About the business: Well-Paid Maids, headquartered in Takoma Park, is a home-cleaning company that pays its employees a living wage, currently starting at $22 an hour, plus benefits, 24 paid days off a year and 100% employer-paid commuter costs. Aaron Seyedian, its founder, has also used the business as a platform to advocate for pro-worker policies.
How it started: Before Well-Paid Maids, Seyedian worked at a D.C. consulting firm in the procurement space. But that career wasn’t what brought him to the District. He wasn’t diving into the issues he cares about, that he wanted to address as far back as a teenager. In general, he said, “I now know I wasn’t cut out for traditional white-collar employment.”
“As a consultant, you’re basically a mercenary,” he said. “It wasn’t meaningful to me.”
So he left and launched Well-Paid Maids with maybe $6,000 or $7,000. Why cleaning? It’s a fairly low overhead business to start, for one, and it was a space known for bad working conditions and low wages. Seyedian wanted to “prove there’s another way.”
He started the company in the back half of 2017 with wages at $16 an hour — those have seen an increase every year. Seyedian uses third-party tools to audit whether Well-Paid Maids has, in fact, been a living-wage business.
The pandemic effect: Well-Paid Maids generated $300,000 in revenue in 2018, its first full year, and $600,000 in 2019, Seyedian said. Of course, 2020 would be a different story. On March 13 of that year, the same day a Covid-19 national emergency was declared, Well-Paid Maids shut down. For the safety of his workers, and to get ahead of an inevitable wave of cancellations, Seyedian said he didn’t give his clients a chance to tell him they didn’t want his staff in their homes.
He raised $50,000 for his employees through a Go Fund Me and applied for a Paycheck Protection Program loan — he would receive two, one for $78,900 and the other for about $85,000, both of which have since been forgiven.
The pandemic pivot: The business reopened in September 2020, though his customers and workers remained on-edge in the pre-vaccine era of the pandemic. So Well-Paid Maids established a new policy: the customers must leave their homes during cleanings.
“It did dampen demand, but not as much as you would think,” Seyedian said. “A lot of our regulars did go along with it.”
With the arrival of vaccines, Well-Paid Maids established a vaccine mandate for its staff, which now totals 33, including 28 home cleaners. The out-of-the-house rule has been replaced by masking, and revenue has returned, even improved — from $350,000 with PPP in 2020 to $800,000 with the second PPP loan in 2021 and already $1 million in 2022.
The challenge today: Unlike virtually every other business these days, Seyedian has no problem on the hiring side, for exactly the reason you would think.
“I’ve been reading about it with amusement, and I think it’s because we pay top of market and have full benefits packages,” he said. “There’s always some demand.”
The main challenge for Well-Paid Maids, he said, is “pretty boring,” that is, “the growing pains of going from micro to medium.” Systematizing operations, hiring vendors and growing the back-office staff, just “moving along that continuum.”
What’s next: Well-Paid Maids tried to expand twice in 2019, to Baltimore and Boston, and neither worked. Seyedian just wasn’t able to generate enough demand to keep its staff working full time. Well-Paid Maids costs "significantly more expensive than the competition,” he acknowledged, as much as double the price.
“You’re not just paying for feeling good about how we pay our staff," he said. "You are getting a better service. You can’t overstate how much the ideological pitch of our business matters.”
And in D.C., it has just caught on. Maybe it will, too, in New York City, where Well-Paid Maids opened this past spring with a manager and two cleaners.
“We’re not at break even,” Seyedian said, “but very painfully inching toward it.”