How Home Service Simple competes beyond the clean
Chris Hessler, owner of Home Service Simple, runs a Wichita carpet-cleaning company offering carpet, tile and grout, upholstery, air duct, mattress and area rug cleaning. Hessler discusses how the company wins customers, why it narrowed its services, and how it builds the customer experience from booking through follow-up.
In home services, good delivery is the baseline, so businesses can stand out by making the whole experience work well, from booking and communication to payment and follow-up. Hessler also advises starting with a minimum viable service, then improving it through small steps with real customers.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
The idea was to take what we’d learned working in larger Fortune 100 companies and apply it to the home service sector — and uplift the standard and experience delivered to customers. Big companies obsess over process and customer experience, and we saw a chance to bring that level of professionalism to an industry that needed it. What makes us different is the whole experience, not just the cleaning itself: good delivery is the baseline now, so we compete on booking, en-route communication, delivery, invoicing, and follow-up.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
By introducing ourselves to strangers at every opportunity. The Dillons line was the first one, but it became the pattern — pumping gas, waiting at the grocery store, anywhere people were. We just talked about what we did, and that turned into work. Most new business today comes from online advertising — Meta lead ads and Google search ads that drive quote requests through our website — along with local Facebook groups and Nextdoor.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
Pruning our services down to just a couple of core offerings, and adding a dedicated salesperson and admin. That let us really refine our offer and deliver a higher level of service — it became our competitive advantage. It also let us scale while exceeding our customer experience metrics, because when someone talks to a live agent who knows just a few services inside and out, they get all their answers up front and feel comfortable with the service. The one mistake that taught me the most was ensuring the business owns what third parties create and provide for us. Our first agency set up several automations and phone numbers for us, and when we parted ways they refused to transfer the phone numbers to us. This caused us to have to inform several hundred customers of the change and provide them our new number.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
The service delivery itself hasn’t changed much. What we’re seeing across home services is the adoption of more refined business practices built around the customer experience. Good delivery is now the base expectation, so what separates the winners from the losers is how good your brand is and how well you deliver the whole experience — from booking to communication while you’re en route, all the way through invoicing, payment, and follow-ups. We’ve adapted by building Home Service Simple around exactly that: the full experience, not just the clean.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: get a minimum viable version of your service in front of real customers and iterate from there — keep making small steps forward. Ignore perfection. Don’t chase perfection — chase minimum viable value and iterate. If something doesn’t work, you can pivot quickly. If you’re chasing perfection, you’ll never get anything done, while the people testing and iterating in small steps are making huge gains in their procedures and processes.
Thank you to Chris Hessler and the team at Home Service Simple for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
Want to tell the story behind your business?
Leaders Perception publishes interviews with business owners and leaders every week. Five questions, about ten minutes, no calls. It is free and every completed interview gets published.