Molly Maid has spent four decades on one plain job, cleaning houses
Since arriving in Ann Arbor from Canada in 1984, the cleaning franchise has been shaped by the people who own its local offices and a charity for domestic violence victims.
Ann Arbor, MI
In Little Rock, Arkansas, one Molly Maid cleaner took a hotel habit further. Hotel maids usually fold the end of the toilet paper into a triangle. She folded her customers’ rolls into flower blossoms. Michael Silva-Nash, who owned the Molly Maid franchise in Little Rock, and his managers singled her out at one of their monthly staff meetings and asked her to show everyone how she did it. The blossoms became a standard touch for the franchise’s customers there, the corporate-culture speaker Larry Johnson wrote on his blog after interviewing Silva-Nash.
It is a small thing, and it suits a company that has never pretended to be complicated. “I always tell people that Molly Maid is a simple business: We clean houses,” David McKinnon, the entrepreneur who brought the brand to the United States, said in remarks the company quotes in the history on its website.
That business has been cleaning American homes since 1984, when McKinnon opened in a Michigan college town. It grew into a national network of franchises, each one independently owned and operated. The company’s story is easiest to read in those local owners and the crews they keep, and in a charity the company started for victims of domestic violence.
Molly Maid began in Mississauga, Ontario, in 1979 and started franchising that same year, according to Franchise Chatter, a site that analyzes franchise disclosure documents. The brand spread across Canada. In 1984 McKinnon brought it to Ann Arbor. The company’s history says he meant it for busy American homeowners who wanted dependable, affordable help with dirty houses. Residents of the university town took to the service, and it soon reached other states. The same year, Pam Bader, a former nursery school teacher and boutique owner, set up Molly Maid in Britain. McKinnon was inducted into the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 2013.
The basic method traveled. In 2009 the British newspaper the Mirror reported that Molly Maid franchises, wherever they operated, charged by the clean rather than by the hour. In Britain, staff visited a home first, sized up the job and estimated the time and charge, then talked with the customer about how often to come back. Nobody had to sign a contract, and the maids wore uniforms.
Bader explained the demand in terms anyone with a job and a dirty kitchen would recognize. “We are finding that there are more households where both partners are at work,” she told the Mirror in 2009. “They’ve no time to do the cleaning so they are turning to Molly Maid because it’s a brand they know and trust.” She also liked what the system offered owners. “One of the key advantages of Molly Maid is that it allows people without formal qualifications or experience to run their own business from home,” she told the paper.
In the United States, some owners stayed for decades. Harry and Emelie Young have owned the Molly Maid franchise in the greater Austin, Texas, area since 1995, according to a 2013 profile on the Stories of Entrepreneurs blog. For the first nine years Emelie ran the business day to day. For six of those years Harry spent his Friday afternoons tallying the books and handling payroll while he served as chief executive of a defense technology company. In 2000 the Youngs hired Nellie Salinas to oversee finance and administration, and she later became a part owner. The office staff met every morning to go over the previous day, a habit Harry tied to W. Edwards Deming’s idea of continual improvement. For their first 15 years, they ran the whole operation out of 1,350 square feet. By his own account, his closest thing to a hobby was visiting other Molly Maid owners and helping them avoid the mistakes he had made.
The head office in Ann Arbor had a local story of its own. Meg Roberts grew up down the street from the company. She built an advertising career in Chicago, decided it did not leave room for the family and social life she wanted, and moved home. Molly Maid hired her as director of marketing in 2007 and named her president in 2012. By 2013 the brand had more than 450 U.S. locations.
Roberts called the promotion “quite the leap from my role as Vice President of Marketing to President of a brand who has been around for nearly 30 years” in a 2013 Q&A published by HuffPost. The franchise owners she worked with came from all over. “It’s been exciting to help people transition from working in a corporate environment, serving in the military or even those who have already retired into owning their own businesses,” she told HuffPost.
The cleaners were harder to keep. In 2016, Roberts said Molly Maid franchises tended to lose new employees within their first four to eight weeks, Franchise Chatter reported. That year the company began testing a rewards-based mobile app for employees at 10 locations. Cleaners could earn rewards for watching short safety videos and leave positive comments for co-workers who did good work.
Molly Maid is part of Neighborly, a group of franchised home-service brands that runs from plumbing to appliance repair. Each Molly Maid location is still independently owned and operated.
In 1996 the company’s founders set up the Ms. Molly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that supports victims of domestic violence. Its aim was to raise awareness and to help local shelters and agencies in the towns where Molly Maid franchises work.
The foundation runs through the franchises. Each year, during National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, local offices hold the Ms. Molly Making a Difference Drive. In 2016, Franchise Chatter reported, owners collected money and personal care items for community shelters and gave a portion of every house cleaning that month to the drive. A shelter that wants a foundation grant has to partner with its local Molly Maid business and apply each year. Most of those partnerships include a donation, and some add volunteering or collecting items from a shelter’s wish list.
The foundation’s board gives an annual award to the franchise that best carries out that work. The first went to the Molly Maid in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1997. Later winners included Molly Maid of Mahoning/Trumbull Co., which supported Someplace Safe in Warren, Ohio, and Sojourner House in Mineral Ridge, Ohio, and Molly Maid of Chesterton & Hobart, which supported The Caring Place in Valparaiso, Indiana.
By 2018 the foundation had raised more than $2.8 million for more than 120 shelters, safe houses and domestic violence agencies, according to the company. About 80 percent of Molly Maid’s franchise offices raised money and collected personal care items for local agencies. That year the International Franchise Association’s foundation honored Molly Maid with its Enduring Impact Award at a dinner in Washington, D.C. In 2021 the foundation marked its 25th anniversary at its booth during the company’s annual reunion.
Back in Little Rock, Silva-Nash’s rules for his crews were as concrete as the folded toilet paper. Crews of two to four cleaners came by the office to check in at the end of each day, and someone from management was always there to greet them, Johnson wrote. Worn brooms and mops were replaced right away. Clean rags were always on hand, and so were the cleaning chemicals. Some jobs ran late into the evening. When that happened, a manager brought pizza out to the house and stayed with the crew until the work was done, even if it was midnight.