In my final semester of university I started a cleaning company in Washington, D.C. with seven hundred dollars. A few months after graduating I moved to Japan, and I ran the company from there for eight years, until it sold in 2024. In all that time I never met a customer. This guide is the order I would do it in if I were starting again tomorrow, with a small budget and no intention of being there.
It is the practical companion to The Remote Local Business, which explains the model. Here you get the steps: what to start, how to set it up from a distance, how to find customers and hire people you may never meet, what to write down, what to hand to an assistant first, and how to prove it works by leaving it alone for a week. Tick the steps off as you go. The page remembers, in this browser only.
The model in one picture
Every local service business has two layers. The delivery layer is local by definition: skilled people, in the city, doing the work. The operating layer is everything wrapped around them, and it is made almost entirely of information: calls, messages, quotes, calendars, checklists and money. Information travels for free.
- The people who do the work, and their supplies
- Access to homes: keys, codes and how you look after them
- A company, insurance and any licences where you work
- Someone local you trust to check a job when it matters
- Phones, texts and email
- Quotes, booking, rescheduling and reminders
- Follow-up, reviews and marketing
- Hiring, payroll, invoices and payments
- Quality checks, from photos and customer replies
That is the whole model. You build the operating layer as if you were far away, whether or not you are. Plenty of people who run their businesses this way live ten minutes from their customers. The distance is optional; building the business so it doesn’t need you in the room is the point.
Two warnings before you start. You will still work on the business every week, just on different things. And it takes time: you do the boring work of making yourself unnecessary first, and you get to be absent afterwards. Owners who want the beach before the systems usually end up with neither.
1Choose practical demand
Pick a service people already buy, often, in every town: cleaning, lawn care, window cleaning, pressure washing, junk removal, gutter cleaning. Boring is good. You want demand you don’t have to create, work that repeats, and customers who search for it on their phones.
Some services suit a remote owner better than others. The best can be priced without a visit, repeat on a schedule, need no special licence for the owner, and can be checked from photos and reviews. House cleaning passes all four. Lawn care repeats beautifully but is seasonal in much of the country. Window cleaning and pressure washing repeat less often, so you need more new customers to fill the same calendar. Junk removal is one-off, but can usually be priced from a few photos.
Name your two favourites and tick each test they pass. Your answers stay in this browser.
| Test | ||
|---|---|---|
| Can be priced without a visit | ||
| Repeats on a schedule | ||
| No special licence for the owner | ||
| Quality shows in photos and reviews | ||
| People already search for it in your city | ||
| Passes | 0 of 5 | 0 of 5 |
Then choose one city. The one you know is the easiest, even if you won’t be living there. Search Google Maps for your service in that city and look hard at the top five companies: how many reviews they have, how recent the reviews are, and what the one- and two-star reviews say. Lots of reviews tells you the demand is real. Recent complaints tell you where the gap is.
Look at the state’s rules before you commit, because they vary more than people expect. Forming an LLC costs anywhere from $35 in Montana to $500 in Massachusetts, and California charges an $800 minimum tax every year.1 States that use the strict “ABC test” for contractors, such as California, Massachusetts and New Jersey, make it harder to build a team of independent contractors.2
2Fix what the industry gets wrong
Read the one- and two-star reviews of the five biggest companies in your city and sort the complaints. In cleaning, nearly all of them fall under three headings: reliability, the hassle of booking, and honesty. Your whole offer can be the fix.
| Customers complain about | Our fix at Think Maids |
|---|---|
| Reliability | Fast replies by phone, email or text (we aimed for three to five minutes), and a written answer for every recurring problem, down to who covers a sick cleaner |
| Booking | Booking, moving or cancelling online without phone tag, and somewhere to leave notes about the dog |
| Honesty | Prices you can see before anyone comes to the door |
Look at the fixes. Every one is a rule for the phones, a setting in the booking software or a decision about the website, and every one of them can be run from anywhere. That is no accident. The problems customers complain about in local services are mostly operating problems, and operating problems can be solved from a desk on the other side of the world.
3Set it up to run from anywhere
You need less than you think, but a business you won’t be standing in needs a few things a local owner can skip. Here is the setup, in the order I would do it.
| What | Why it matters from a distance |
|---|---|
| Company | Usually an LLC. Fees vary by state, as above. US-formed companies no longer file beneficial ownership reports with FinCEN.3 |
| Registered agent | States require one, with a street address in the state, to receive legal papers; a P.O. box or a mail-forwarding address won’t do.4 If you don’t live there, a registered agent service does it for a yearly fee. |
| Tax ID (EIN) | Free from the IRS. Without a US Social Security number you can’t apply online, but applicants outside the US can apply by phone, fax or post with Form SS-4, and don’t need an ITIN first.5 |
| Insurance | General liability at least, and in cleaning a bond as well. For a house cleaner, a typical general liability policy runs to about $51 a month.6 |
| Website | One that books and takes payment, so customers book, move and pay without anyone picking up a phone, at any hour, in any time zone. |
| Booking software | Quotes, scheduling, reminders and invoices in one place your whole team can see. Jobber and Housecall Pro suit most trades; cleaning has its own, such as ZenMaid (a partner of mine) and Automaid. |
| Local number | A business number with the city’s area code, on an app such as Quo or Google Voice, that rings whoever is answering today. To send business texts in the US, the number must be registered; unregistered numbers have been blocked since February 2025.7 |
| Card payments | Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ for an online card payment in the US, and half a percent more when a card is typed in by hand, which is what happens when an assistant takes a card over the phone.8 Take a card when the job is booked, so nobody has to chase a cheque. |
| Google profile | A Google Business Profile, as a service-area business, with your address hidden. Google now usually asks for a short, unbroken phone video showing the business in its area, so plan who will record it; it says its review can take up to five business days.9 |
Keep the startup budget small. The Local Business MBA assumes roughly $1,000 to $1,500, more in high-fee states, and the startup costs guide breaks down where it goes. Spend on the things a customer touches first, not on a logo.
The number that matters more is the monthly one: what it costs to keep the lights on before you have done a single job.
Example figures; change any of them to your own. Nothing you type leaves this page.
If the answer frightens you, start the assistant on fewer hours and grow them with the bookings. If it doesn’t, you are probably underestimating something. Either way you now know the first number to beat.
4Find customers where they already look
Be findable where people search: Google first, then one or two lead marketplaces. In our early years Thumbtack was one of the best channels we had, alongside Google. The platforms have changed a great deal since. Google’s Local Services Ads now carry a single “Google Verified” badge, which replaced the old Guaranteed badge in October 2025, and are moving into Google Ads during 2026.10 Test rather than copy: what works in one city can do nothing in the next.
Treat the first job as marketing. We discounted the first clean, gave a smaller discount on the next couple, and followed up properly afterwards, because a customer is only worth having if they stay. Be willing to break even, or lose a little, on the first one to three jobs. The regulars pay for everything else. And keep following up with old leads: we were still in touch with some two years after they first enquired. People who don’t book today still have houses tomorrow.
Ask every customer for a review after every job, the same way, with no reward attached. In 2026 almost everyone reads them: in BrightLocal’s survey of US consumers, 97% read reviews when choosing a local business, and three in four pay attention only to reviews from the last three months.11 The rules have tightened, too. The FTC bans fake reviews and rewards for good ones, and since April 2026 Google has banned review quotas for staff and asking customers to name an employee.12
For a remote owner that finding is the whole game. Speed is your cheapest advantage, and from a distance speed is a staffing decision: somebody has to be on the phone during your customers’ day, which is step seven. Plenty of businesses still miss them: in Invoca’s 2026 benchmark of calls to home-service companies, mostly larger firms with big marketing budgets, only 52% of callers spoke to a person.14
5Hire people you may never meet
The people who do the work are the business. Hire for reliability and warmth, and build the process so that it works without you in the room. This is the order I would use.
- Post the job
Pay, area, hours, and what a great hire looks like. A growing number of states and cities require a pay range in the advert; about fourteen states and Washington, D.C. had pay-transparency laws in 2026.15
- Let the form do the first sort
A short application with a few deal-breaker questions: transport, the hours you need, experience. Applicants weed themselves out, and you only talk to people who could do the job.
- A short video call
Ten or fifteen minutes. You are listening for warmth, reliability, and how they talk about past jobs and past bosses.
- References and a background check
In the US, with a standalone written disclosure and the person’s written consent before you order the check, as the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires.16 A basic database check from Checkr or GoodHire costs $29.99, but it doesn’t search county court records; for people going into customers’ homes, pay for the level that does.17
- A paid trial job
Alongside your best person or a local lead, who tells you honestly how it went.
- Start with the checklist
Every job has a written checklist, and every job ends with photos. That is how you will see the work you can’t see.
Many remote operators begin with independent contractors; employees can make more sense later, as you grow. The rules are in flux. In the US the Department of Labor proposed a new contractor test in February 2026, and the ABC-test states are stricter whatever happens federally.2 From 2026 you only file a Form 1099-NEC for a contractor you pay $2,000 or more in a year.18 Take local advice before you decide, and get a W-9, a written agreement and proof of insurance from every contractor before their first job.
However you hire, have more than one person you can call. A single cleaner is Halloween waiting to happen.
Seeing quality you can’t see
| Signal | How it works |
|---|---|
| Photos | Taken at the end of every job, against the checklist, and stored with the booking |
| A text | After the job, one question to the customer: how did it go? Every reply is logged, good or bad |
| Reviews | Read every week, and replied to, all of them |
| A local lead | Your most trusted person checks new hires’ first jobs and anything a customer flags |
| Complaints | Counted, with what each one was about, so a pattern shows up before it costs you a customer |
6Write the company down
For two weeks, every time you do something, write down what you did and what you said. Then sort it into marketing, sales and operations. That rough document is the beginning of your operating manual, and it is enough. The rule afterwards is simple: if a question reaches you twice, the answer becomes a page.
When: what triggers it, and how often.
How we do it: the steps, in order, with an example.
Done means: what finished looks like.
Decide alone when: the usual cases.
Come to me when: the few that are still yours.
For a remote business, these are the first ten pages I would write, roughly in this order:
| Page | Answers the question |
|---|---|
| Answering the phone | What do we say, and what do we ask, from hello to a booked job? |
| Pricing and quotes | How do we price a job we haven’t seen? |
| Moving and cancelling | What do we allow, and what does it cost the customer? |
| A no-show | Someone calls in sick at 7am. Who covers, and what do we tell the customer? |
| Complaints and refunds | What can the assistant offer without asking anyone? |
| Keys and access | Where are keys and codes kept, who can see them, and what happens if one is lost? |
| The job checklist | What does finished look like, room by room or task by task? |
| Hiring | From the job post to someone’s first paid job. |
| Paying the team | When, how, and what happens if a job runs over? |
| The weekly numbers | Which five numbers, worked out how, and sent to whom? |
The 80/20 of Systems & Delegation takes this much further: how to organise the pages, what to automate, and how to hand each one over.
7Hand over the phones and the schedule
These are the two jobs that break first and matter most, so they are the first to give away. A virtual assistant, trained from your pages, can answer enquiries, book and move jobs, chase payments and handle the everyday problems. I used to describe one as an out-of-office office manager: someone who does the office work of a local business, online, for the hours the business actually needs.
Hand things over in this order, one at a time, and only move on when the last one runs without you:
- FirstBooking and scheduling
The phones, the inbox and the calendar. The loudest work goes first, because it is the work that interrupts everything else.
- ThenCustomer follow-up
Leads that didn’t book, first-time customers who could become regulars, and the review request after every job.
- ThenDaily admin
Invoices, failed payments, reminders, and keeping the schedule and the team in step.
- ThenThe process parts of hiring
Posting, screening and booking interviews. The final decision on who joins stays with you until someone has earned it.
Every handover is a page plus a boundary: here is how we do it, here is when you decide alone, and here is when you come to me. Hire for warmth and train with pages; we could teach anyone our software and our scripts, but we could never teach someone to enjoy people. And listen to how your assistant speaks to customers and to the cleaners, not only to you. Why I Built a Staffing Agency has more on what we learned placing assistants in other owners’ businesses.
Where assistants come from
- Screened and often trained already
- Someone else covers a sick day
- One invoice; the agency handles the paperwork
- You find, test and train them yourself
- Cover is your problem, so hire two
- You handle contracts and payments abroad
If you hire in the Philippines, job adverts there give a sense of local pay: Indeed’s average for a virtual assistant was ₱27,472 a month in September 2026, about $440, and JobStreet’s guide puts it at ₱16,000 to ₱25,000. Metro Manila’s legal minimum wage rose to ₱755 a day on 26 September 2026, though it covers employees of Manila businesses rather than home-based contractors.19 What you pay depends on the route: an agency charges for screening, training and cover, and a direct hire is a negotiation in which good people have choices. Pay well enough to keep them. Your customers will get to know them by name.
Covering your customers’ day
The Philippines doesn’t change its clocks, so Manila is twelve hours ahead of US Eastern time from March to November and thirteen hours ahead in winter.20 An assistant there who covers your customers’ day works through the night. Philippine law gives employees at least 10% extra for hours worked between 10pm and 6am;21 a contractor isn’t covered by it, but it is a fair thing to match.
| Your customers are on | March to November | November to March |
|---|---|---|
| Eastern time | 8pm to 6am | 9pm to 7am |
| Central time | 9pm to 7am | 10pm to 8am |
| Mountain time | 10pm to 8am | 11pm to 9am |
| Pacific time | 11pm to 9am | Midnight to 10am |
Paying someone abroad is simpler than people expect. If your assistant isn’t a US citizen or resident and does all the work outside the US, they give you a Form W-8BEN instead of a W-9. You keep it on file, it stays valid until the end of the third calendar year after it is signed, and you don’t file a 1099 for them.22 A US citizen living abroad is different: they give you a W-9 as usual. On their side, Philippine law gives employees extras such as a thirteenth-month payment each December. Genuine contractors fall outside it, but a full-time assistant who works set hours under your direction could be argued to be an employee, so take Philippine advice before you write the contract.21
If you want the whole method, from the job description to the first ninety days, the VA course is the complete hiring-and-training system for assistants, sold separately from the MBA.
8Watch a few numbers, then take a week away
You can’t walk the floor, so the numbers become the floor. A remote owner who watches five numbers every week knows the business better than an owner on site who watches the door.
| Every week | How to work it out, and what it tells you |
|---|---|
| Bookings | Counted. Whether the business is growing |
| Recurring share | Customers on a recurring schedule ÷ all active customers. How predictable next month is |
| Booking rate | Bookings ÷ enquiries. How well the phones are answered |
| Cost per customer | Marketing spend ÷ new customers. Which channels deserve the money |
| Complaints | Counted, with what each one was about. Which page to write next |
Then do the test that matters: take a week away, genuinely unreachable except for emergencies, and see what happens. The first time I did it, I came back to no fires. If you come back to a few, you now know exactly which pages to write next.
- Two weeks beforeTell everyone, and write the list
Tell the team the dates. Write down the few things that still count as an emergency, and who decides whether something is one.
- The week beforeOne channel for emergencies
A single number or chat that reaches you. Everything else waits, and the team knows it will.
- The week itselfActually go
Don’t check the inbox, and don’t ask how it is going. The point is to find out what happens without you.
- When you get backOne page for every fire
List everything that went wrong or waited for you, and write or fix a page for each. Then book the next week away, three months out.
It is also what a business is worth. John Warrillow’s Value Builder System, drawing on data from more than 80,000 business owners, found that companies able to run without their owner for at least three months were twice as likely to receive an acquisition offer above six times EBITDA, a standard measure of yearly profit.23 When Think Maids sold in 2024, and Inova Local was acquired in 2025, each sale answered the same question: whether what we had built had value without me attached. It did.
The mistakes I see most
Leaving before the pages exist. The business learns it can’t cope without you, and you come home to prove it right.
One cleaner, one assistant, one person who knows the codes. A single person is a single point of failure.
Hiring an assistant and explaining the job out loud. When it goes wrong, the conclusion is “nobody can do it like me”.
Handing over the task but keeping the worry. Agree the numbers and the boundaries, then stop looking.
The cheapest assistant who is short with customers costs more than any wage. Hire for warmth.
No weekly numbers. From a distance, a feeling is a rumour about your own business.
Questions people ask
Can you really run a local business from another country?
Yes. I ran a Washington, D.C. cleaning company from Japan for eight years, and it grew into a national one. What you can’t do is skip the work of making yourself unnecessary first. Check the rules where you live as well as where the business is: your visa, and where you pay tax, are questions for a professional in your own country.
Do I need to visit the city?
I didn’t, once. It helps to have someone local you trust: a team lead who can check a new hire’s first jobs, look at a problem a customer has flagged, and record the short video Google may ask for to verify your profile.
Which services work best remotely?
The ones that pass the five tests in step one: priced without a visit, repeating on a schedule, no special licence for the owner, quality you can see in photos and reviews, and real search demand. House cleaning passes all five. Trades that need a licensed person to quote or sign off work, such as electrical work, are harder.
What does a virtual assistant cost?
It depends on the route. Philippine job adverts put a virtual assistant’s local pay at roughly ₱16,000 to ₱27,500 a month in 2026, about $255 to $440. An agency costs more, because it screens, trains and covers sick days; a direct hire is a negotiation, and good people have choices. Start with the hours you need rather than a full-time hire, and see step seven for paying someone abroad.
Contractors or employees?
It depends on the state, and the rules are changing. Many remote operators start with independent contractors and move to employees as they grow. Take local advice before you decide, and see step five for the US position in 2026.
How do I check quality without being there?
Photos at the end of every job, a one-question text to the customer afterwards, every review read and answered, a local lead for spot checks, and every complaint counted by type. The table in step five has the detail.
What happens when something goes wrong at 3am my time?
The same thing that happens when an owner is asleep in the same city: the person on duty follows the page for it. Write the no-show page and the emergency list before you need them, and make sure there are always two people who can act.
Is this passive income?
No. You will still work on it every week: the numbers, the pages, the people, and the decisions that are still yours. What changes is that the business stops needing you in the room.
How much does it cost to start?
I would set aside $1,000 to $1,500, more in states with high fees, plus the monthly costs from step three. The startup costs guide has the breakdown, and the 30-day plan has the whole launch, one task a day.
None of it is glamorous, and all of it compounds. The distance comes last. The systems that make it possible come first, and they are worth having even if you never leave.
- ZenBusiness, LLC filing fees by state, 2026; California Franchise Tax Board, Publication 3556 (the $800 minimum franchise tax). zenbusiness.com/state-fees
- US Department of Labor, proposed rule on employee or independent contractor status, 26 February 2026; Morgan Lewis, “US Department of Labor rolls back Biden-era FLSA practices”, July 2025. dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20260226
- FinCEN, Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Requirement Revision, Federal Register, 26 March 2025. federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/26/2025-05199
- Delaware Division of Corporations, “FAQs regarding registered agents”; Wyoming Secretary of State, registered agent FAQs (no post office boxes, virtual addresses or mail-forwarding locations). corp.delaware.gov/faqs-regarding-registered-agents
- Internal Revenue Service, “Get an employer identification number” and Instructions for Form SS-4 (December 2025); Internal Revenue Manual 21.7.13 (foreign individuals don’t need an ITIN to get an EIN). irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/get-an-employer-identification-number
- Insureon, “How much does house cleaning insurance cost?”, 2026 (median for Insureon customers). insureon.com/cleaning-business-insurance/house-cleaners/cost
- Twilio, “U.S. A2P 10DLC: full blocking of traffic sent from unregistered numbers”, effective 1 February 2025. twilio.com/en-us/changelog
- Stripe, “Pricing”, October 2026 (2.9% + 30¢ for domestic cards online; 0.5% more for cards entered by hand). stripe.com/pricing
- Google Business Profile Help, “Verify your business with a video”. support.google.com/business/answer/14271705
- Google Local Services Help, “Google Verified” badge (from 20 October 2025); Search Engine Land on Local Services Ads moving into Google Ads, 2026. support.google.com/localservices/answer/16498018
- BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, February 2026. brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey
- Federal Trade Commission, Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), in force from 21 October 2024; PPC Land, “Google tightens Maps review policy: staff names and quotas now banned”, April 2026. ppc.land/google-tightens-maps-review-policy-staff-names-and-quotas-now-banned
- Oldroyd, J. B., McElheran, K. and Elkington, D. (2011). The short life of online sales leads. Harvard Business Review, March 2011. hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads
- Invoca, Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report 2026, July 2026 (calls tracked on Invoca’s platform). invoca.com/reports
- National Law Review, “Several states enact pay transparency laws: what employers need to know for 2026”, 2026. natlawreview.com
- SHRM, “FCRA 101: how to avoid risky background checks”. shrm.org
- Published pricing, October 2026: Checkr Basic+ and GoodHire Basic, $29.99 a report, database searches only.
- RSM, “IRS updates: new reporting thresholds” (the $2,000 Form 1099-NEC threshold from 2026). rsmus.com
- Indeed Philippines, virtual assistant salaries, updated 13 September 2026 (ph.indeed.com); JobStreet Philippines, virtual assistant salary guide, October 2026 (ph.jobstreet.com); Philstar, “P60 wage hike for Metro Manila minimum wage earners takes effect”, 26 September 2026 (philstar.com). Pesos converted at about ₱62.75 to the dollar.
- PAGASA, “Philippine Standard Time” (eight hours ahead of UTC); NIST, daylight saving time in the US (8 March to 1 November in 2026). nist.gov
- Labor Code of the Philippines, Article 86 (night shift differential); Department of Labor and Employment, Bureau of Working Conditions, FAQs on 13th Month Pay, 2024 (under Presidential Decree 851). bwc.dole.gov.ph
- Internal Revenue Service, “Withholding and reporting obligations” (foreign persons who provide a Form W-8BEN are exempt from Form 1099 reporting) and Instructions for Form W-8BEN (how long a form stays valid). irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/withholding-and-reporting-obligations
- Value Builder System. How to double your chances of a premium acquisition offer. An article distributed through Value Builder’s certified advisers, citing Value Builder Analytics data on more than 80,000 business owners. One copy, at solutions-intl.com. On owner dependence generally: Warrillow, J., “One critical business lesson from LeBron James”, Built to Sell. builttosell.com