There is an episode of The Bear that explains almost everything I believe about this work. It is about a guy polishing forks.
If you have seen The Bear, you know the fork episode. Richie, who is rough around the edges and spends most of the show with a chip on his shoulder, gets sent to a high-end restaurant to polish forks for a week. He shows up at 6am every day, hating every second of it, grumbling the whole time. And at the end of the week he walks back into his own restaurant in a suit and says, basically, “What? I wear suits now.”
Here is what makes that scene land. The suit did not change him. He wore the suit because he had already changed. Somewhere in that week of polishing forks, he understood that the small stuff matters, that how he carries himself matters, that the forks matter.
Nobody notices the polished fork. That is the point.
Think about it. When you sit down at a beautiful restaurant, you do not look at your fork and think, “Wow, beautifully polished, this must be a five-star place.” Nobody consciously clocks a clean fork.
But flip it around. If they hand you a fork straight out of the dishwasher, spotted with water marks, you probably will not say “this fork is dirty” out loud either. You will just quietly feel that something is off. You will start noticing the other cracks. The magic breaks, and you cannot always say why.
That is cleaning. That is the entire job.
“It’s just cleaning” is a lie we let people tell us
You hear it constantly. It’s just cleaning. It’s just serving. It’s just this, just that.
No. What we do is important and necessary. It may be a luxury service, but it is a real one, and we are genuinely changing how people get to live in their own homes. On top of that, our technicians are skilled. They train. They earn certifications. They do ongoing education. This is a skilled trade, and it is past time we talked about it like one.
So here is the question I keep coming back to. Are your people showing up in a suit?
What “wearing the suit” actually looks like
I do not mean literally, although I will admit that would be a fun branding idea if I ever land on a name for it.
I mean, are they scrubbing that baseboard a little harder? Wiping the base of the toilet a little better, so there is not a single hair left behind? Those small touches nobody was ever going to inspect are exactly the ones that separate a real clean from a rushed one. Same as the fork.
And it starts before they ever touch a surface. Are they in a crisp, clean uniform, or are they wrinkled and covered in pet hair like they rolled out of bed? Is their kit organized and clean, or are they hauling a messy, dirty bag into someone’s home? Because a client clocks that instantly. Walk in with a disaster of a bag and the thought is right there on their face: you are the cleaner? How are you going to clean my house if you cannot keep your own kit straight?
Wearing the suit means suiting up for the job you actually have, which is a skilled professional doing a craft, not “just a cleaner.”
That starts with how we treat them
You cannot ask someone to wear the suit while you treat them like they are disposable. If your posture is “if this one does not work out, I will just replace them, there is another right behind them,” they feel it, and they will never give you the pride you are asking for.
Here is what I know after years of this. We can teach almost anyone to be a good cleaner. We cannot teach character, and we cannot teach work ethic. This is hard physical work, it is a lot to hold in your head, and it takes a real toll on the body. The people who do it well and do it with pride are not disposable. They are the whole business.
So, some real questions. How does your team show up? How do you show up for your team? And how hard are you actually pushing them to polish the forks, to do the finer things that make a client feel that five-star difference they cannot quite name?
Owning the room
The reason I love that scene is that Richie does not just put on the suit. He owns it. He walks in and owns exactly who he decided to become. That is what I want for every person on a cleaning team. Not a uniform they tolerate, but an identity they own.
That identity is the whole point of the training I am building, the STEP Method. A mentor trains an apprentice into a certified technician, so that when they walk into a home, they feel like they showed up in the suit. A force to be reckoned with, not “just a cleaner.” If that is the team you want, get on the waitlist.
Click here to be added to the waitlist.
If you’d like to see the section of “The Bear” that I am referencing, click here or see below.