Welcome to our Member Spotlight series, where we proudly showcase the businesses and individuals making a difference in our Strive community and beyond. Today we have the pleasure of highlighting Jacques Bastien, CEO of Chery Maids, a family owned cleaning service operating out of Strive Nashville. Join us to learn more about how and why Jacques started the business, what makes his business stand out, and what he finds most rewarding about his work!
Tell us a little about Chery Maids.
We’re a family-owned cleaning company. My wife and I started it in Tampa in the summer of 2024, and we launched here in Nashville in the summer of 2026, serving the metro plus Brentwood, Franklin, Murfreesboro, and Hendersonville. Recurring cleans, deep cleans, move-in/move-out cleans. Non-toxic products, background-checked and insured cleaners, pricing you can see before you book, and a 48-hour guarantee.
The name, ‘Chery,’ is actually my mother’s maiden name, and it’s also my daughter’s middle name. When the business carries your mom’s name and your kid’s name, you get pretty careful about who you send into somebody’s home.
What led you to start Chery Maids?
Honestly? A spreadsheet.
In 2022, my wife and I started buying short-term rentals. We had a couple in Philadelphia and a couple in Tampa. At the end of that first year we sat down with the P&L and the biggest line item wasn’t the mortgage or the furniture. It was cleaning. So the logic was simple: start a cleaning company, cut our own biggest expense roughly in half.
Here’s the funny part. We’ve since sold every one of those properties and kept the cleaning company. The thing we started to prop up the real business turned out to be the better business
What sets your business apart from your competitors?
People. It sounds like the kind of thing everybody says, so let me be specific about what we actually do differently.
You get the same cleaner. Not whoever’s available that week. The same person, who already knows you keep the good glasses on the top shelf and that the dog gets nervous around the vacuum. Our team knows our clients by name and our clients know them by name. And if something isn’t right, the person who cleaned your home comes back and fixes it. Not a stranger sent to clean up somebody else’s work.
When you call us, a real person answers you. That matters more than it used to. A lot of companies in this industry have handed their front door over to a bot, and you can feel it in about two sentences.
What we don’t do is make you jump through hoops to get a price. No in-home estimate before you know what a clean costs. No five phone calls after you fill out a form. We’ll text you, because that’s how most people would rather handle it, and if you’d rather talk, just say so and we’ll call. We’ve got clients who’ve been with us over a year that we’ve never spoken to on the phone. Not because we’re hiding, but because they never needed us to.
What is something you wish you’d known when you were just starting your business?
That we were bracing for the wrong problem.
We came in with fifteen-plus years of marketing and operations behind us, so we weren’t worried about finding customers or building systems. What got us was hiring. Most cleaning company owners came up as cleaners, so they struggle where we’re strong and they’re strong where we’re weak.
Which leads to a problem nobody warned me about: we regularly have to turn our advertising off. Not because it’s too expensive. Because we have more people ready to book than cleaners to send. Finding people who are good at the work and also genuinely good people you’d trust with a key to a house is slow, and there’s no shortcut for it. I wish I’d known to start building that pipeline six months before we needed it instead of six weeks after.
What is one unexpected way your business has changed so far in your journey?
We ended up selling the businesses it was built to serve.
The cleaning company existed to support our rental properties. Within a couple of years we’d sold all of them, because it turned out the cleaning business threw off more genuinely passive income than the real estate did. Real estate’s a great vehicle and we still own our own home. We just didn’t have any real edge in it. We were paying full price for everything. In cleaning we had fifteen years of marketing, web, and operations experience to actually put to work.
So the side project ate the main project. I’ve learned to hold plans loosely.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Being able to pay people well and having the math actually support it.
Good pay is an operations decision before it’s a values decision. If your margins aren’t built for it, you can’t keep the promise, and everybody figures that out eventually. Getting to a place where we can pay our cleaners and our operations team properly, on time, without crossing our fingers, is the thing I’m proudest of. Happy team, happy clients. That order, not the other way around.
Then there’s the client side. There’s a very particular kind of relief people have after a deep clean, especially when they’ve been quietly stressed about their house for months. You can hear it in how they text. That doesn’t get old.
What is something you have learned about yourself/the industry since starting your business?
About the industry: this isn’t a cleaning business, it’s a trust business. You’re asking somebody to hand you a key to the place where they sleep. Cleaning well is just the entry fee. Trust is the actual product. Which is why we spend more time on who we hire than on almost anything else.
About me: I spent more than half my career as the doer. I answered the phones, I did the work, and back when we had an office, I was the one cleaning the office. That instinct feels like leadership and it’s actually a ceiling. So the rule my wife and I apply to everything we start now is that we can’t be the ones on the ground from day one. Our team is distributed, and with Chery Maids we hired our first team member about six weeks in. By that January we were mostly out of the daily work.
Worth saying though: getting yourself out of the day-to-day and staying close to your customers are two different things. Plenty of owners confuse them. We stepped back from doing the work. We didn’t step back from caring how it goes.
How has being a part of Strive Nashville affected you and your business?
Walking into a new market from out of state is mostly a credibility problem. You can be genuinely good at what you do and still look like nobody, because you’ve got no local footing. Strive fixed that faster than anything else we did. A real address on Union Street, mail handled properly, and a professional place downtown to actually meet people.
That last part has mattered more than I expected. Growing a service business in a new market means a steady stream of conversations you can’t have over Zoom, or shouldn’t. Interviewing a cleaner you’re deciding whether to trust with a key to someone’s home. Sitting down with a vendor or a potential partner. The occasional client who wants to meet the people behind the company before they hand over a house. Doing any of that from a coffee shop sends a message, and it isn’t the one you want. Having somewhere in the Central Business District, steps from the courthouse and the Capitol, to say “come meet me here” quietly changes how those conversations go.
And shout out to Anita, who’s made the whole thing easy in a way I honestly didn’t expect from a workspace.
If you could have a conversation over coffee with yourself from 5 years ago, what would you say to him/her?
I’d tell him the businesses he’s proudest of aren’t the ones he’ll still own.
Five years ago I was building things that looked good on a LinkedIn profile. Since then we’ve sold a photo booth company and a web design company, and put real energy into a residential cleaning business, which is not what anyone would have predicted for me. Impressive and durable turn out to be two different things, and I was optimizing for the wrong one.
The practical version: simplify sooner. Write down how you do things while you’re doing them the first time, because rebuilding that later costs ten times as much. Know your numbers per job, not per month. And quit treating yourself as the irreplaceable part. The pieces of the business that only work because you’re standing in them aren’t strengths. They’re unfinished work.
If you had a friend in town, and you could take them to one of your favorite restaurants or spots in your community, where would you take them?
I’m going to cheat on this one and admit I’m still building my Nashville list. My only rule so far is skip Broadway and let people who actually live here pick. So consider this an open invitation. If you’ve got the spot you take out-of-town friends to, I want to hear about it!
We want to thank Jacques for his willingness to participate in our Member Spotlight series. If you are interested in spotlighting your business or a side project, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Community Manager. We are always eager to help elevate your business in any way we can!
