Do I pay royalties on my existing customers if I join a franchise?

In a conventional franchise agreement, ongoing royalties are usually calculated on gross sales. That can include the customer you found, priced, served and kept long before the brand entered the picture. Before you join any franchise, check the fee basis first. The question that decides the deal is what the royalty is calculated on, not only the percentage.

If you already run a cleaning business, this is not a small detail. Your recurring clients are not theoretical. They are the Monday house, the biweekly regular, the move-out customer who calls again, and the homeowner who texts you instead of searching online. You built that customer list clean by clean.

That is why a conversion franchise royalty on existing accounts needs plain language. Some franchise systems charge on everything the business sells under the brand. Some may treat pre-existing accounts differently. Some reduce the opening cost for a conversion but leave the ongoing fee basis unchanged. You cannot know from the word franchise. You know from the Disclosure Document, the franchise agreement and a direct answer from the franchisor.

A franchise royalty is commonly calculated on gross sales, meaning the fee applies to sales recorded by the franchised business as defined in the documents. The important phrase is fee basis. If gross sales includes all customer revenue, it may include current clients, new clients and brand-sent jobs in the same bucket.

For a working cleaner, gross sales can sound harmless until you ask what sits inside it. Does it include recurring accounts you brought with you? Does it include work from your old customer list after rebrand? Does it include a job the franchisor never touched? The answers belong in Item 6 of the Franchise Disclosure Document and in the agreement, not in a salesperson's shrug.

This page is about fee basis, not the whole cost stack. The setup fee and the wider cost picture have their own page. On this question, stay narrow. If a franchisor cannot explain what the ongoing fee is calculated on, you do not yet understand the deal.

Franchises charged a percentage of everything because the old model had no clean way to measure what the franchisor actually caused. In the 1970s, the package was usually a name, an operations manual, training and a territory on paper. The local owner still had to find every customer.

The law and the house-cleaning franchise era grew up around that world. The California Franchise Investment Law came in 1970. The FTC Franchise Rule was promulgated on 21 December 1978 and became effective on 21 October 1979. Two of the best-known house-cleaning franchise brands were founded in 1979, which dates the era without saying anything about anyone's terms.

The 2007 amendment to the FTC Franchise Rule, mandatory from 1 July 2008, added computer-system disclosure at Item 11 and reserved-channel disclosure at Item 12. That matters because the old deal was not built around software that could answer a homeowner, book work and route that work to a local owner.

Back then, a franchisor could not answer your missed call, quote a homeowner from your booking site, follow up with a quiet estimate, or collect a booking while you were cleaning a kitchen. A percentage of gross sales became the rough measuring stick because the franchisor's contribution was broad and hard to separate.

That is the structural issue. It is not about whether a brand is good or bad. It is about whether the fee basis matches the value being delivered now. Your mother-in-law would call that looking under the couch, not admiring the logo.

In 2026, a franchisor can do more than lend a name. It can generate demand, take the booking and hand the owner a job that would not have existed otherwise. When the franchisor can send work, it has another option: charge for the work sent instead of charging on everything the franchised business sells.

That is the line M.I.L. Cleaners draws. Ongoing fees are tied to the work we send you, and every figure is in the Disclosure Document. We are not asking you to trust a slogan. We are saying the fee basis should be visible, written and walked through before you decide.

This matters most when you are joining a franchise when you already have a customer list. You are not buying permission to start from zero. You are deciding whether our brand, booking site, software, marketing in your zip codes, protected territory and training are worth adding to the business you already built.

The software answers the phone when you cannot, replies to texts and web chat, chases quotes that went quiet, helps with hiring, asks for reviews, and handles the plain office work: schedule, crew, quotes, payments and a booking site on your own domain that quotes a flat price.

You may have to give a franchise a cut of your current clients if the agreement calculates ongoing fees on gross sales without carving out pre-existing accounts. Do not assume either answer. Ask whether your current customer list is included, excluded or treated differently, and ask where that answer appears in the documents.

A good conversation should be specific without turning into a back-of-napkin calculation. You do not need a hypothetical bill. You need the rule. If a customer was yours before joining, what happens after the rebrand? If that same homeowner books again through the new site, does the treatment change? If you leave, who owns the customer record?

For M.I.L. Cleaners, the plain structure is this: ongoing fees are tied to the work we send you, and every figure is in the Disclosure Document. That is as far as this page should go. The exact documents matter more than a pretty paragraph, and the right answer is the one you can read before signing.

M.I.L. Cleaners answers the royalty question by tying ongoing fees to the work we send you, with every figure stated in the Disclosure Document. Setup is $4,999, down from $9,999, and that switches on your booking site, software, marketing in your zip codes, protected territory and training.

For an existing cleaning operator, the offer is not to throw away what works. Keep your crew. Keep serving your customers. Add the M.I.L. Cleaners brand, the Mother-in-Law Test, the Mother-in-Law Guarantee and the office system that handles calls, texts, web chat, follow-up, hiring help, review asks, schedule, crew, quotes and payments.

A consultant works with you from the first call through launch. The how-to-convert steps have their own page because name change, booking setup, launch timing and territory need room. Here, the point is simpler. If you have a customer list, ask what the fee is calculated on before you ask whether you like the rate.