Action Academy | Millionaire Mentorship For Your Life & Business · Brian Luebben

From $114K in Debt to a $2.8M Cleaning Empire (Without Cleaning a Single House!) w/ Anthony & Jhanilka Hartzog

December 16, 2025·43 min·3 clips

How did a couple from Brooklyn projects build a $2.8M cleaning empire without cleaning a single house?

2016 and 2017 were the start line they keep coming back to. The guests describe growing up in Brooklyn housing projects, without trust fund money or easy corporate millions, then building from scratch. The business is now in Dallas, Texas. Their cleaning company has been running for seven and a half years, with about 2.8 million done and more coming in. The host keeps the pace up. He frames the win, asks for the chapters, then gets straight to the mistakes that forced better systems. Hiring was the first big mess. Early on, they trusted people too fast and sent cleaners out before using the checks they rely on now. Today the process is tighter. Out of a hundred candidates, they expect to hire only one or two after ads, interviews, Zoom calls, confirmations, checks, insurance, and a trial job. That is the business lesson hiding in the story. Scale sounds less like magic here and more like turning painful judgment calls into filters. Clients taught the other hard lesson. All money is not good money, especially when debt makes every booking feel urgent. Some red flags showed up before the job, but they tried to make bad-fit clients work anyway. Those calls burned them. Now they say no faster. The episode keeps tying that maturity back to debt pressure and starting before everything feels safe. The closing advice stays practical: talk about the idea, share it, post it, and see where it goes.

As heard by us

A practical business story about debt, discipline, and learning to turn down bad clients.

Anthony and Jhanilka Hartzog's Dallas cleaning company becomes a practical case study in building under pressure. The story stays tied to the work itself: they started while trying to get out of debt, reached about $2.8 million, and learned that hiring, client selection, and…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a founder story with debt, systems, and real numbers, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Action Academy | Millionaire Mentorship For Your Life & Business