A cleaning company built around what most cleaning companies get wrong.

Amara Okafor spent seven years running operations for a 40-person cleaning company in Chicago. She saw the same problems on every account: late arrivals, surprise fees, cleaners rotating in and out, contracts that were a pain to cancel. The work itself was usually fine. The way it was sold and managed was the problem.

She moved to Des Moines in 2019 and started Threshold Clean to do it differently. Transparent flat-rate pricing, shown before you book. Online signup, online cancellation, online everything. W-2 employees on payroll — not 1099 contractors — paid above the regional average and trained in-house. Same cleaner each visit, when possible.

Five years in, Threshold has 12 cleaners on staff and serves recurring customers across the Des Moines metro, plus light commercial accounts — small offices, dental practices, law firms. The business is bonded and insured for $2M general liability. Every cleaner is background-checked. There's no phone retention script when customers cancel — there's just a button.

The argument is operational, not aspirational. Most cleaning companies say they clean well. Few make it easy to hire them, manage them, or leave them. Threshold is the second part.