Most cleaning companies you can hire in Pinellas or Hillsborough County do not employ the person who shows up at your door. They use independent contractors. It is the default in this industry, it is legal when it is done correctly, and it is cheaper.
We went the other way. Every cleaning technician at New Leaf is a W-2 employee, and has been since our first day in December 2025. I want to explain that choice honestly, because it is the kind of thing a company can put on a website without meaning much by it.
What the contractor model actually is
When a cleaner is a contractor, the company is not their employer. It is closer to a booking service. The cleaner covers their own taxes, carries their own risk, buys their own supplies in a lot of cases, and has no guaranteed hours. The company takes a cut and moves on.
The savings are real and they are large. No payroll taxes, no workers' compensation premium, no unemployment insurance, no paid training hours. A company running on contractors can price below one that does not, and often does.
There is a second thing it buys, which is rarely said out loud. If a contractor is hurt in your home, the question of who is responsible gets complicated. If they are an employee and we carry workers' compensation, it does not.
Why we did not do it
Two reasons. One of them is about the people who work here and one is about the people who hire us.
The first is that I did not want to build a company where the person doing the actual work carries all the risk. Cleaning is physical. It is hard on knees and shoulders and hands. If somebody spends four years doing that work for us and gets hurt doing it, "she was a contractor" is not an answer I am willing to give. Employment means we carry that. It means we withhold and pay their taxes so they are not handed a bill in April they did not plan for. It means training is paid, because asking someone to learn our standards on their own time is asking them to work for free.
The second reason is that the contractor model quietly limits how good the cleaning can get. You cannot require a contractor to follow your process. That is close to the legal line that separates a contractor from an employee. So you cannot really train them, you cannot set the order they work a room in, and you cannot hold them to a checklist. What you can do is book them and hope.
We have a method. Dry work before wet work, top before bottom, floors last, and a written checklist for every room. That method only exists because we are allowed to teach it and require it. Employment is what makes the standard possible.
What it costs, and who pays for it
It costs us more per hour of work than the contractor equivalent, once payroll taxes, workers' compensation and paid training are counted. Employer payroll taxes alone are a fixed percentage before anyone has been trained or insured.
We pay for part of that by running leaner elsewhere. The rest is in the price. I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you get a quote from us and a quote from a company using contractors, ours will usually be higher, and this is a large part of why.
What you get for the difference is a company that is actually responsible for the people it sends. If something goes wrong, there is no question about who you are dealing with. The cleaner in your home is insured through us, trained by us, and paid by us.
What to ask, including if you hire somebody else
This is worth checking whoever you hire, and it takes one question.
Ask whether the person who will be in your home is an employee or a contractor. Then ask whether they carry workers' compensation. A company that employs its cleaners will answer both immediately, because it is a thing they decided on purpose and paid for. A company that does not will usually talk about being insured, which is a different thing. General liability covers damage to your property. Workers' compensation covers the person. You want to know about both.
If a company cannot tell you which one their cleaners are, that is your answer.
The part that is not a business argument
New Leaf was built on the idea that a business should lift the people it touches, and that has to mean something specific or it means nothing. For us it means this: the person doing the hardest physical work in the company is the person with the most protection around them, not the least.
New Leaf is small. We are not going to fix an industry. But we can decide that the people who clean for us are employed, insured, trained on our time, and paid on a schedule they can count on. That was worth building the company around, and it is worth what it costs.
If you are deciding between us and someone cheaper, I would rather you know exactly what the difference is buying. Thanks for reading this far. It is a longer answer than the question usually gets.