08/22/2026
The Day I Almost Blamed My Cleaner for Something She Didn’t Do
Business owners, I learned something this week that I wish I had learned much earlier.
Don’t be so quick to blame your employees just because a customer says something went wrong.
I learned this one the hard way.
One of my customers reached out to me this week and said:
“The house needs to be redone. It’s dirty.”
My heart dropped.
Because one of the systems I’ve put in place at Jomaleks Cleaning Services is that we inspect every job after cleaning before we hand it back to the customer.
I had personally been to this house.
I had inspected it.
So my first thought was:
“Wait… is this the same house I inspected?”
The customer told me a new tenant was moving in the next day and asked if we could come back that evening.
I said yes.
Then I called the cleaner who had worked on the house.
I said, “Can you meet me at the property at 7:30?”
She immediately asked, “Why?”
I explained what the customer had said.
And she responded:
“But the house was clean. I made all the corrections you asked me to make.”
At that moment, I’ll be honest…
I was confused.
Part of me was already thinking, “Did my employee really do what she was supposed to do?”
And that thought bothered me because I had personally inspected the property.
We met at the house that evening.
The customer couldn’t make it because she wasn’t feeling well, so I called her when we arrived.
And that’s when everything changed.
I looked around the house and realized something.
The house was dirty because someone had come in AFTER we cleaned it.
A contractor had been working inside the property, doing renovations and other work.
And they had left behind a mess.
The cleaning my team had done wasn’t the problem.
The timeline was.
The customer’s assistant had simply passed along the message without explaining that contractors had worked in the house afterward.
The customer apologized and explained what had happened.
And honestly?
I felt terrible.
Because for a moment, I had questioned my cleaner.
I had almost put the blame on someone who had actually done exactly what I had asked her to do.
That experience taught me a lesson I won’t forget.
Customers deserve to be heard.
Absolutely.
But your employees deserve to be heard too.
As business owners, we sometimes hear:
“Your employee did this.”
And immediately our minds go to:
“I’m going to deal with my employee.”
But before we do that, we need to ask:
What actually happened?
Get the facts.
Look at the timeline.
Ask questions.
Inspect the situation.
Talk to your employee.
And then make the decision.
Because your employees aren’t just people working for you.
They are carrying your brand.
When they walk into a customer’s home, they represent everything your business promises.
And if you’ve trained them, trusted them, built systems around them, and watched them consistently deliver good work…
Don’t throw that trust away because of one complaint before you know the full story.
This experience also reminded me why systems matter so much.
Our inspection process didn’t just protect the customer.
It protected my employee.
Because without that inspection, I might have blamed the wrong person.
So here’s the question I want to ask other business owners:
👇 Have you ever blamed an employee for something, only to later discover that they weren’t actually responsible?
Or maybe you’re on the other side:
Have you ever had an employee get blamed for something they didn’t do?
Tell me what happened.
I genuinely want to hear your story because I know I’m not the only business owner who’s had to learn this lesson.
And if you’re building a service business, here’s my advice:
1. Build systems that verify the work.
2. Don’t react before you investigate.
3. Listen to both sides.
4. Protect your customers.
5. Protect good employees too.
6. Don’t confuse “the customer is always right” with “the customer always has all the information.”
Sometimes the customer is right.
Sometimes the employee is right.
And sometimes…
neither one has the complete story.
That’s when your job as the business owner is to find the truth.
What would you have done in my situation?
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