At 22, she put $2,000 into a course — her cleaning company now does $1.4 million a year
3 min read · RealCase summary
Stephanie Pipkin grew up in rural western Wisconsin, graduated in a 44-person class at Melrose-Mindoro High School, and earned an associate's degree in marketing at Western Technical College while waitressing to pay tuition. After a stint as a credit union teller and three years managing her parents' manufacturing office, she relocated to Black River Falls for better income and, in February 2019, put $2,000 into Melissa Maker's "The Decision Makers" course, calling it transformative.
She launched her cleaning business on April 1, 2019, initially asking herself, "Why not clean houses on nights and weekends?" -- though that approach struggled to land clients at first. Her first hire, in June 2019, ghosted before finishing training. When COVID hit, she pivoted toward commercial accounts and used PPP funding to keep going; a Fort McCoy contract running from August 2021 to February 2022 alone generated just over $1 million.
By age 28 -- about 5.5 years after launch -- her business was running 170-180 appointments a week across Black River Falls, Sparta, and La Crosse, with a complaint rate under 1%, a four-person management team covering HR, payroll, customer relations, and field development, and annual revenue over $1.4 million.
Key takeaways
- ›Invested $2,000 — described as 'a huge amount of money' for her at the time — into a business course before launching
- ›Launched Black River Falls Cleaning Services in April 2019 at age 22 and hired her first employee two months later
- ›Landed a six-month Fort McCoy military-base contract worth just over $1 million, and grew the company to $1.4 million in annual revenue with 170–180 weekly appointments
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