Anita Lamb is the founder of Imperial Concierge & Cleaning and the author of The Feminine CEO. In November 2025 she won the Most Promising New Business award at the Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce Business Awards.
How do you start a cleaning business with no money? I can answer that precisely, because I did it. When I registered Imperial Concierge & Cleaning in November 2024, I had no investor, no start-up loan, no savings to speak of and, because my credit was poor, no realistic access to conventional funding at all.
I first started thinking seriously about the business while I was pregnant with my sixth child. My mother was unwell, my husband had lost his job, and we were struggling financially. I often think of the image of a diamond being formed under pressure. There was pressure everywhere in my life at the time, but it also forced something out of me that I did not know was there.
So I started by cleaning. After my baby arrived, I registered the company and reinvested everything the cleaning jobs earned back into the business.
How to Start a Cleaning Business With No Money
The first money came from cleaning work. It paid for the things that make a company credible: registration, public liability insurance, professional memberships and networking. I invested in BNI and the Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce. Those things are expensive when a business is small. You are taking money you could use personally and putting it into something that has not yet proved it will work.
In its first 12 months the business received just under £9,000 in revenue. That is a modest number by corporate standards, but I started from virtually nothing and funded the early development of the company through the work itself.
The most difficult period was at the very beginning. I was pregnant, or had just had my sixth child. My mother was unwell. My husband had lost his job. There was no comfortable cushion behind the business. That is one of the reasons I am proud of what it has become. I was not building because everything around me was stable. I was building because so much around me was unstable.
At the same time, I was writing The Feminine CEO, and the book and the business grew alongside one another. I had reached a point where I had lost confidence in myself. Slowly I began exercising again, taking care of myself and remembering that looking after myself was not selfish. I discovered a different version of myself during that period.
What Years of Care Work Taught Me About Service
Before the business, I worked in care, and it taught me things no course could. I learned how to serve people with compassion and how to preserve somebody’s dignity. When you work inside people’s homes and personal spaces, you quickly learn that every environment tells a story. A house might be untidy because someone is elderly, grieving, unwell, overwhelmed or going through a major transition. People in that position do not need judgement. They need someone to come in and help.
I never want a customer to feel embarrassed because their house is in a particular condition. We are there to relieve pressure and leave people feeling better, not smaller.
The instinct goes back further than care work. When I was young, I lived with my grandparents and shared a bedroom with an older cousin. The room looked clean on the surface, but there were old sewing machines and furniture piled into corners. One day I decided to transform it completely. I moved furniture, removed what did not belong and cleaned places that probably had not been touched for years. I still remember the expression on my grandmother’s face when she saw it. She was so impressed that she asked me to do the same to her bedroom.
I did similar things for my mother, who was a single parent working and studying at the same time. Even as a child, I realised that changing someone’s environment could change how they felt.
People sometimes look down on the cleaning industry. That has never made me hesitate. You can call yourself a CEO, win awards and sit in business meetings, but you are still running a company whose fundamental purpose is service. Sometimes that means cleaning a toilet. I value that, because I never want success to convince me that I am above serving another human being.
Cleaning may be the industry people think about least, but it is one of the industries almost everything else stands on. Think of a hospital, a nursery, a school, a hotel, an office, a construction site. The cleaners may not be the people everybody notices, but remove them and very quickly everybody notices.
The First Client, and the Contract That Changed Things
One of my earliest clients was a village shop. It felt good to be paid, although at that stage I still struggled to see myself as somebody running a company, because I was personally doing the cleaning. In my mind, I thought I would feel like a real business owner when I was sending other people out to do the work.
The bigger psychological moment came when I won an Airbnb contract covering multiple properties. I met the landlord through networking, and that relationship became recurring work. More than a year later, it is still running.
There is something powerful about realising a customer is not only paying you once. They trust your company enough to keep coming back. Recurring income gives a small business breathing room, and it gives you confidence that perhaps you really can build something beyond yourself.
Visibility Before You Feel Established
There is an important difference between not feeling ready and genuinely not being ready. Women can wait far too long because they are waiting for confidence to arrive. Sometimes you have to put yourself forward while still feeling nervous. But visibility creates responsibility. If you tell people you can deliver something your business does not yet have the capacity to deliver, that can cost you your reputation. Confidence and capacity have to grow together.
That is why I entered the Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce Business Awards in 2025, while the business had been operating for less than a year. When they announced the other finalists, I recognised some of the companies and genuinely thought, “There is absolutely no way I am winning this.” I actually started drinking my water, because I had mentally switched off from the possibility. Then they called my name. I almost choked.
That award meant a great deal, because it was external confirmation that something I had been building in very imperfect circumstances was being taken seriously. We were also finalists for Best in Customer Service at the Kent Business Awards, which mattered because customer service is central to the company.
My advice is simple. Do not wait for perfect confidence. Put yourself forward. Just make sure that as your visibility grows, you are also building the systems and capacity to honour the opportunities you are asking for.
Six Children, and No Perfect Balance
I still get the balance wrong. I would never present myself as somebody who has solved this, because life keeps changing. My mother has been unwell and is recovering. I have six children at very different ages with completely different needs, and I am building a company and writing. There will always be another demand.
What helps me is looking at the bigger picture, and simple systems. In our house there is a routine around bathing, dressing, breakfast and getting everybody where they need to be. Sometimes I cook dinner earlier in the day so all I have to do later is heat it. At other times I cook in bulk and freeze meals, because I know there will be days when I cannot cook from scratch. That translates directly into business. You stop trying to solve the same problem from the beginning every single day. You create systems. Children also teach you how to deal with different personalities. Six children do not respond to everything in the same way, and neither do employees, subcontractors, suppliers or clients.
My mother was an extraordinary woman who worked incredibly hard, studied and eventually secured a home for us. I respect what she sacrificed. But as children, what we often wanted most was simply her time. You cannot get time back. So even during busy periods, I try to do small things that tell my children I am here. I hug them. I tell them I love them. I listen to the story that may make absolutely no sense to me, because it matters to them.
I also explain to them why I am working. I tell them they are not outside the reason I am doing this. They are at the centre of it. But I remind myself that if I spend their entire childhood building a future for them and miss the childhood itself, I have missed something irreplaceable. That tension is real, and I will not pretend otherwise.
Where the Business Is Now
Imperial achieved ISO 9001 certification during its first year, and it now works across commercial cleaning, nurseries and schools, short-let and Airbnb properties, after-builders and specialist cleaning, with concierge and personal-assistance services developing alongside. Where capacity allows, we have also provided complimentary cleaning support to vulnerable people who genuinely need help. I work with a growing network of subcontractors and specialist delivery partners rather than describing everybody in that network as direct employees, and the company is expanding across Kent, London and the wider South East, pursuing larger commercial, construction and facilities-management opportunities.
What excites me now is the move from “Anita doing cleaning jobs” into an organisation with systems, partners, recurring customers and the ability to deliver through other people. That transition matters to me more than making the business sound larger than it currently is.
What I Believe Now
Success, for me, means freedom. I do not want to spend my whole life dependent on somebody else deciding whether I get another shift or another opportunity. That does not mean I believe everybody should become an entrepreneur. Somebody may be called to medicine: be an excellent doctor. Someone may be called to care: be an extraordinary carer. Whatever work you do, leave people remembering something good about how you served them.
In The Feminine CEO I write about the eagle. You do not have to respond to every noise around you. People will tell you what you cannot do. They may criticise you, misunderstand you or underestimate you. Not every comment deserves a response. Sometimes your answer is simply to rise higher. I sometimes describe it as learning to “turn your snakes into snacks”: take the things that were supposed to defeat you and allow them to develop something stronger in you.
You do not need perfect circumstances to begin building a meaningful life. Start with what is in your hands, serve people well, keep your character, keep learning, and keep rising.
Anita started with no money and a newborn, and built anyway. To plan the same route, start with our guide to setting up your business today, then read our complete guide to starting a business in the UK. The list of business ideas for UK women will help you find yours. Pressure does not always mean you are being destroyed. Sometimes pressure is where you discover what you are capable of.
