The Maids Brand Guidelines: Omaha Team Cleaning, a 22-Step Process and a Yellow Car

An Omaha building cleaner turns to homes.

The Maids began in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1979. Its founder, Daniel J. Bishop, was not new to cleaning. A Business Hall of Fame profile published by the Greater Omaha Chamber in February 2019 says the Omaha native paid for his studies at the University of Omaha by cleaning buildings at night, and in 1959, at the age of 20, started his first company, Bishop Building Services, enlisting family and college friends to work with him. Its payroll eventually grew to more than 300 full- and part-time employees, and Bishop ran it from his home, the chamber says, until it had about 100 of them.

Calls coming into that office pointed him towards homes. According to the chamber profile, Bishop spent a year and a half researching and testing how to detail-clean a house, and settled on a team approach: four people working a house, each focused on a different, specialised job. “So that started The Maids,” he told the chamber. Two friends who were also in commercial cleaning, he said, started the same programme in their own cities.

The company’s franchise site tells the same origin in its own words. It dates the founding to 1979, describes Bishop’s first business as a janitorial company in his home town, and says the brand was aimed from the start at residential deep cleaning for families with busy lives. It adds that the business began franchising one year later.

Bishop led the company for three decades. He served as president and chief executive of The Maids International until 2010, a 31-year span, and then became chairman of the board, the chamber reported in 2019. By then his son Colin was president and chief executive, his daughter Erin Bishop-Murray was vice president of learning development, and his son Ryan owned and operated the original The Maids franchise. Bishop also helped found the Building Service Contractors Association International, according to the same profile, and held leadership roles with it early in his career.

A numbered method and a car people recognise.

The Maids presents its service as a system with a number on it. The franchise site describes a proprietary 22-Step Cleaning Process, built on the team approach and a fixed, step-by-step order of work, and says franchisees are trained to deliver it. In 1995, the company says, it changed its routine, adopting cleaning products it describes as environmentally preferable and a backpack vacuum that it says was developed specifically for The Maids; the 22-step process grew out of that change.

The most visible part of the identity, by the company’s account, was on the road. Its franchise site says the four-person teams and a recognisable yellow company car became a “differentiating calling card” from the early years.

The service itself is described in plain terms. The franchise site presents recurring weekly, every-other-week and monthly cleaning plans as the backbone of the business, alongside one-time and specialised residential cleans, and says franchisees work mostly on weekdays during regular business hours. New owners go through what the company calls a SMART Start set-up, which it says includes up to seven weeks of business training. Bishop told the chamber in 2019 that training had always been done in Omaha.

The network is mostly franchised. In 2019 the Greater Omaha Chamber counted 180 franchise locations in more than 40 states and three Canadian provinces. Bishop added that about one-third of the owners were by then second-generation, the children of earlier franchisees. In November 2026 the company’s franchise site spoke of more than 180 locations in the United States and Canada.

How home-service franchises present themselves.

Home-service franchises sell work that happens inside someone else’s house, out of sight of the wider public, so much of their identity lives on the things that travel: the vehicle parked outside, the clothes the crew wears, the forms and checklists left behind, and the photographs of finished jobs that the companies publish on their own sites. The service itself is the product, and the brand has to stand in for it before the door opens.

Vehicles can carry much of that load. The Maids, the Omaha cleaning franchise founded in 1979, says on its franchise site that its four-person teams and a recognisable yellow company car became its calling card in the early years. The company still tells its founding story through that car, alongside the team of four.

Naming can be plain and functional, and some brands turn a method into a branded product: The Maids describes a numbered 22-Step Cleaning Process, and MaidPro, founded in Boston in 1991, cleans to what it calls a 49-Point Checklist, marked as a trademark. In both cases the company presents the routine as something every franchisee follows in the same order.

Behind the local names sit owners and parent groups, and their corporate pages are part of the picture. MaidPro has belonged since 2021 to Threshold Brands, a multi-brand franchise platform launched by the Riverside Company, Private Equity Wire reported in April 2021. The Maids was acquired in March 2020 in a deal backed by Gladstone Investment Corporation, which lists it on its portfolio pages. Customers meet the local franchise; the parent appears in investor releases, franchise-recruitment sites and the small print.

From family firm to investor-backed franchisor.

The company stayed with the Bishop family for four decades. On 4 March 2020, according to a release on the investor site of Gladstone Investment Corporation, the Nasdaq-listed business development company partnered with Dan Kirwan, a long-time executive of The Maids, to acquire The Maids International. Gladstone provided both the equity and the debt financing for the deal, and Kirwan became president and chief executive at closing. The release, dated 9 March 2020, described the business as based in Omaha and the brand as established in 1979.

Since then the franchisor has moved and its leadership has changed. Gladstone’s portfolio page, read in November 2026, lists The Maids International’s headquarters as Irving, Texas, and describes franchise and company-owned locations in more than 40 US states and three Canadian provinces. The leadership page of the franchise site names Cathy Skula, formerly president and chief executive of Rent-A-Center Franchising International, as chief executive, and says a new chief financial officer joined in 2025 and a new chief operating officer in July 2025.

Two name traps are worth knowing. English Wikipedia’s article titled “The Maids” is about a 1947 play by the French dramatist Jean Genet, not the cleaning company. And The Maids is a separate business from Merry Maids, another house-cleaning franchise with a similar name, which has its own guide. The cleaning company writes its name with the article, “The Maids”, and the franchisor’s legal name adds “International”.

For a design guide, The Maids shows how a cleaning franchise can be carried by a numbered method and a single vehicle colour rather than by a mascot. Compare Merry Maids and Molly Maid, two other house-cleaning franchises. For this guide we use a company-car yellow, a deep pine and warm linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Maids’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.