable. She did not charge me. She did not ask for anything. She told me the rule among working women in this industry is that you pass it down to the next operator because somebody passed it down to you. I am passing it down. 🫶 If you are a new cleaning business owner reading this, and you are dreading bathtubs, and you are using Bar Keeper's Friend and Magic Erasers and your hands hurt and you are wondering if you made a mistake leaving your old job, I want to give you 3 honest things. One. The product is half of it. The other half is sequencing. Switch both and a bathtub becomes a 25 minute job. Two. The total supply cost for a properly equipped solo cleaner is around $14 per job. If you are spending more than that, you are using the wrong category of product. Three. There is a network of working women in this industry who will help you if you ask. Reddit. Local cleaning Facebook groups. Trade associations. Find your Diane. She is out there and she is waiting for you to message her. 👉 X-All is 60% off for new operators right now and stock goes fast. Link is in the post. I texted Diane last week with a photo of a bathtub I had finished in 22 minutes. She replied with a single thumbs up emoji. I am 5 months into this business and I am making more than I made in sales. My hands are healed. I am home for my kids in the afternoons. My husband stopped asking me when I was going to go back to a real job. I cleaned my own bathtub last Sunday in 11 minutes. My husband walked into the bathroom while I was doing it and said, "You make this look easy." I told him it was easy now. It was not easy in October. The product was not the only thing that changed. But the product was the thing that made everything else possible.