About

House cleaners and maids ask daily about Angela Brown, also known as the house cleaning guru.

For 25 years (1989-2015), Angela Brown owned and operated one of the largest cleaning companies in the Carolinas. She later added a branch in Los Angeles, CA. (2009-2015)

Angela Brown is the founder and CEO of Savvy Cleaner Training for house cleaners and maids. Since 2016, Brown has been training and consulting with cleaning clients in 31 countries and millions in revenue.

Growing Up Angela Brown

Born in Payson, Utah in 1970 and raised in Springville, Angela Brown was born into a large family. She’s the fourth oldest of nineteen children by the same mom and dad. Angela’s Mom, Gail Crookston Brown, was a homemaker. And her Dad, Philip Wells Brown, was a locomotive engineer at Geneva Steel. Both parents took turns homeschooling the family of kids.

Her early years included farming, gardening, and musical performances. She grew up a member of the Latter Day Saints Church and was an active member of 4H.

Growing up, Brown was athletic as a child and involved in gymnastics. As a teenager, she swam with the local swim team. And later became a competitive marathon runner and triathlete.

She attended Alta High School in Sandy, Utah (1987-1988) her senior year and ran competitively on the track team.

After School

After high school, Angela Brown took a job as a live-in nanny raising children for a family in Charlotte, North Carolina. (1988-1989)

When the nanny contract ended, Brown took a job as a barter broker. . She worked with ITEX, A trade and barter organization, from 1989 to 1991.

And one of the requirements of her barter job was to attend Toastmasters International. It was Toastmasters where she learned presenting and public speaking skills. She did not know it then, but she would later use these skills for training cleaning companies.

The ITEX job took her from Charlotte to Asheville, NC where she lived for two years, and then back to Charlotte.

Angela Brown’s Odd Jobs

Back in Charlotte, Angela Brown worked a couple of part-time odd jobs. She delivered newspapers for the Charlotte Observer, as well as pizzas for Domino’s Pizza. And she spent a year waitressing at Harpers Restaurant.) She even tried her hand at MLM selling water and air filters for National Safety Associates (NSA).

While waitressing, a manager at the restaurant was also cleaning houses and hired Angela to work with her. Brown worked for the cleaning company exactly one day and took home one hundred and fifty dollars pay.

At the end of the day, Brown decided that her work ethic did not align with the cleaning company. Yet, she was thrilled that she could earn more in one-day cleaning houses than in one day working her three other jobs.

Angela Brown Discovers Residential Cleaning

Angela Brown started her own cleaning business the following day in Charlotte, NC. And she mastered the art of trial and error over the next twenty-five years as she grew a cleaning empire. (1991-2015).

Cleaning house was a natural fit for Brown, having grown up in a big family with lots of kids. “There was an endless stream of household chores. And Dad inspected our work twice a day, ” Angela laughs. “It was Dad who first used worksheets to make sure we didn’t miss anything. And right before mealtime, he made the rounds. If your jobs didn’t pass, you didn’t eat. And we learned to work together as a team so no one went hungry.”

Angela Brown’s Cleaning Worksheets

Brown created her own worksheets for her cleaning business following the same inspection concept.

It wasn’t long before word got out that there was a new cleaning company in town that cleaned and inspected their work at a reasonable price.

Within three months of starting a cleaning company, Brown had grown a clientele of 116 homes. She was working herself with a small team of four cleaners, and the referrals kept coming.

Coincidentally, word of her worksheets got out as well, and everybody wanted one. Before the internet was a household thing, Brown spent evenings and weekends mailing thousands of copies of her now-infamous cleaning worksheet to families and cleaning companies around the globe.

 

Angela Brown Learns on the Go

From the outside, the company was flourishing, but behind the scenes, Angela Brown had power struggles with the employees and she lacked money management and business skills to thrive. Not being able to work, manage a cleaning team, and go back to school, she took up reading books at night and on the weekends. She listened to cassette albums on business and self-help during the day while cleaning, and the librarians at the Charlotte Public Library became her biggest ally.

At the time, the library had a program where you could ask up to twenty questions a day, and librarians would do the research for you. Brown had a new list of business questions each day and dropped by after work or phoned in, to collect the answers and recommended reading from her self-appointed “business mastermind team.”

The “implementing as you learn” method of business strategy proved successful for Brown and her new cleaning business. Before her first year in business was complete, a cleaning company in Boston, MA, hired her to fly in and train their cleaning team. This was the beginning of a thirty-year-long second business as a cleaning trainer and consultant and what would later be branded by Brown as Savvy Cleaner Training, LLC.

 

Cleaning Companies Hire Angela Brown to Train Their Teams

Angela Brown traveled almost non-stop every weekend to cities across the United States from 1991-1994, training cleaning companies and their staff outside a 500-mile radius of the Charlotte area. She learned what cleaning companies were doing right and wrong and then created cleaning techniques, inventory procedures, and customer management solutions for all-size teams to enhance productivity and profitability.

 

Can The House Cleaning Guru Sell?

Still running her own cleaning company, Angela Brown was out in the field on days when employees got sick or had call-outs, and the weekend training and travel started taking their toll. In the back of the trailer where she lived, Angela had hundreds of water filters from her failed attempt as a door-to-door water filter salesperson. Her cleaning company was working from referrals only, and her training programs were also selling by word-of-mouth – but behind closed doors, the house cleaning guru wondered if the referrals stopped – could she sell?

In late 1993, Angela Brown sought out Jeffrey Gitomer, a local salesman who wrote sales articles for the American City Business Journals. She asked if he could mentor her in sales and marketing around her already chaotic schedule. The goal was to sell all the water and filters in storage and use her newfound skills to pick up new cleaning clients and more seminars.

Gitomer snatched the opportunity to mentor Angela, but instead of selling water filters, he agreed to help if, instead she “practiced selling his seminars to his business journal readers and later fortune 500 clients.” She scaled back her cleaning business and worked with Gitomer for the next two years almost every day, practicing her selling skills. During that time, both of their seminar businesses and her cleaning business exploded. It was also during that time that Angela Brown was introduced to the National Speakers Association and the world of professional speaking.

 

Motivational & Marriage for Angela Brown

Running a cleaning business, training cleaning companies, and selling sales seminars forced Brown into the world of motivation and self-help. It wasn’t long before she crossed paths with InterNET Services Corporation  (ISC), created by Dexter and Birdie Yager of Amway fame, who ran a content creation business with motivational self-help programs, tapes, CDs, and satellite programming out of their sound studios in Fort Mill, SC.

She worked closely with ISC packaging her own seminar content. From 2000-2001 Brown rented their sound studios for a radio show she created called Words of Wellness. It was like a podcast for overwhelmed cleaning business owners.

It was also in Fort Mill, SC, where she met Patrick Oberer at a Chrysler Dodge dealership, and the couple was married at St. Philip Neri Catholic Church the following year. (2002 – Present)

 

Angela Brown and the Psychology of Subtext

By 2007 Angela Brown faced different problems while managing cleaning employees and clients scattered all over the Carolinas. Managing that and the weekend travel and training was getting old fast. YouTube was only a couple of years old, but the writing on the wall pointed at a future that included training online rather than in hotel rooms and tiny cleaning offices.

Brown enrolled in acting for the camera classes at Central Piedmont Community College to learn how the camera, lighting, and acting end of video and film work and also to learn about the subtext of scenes.

 

Angela Brown Auditions for Cleaning Jobs

Brown was heavily influenced by her acting classes and started incorporating camera and acting skills into her cleaning training. Home security cameras were starting to show up in customers’ homes. Brown noticed how one cleaning on camera could mean referrals from customers – or getting fired from the job. Each cleaning job was, in a sense, an audition.

It was using the audition skills from acting that cemented Brown’s selling skills as ‘the queen of the walkthrough’. (Clean job estimates or bids.)

During the summer of 2009, Brown picked up a second residency in Los Angeles, California, started a branch of Life Long Cleaning, and hired acting friends from the workshops and classes she attended at the Groundlings and Edgemar Center for the Arts.

Brown commuted each week between Charlotte, NC, and Los Angeles, CA, from 2009 until 2015. And it was then that a life-altering event upturned her well-oiled travel, training, and cleaning machine.

 

Angela Brown Reinvents Her World

In the summer of 2015, a troubled teen close to the family came to live with Pat and Angela. She required 24/7 care and state mandatory therapy, and that meant making some serious life changes for Angela Brown.

“Cleaning for 25 years in three states is a success in my book,” adds Brown, “maybe it’s time to sell. With a training company that spans the globe in 31 countries, it might be time to do that internet thing.”

In December of 2015, Brown sold Life Long Cleaning. And on January 1st, 2016 she opened Savvy Cleaner Training, an online training program for house cleaners and maids.

 

Ask a House Cleaner

When Angela Brown moved her training company online, it was a monumental task. She had no internet presence except a Facebook account on which she rarely posted. And her cleaning company of 25 years was based on word-of-mouth marketing.  Brown hoped this whole internet thing was a fad that would soon pass — but she was wrong; it did not.

Reinventing herself quite literally meant “inventing herself” online. She opened a Facebook account and started a group for professional house cleaners. Brown published a book: How to Start Your Own House Cleaning Company making the eBook free to everyone, and launched the daily podcast and YouTube show: Ask a House Cleaner.  Savvy Cleaner Training was off to a start.

Erroneously, Brown thought that all online questions would find her through the contact page on her website at Savvy Cleaner. Still, she found instead that cleaning questions started flooding in from Quora, Instagram, and every other conceivable online platform.

 

Savvy Cleaner Training

Over the next few years, Angela Brown rolled out training programs through her online program. The courses range from starting, growing, and managing a cleaning company to cleaning toilets.

Brown, Angela (March 03, 2022) How to Dust Like a Pro. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (October 03, 2021). Why Credentials Matter. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (June 12, 2021) Hiring Right. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (May 19, 2021). Money Mindset.  Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (May 04, 2021). How to Clean a Toilet. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (February 08, 2021). Upsells and Special Projects. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (August 31, 2020) How to Ace a Walkthrough. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (August 30, 2020) Equipment Cleaning and Sanitization. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (June 16, 2020). Sponges, Cloths, and Paper Towels. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (April 21, 2020). Personal Protective Equipment. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (April 12, 2020). Eco Cleaning Supplies. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (February 10, 2020). Worksheets and Checklists. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (November 25, 2020) Maintenance vs. Deep Cleaning. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (November 02, 2019). Pricing Basics. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (October 26, 2019). How to Choose a Territory. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (October 17, 2019). Is Cleaning Right for You?. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (September 20, 2019). Employee Handbook. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (July 20, 2019). Getting Started Basics. Savvy Cleaner Training

Brown, Angela (April 07, 2019). Chemical Safety Training. Savvy Cleaner Training

 

Angela Brown Cleaning YouTube Channel Reaches 250K Subscribers

It took five years after starting the Ask a House Cleaner show on YouTube to reach 250,000 subscribers. “This is an epic moment for us,” laughs Angela Brown, “because it took us 1300 videos to finally get here.” After 180 episodes, Brown hired neighbors to help out with the show in small part-time tasks. The Savvy Cleaner Team edits videos does search engine optimization and helps out with customer service.

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