Time For You is cleaning up thanks to Freddie Rayner’s leadership

If you ask Freddie Rayner about the secret to the success of his domestic-cleaning franchise Time For You, he’ll tell you that it’s really simple. “Dirt is dirt,” he says. “You don’t have Asian, Australian or American dirt. And wherever there’s dirt you can bet that someone will pay you to remove it.” This knowledge has certainly stood him in good stead, with the company today reaching far beyond the borders of Blighty.

However, while the business today has a sparkle to it, the company’s beginnings were more gloomy, springing from a painful experience Rayner had while working as a door-to-door cleaner two decades ago. “One day my wife had a cardiac arrest and was taken to the hospital,” he says. “The doctors told me she wouldn’t make it through the night.” Fortunately, she survived but was left unable to work for a long time. Desperate to earn more money, Rayner changed his business model to commercial cleaning. But doing this left him facing one of the most common woes of British SMEs: late payments. “I spent most of my time running around chasing money that I’d already worked for,” he says.

A true low point came when a” company that owed him £8,000 suddenly went belly up. “I was running backwards, felt really disappointed and ended up having a pity party by myself,” Rayner says. “A few days later I’d sobered up and wondered what I could possibly do to improve my situation.” The answer was to launch his domestic-cleaning business, initially named Maid For You. The important difference between it and his old company was that he would only clean people’s houses if they’d paid in advance. “That way they couldn’t run away from me,” Rayner says. “And to my astonishment it worked again and again and again.”

In fact, the concept proved so successful that he eventually found himself cleaning all over Britain. “I was everywhere: from Oxford to Cambridge, from Birmingham to Luton,” he says. “I was being run ragged when my wife suddenly asked: ‘why don’t you just franchise?'” Agreeing to try it out, he paid a franchise consultant £10,000 to guide them through the process. “I thought that would be the last I’d see of that money but he came back and told us to change the name because Maid For You sounded old-fashioned,” Rayner says. “So we changed it to Time For You overnight and wrote in to several papers and franchise magazines. It proved to be an enormous success.”

With the publicity surrounding the launch of the franchise in 2002 giving it a special shine, the franchisor found finding franchisees fantastically easy. “But we started out really slowly,” he says. Recognising that franchisees were taking just as big a risk betting on him as he was trusting them with his business, he initially sold the first franchise for just £50. “And a few weeks later, when they proved successful, we raised it to £4,000 and then a month later to £8,000,” Rayner says. “A year later it went up to £11,000 and five years later to £15,000.”

While it’s been 15 years since the franchise started, the qualities of successful Time For You franchisees have remained the same. “We look for people with the ability and will to change their own lives,” he says. Essentially, he’s searching for people who’ll do everything it takes to change their situation. “They have to prove that they will put in the effort to make it work and if they can then we’ll do everything we can to support them,” he says.