Rose Selvaggio started a cleaning company in 2016 to get herself through school. The plan was to graduate in 2020, become a therapist and never pick up a rag again. This month Hocus Pocus Cleaning turns ten, with about 30 employees, more than 425 recurring clients and roughly $1.7 million in revenue on the books for the year.
The therapy career lasted until December 2025. The cleaning company is still here.
“Here’s a Rag. Good Luck.”
“It was absolutely not supposed to become this,” Selvaggio said.
In 2016 she was an undergraduate at Cedar Crest College, working toward a career as a therapist, raising a four-year-old daughter and looking for something flexible she could fit around the rest of her life. Cleaning made sense. Almost nothing else about it did.
“I didn’t have professional cleaning experience, I didn’t have an MBA, I had never really managed people and I really didn’t know anything about running a business,” she said. “And when I say I didn’t know anything, I mean ANYTHING.”
Revenue lived in Apple Notes. Scheduling lived in Apple Calendar. Leads came from local moms pages on Facebook. Every client got a text she typed herself. There was no training program, formal or otherwise.
“When I started hiring, training was basically handing someone a rag and saying, ‘Good luck,’” she said.
She did the bookkeeping, the social media, the sales, the scheduling, the customer service and the actual cleaning. Then she went home, wrote papers and raised her daughter.
The name took even less deliberation than the business.
“I decided on a whim to start the cleaning business. It was the beginning of fall, I was binging Halloween classics, and abracadabra, Hocus Pocus just happened to be on the TV,” she said. “It fit, it made sense, and I still love our name.”
She describes the first year in capital letters. “IT WAS SO SCRAPPY. There was no master plan. There were no SOPs. There wasn’t a leadership team or software or really any systems at all. I was cleaning houses and figuring out everything else as it happened.”
There was never a moment where she saw where it was going.
“I don’t remember having this big moment where I thought, ‘I’m going to build a million-dollar company.’ I don’t think I would’ve believed you if you told me that,” she said. People kept referring her. The schedule kept filling. She hired someone because she could not do it alone, and then could not do it with one person either.
“For a long time, growth basically looked like, ‘Well, I guess we need another person.’”
The Year It Was Supposed to End
The exit had always been on the calendar. Start in 2016, graduate in 2020, use the master’s degree, become a therapist.
Then 2020 arrived. Hocus Pocus shut down in March. Selvaggio finished her master’s at Marywood University from home during lockdown and graduated at a virtual ceremony.
“I remember thinking, ‘Damn, if I go straight into using my master’s degree after graduation, I’ll never pick up a rag again,’” she said. “At that point, I really thought that might be exactly what happened.”
The company reopened in June with masks, distancing and a long list of new precautions. Then something nobody had forecast happened. It exploded. Hocus Pocus went from about 15 clients to 60 by the end of that summer.
That fall, one of her favorite clients got her on the phone.
“I can actually picture exactly where I was sitting,” she said. They talked for about an hour about the business and her future. He was a brilliant businessman, she said, and he told her she would be crazy to walk away from what she had built just because she had earned a degree and thought she was supposed to go use it.
He died of COVID a few months later.
“I don’t think he ever knew how much that conversation stayed with me,” Selvaggio said. “His wife is no longer a client, but they were one of those families who changed the trajectory of my career without probably ever realizing it.”
She did become a therapist. For several years she did both jobs. She never shut the company down.
“2020 was supposed to be the end of the business,” she said, “but it became the beginning of everything else instead.”
Building a Company That Knows What to Do
Quadrupling the client list in one summer broke the way Selvaggio had been running things.
“Before that, so much of the business still lived in my head,” she said. “I knew the clients, I knew the schedule, I trained people myself, and if something went wrong, everyone basically came to me.”
The COVID protocols were temporary. The lesson underneath them was not.
“You can’t scale a service business if every employee has to ask the owner what to do every time something unexpected happens,” she said.
What followed was formal training, written procedures, quality control and a documented response for nearly every strange situation the company has run into. It has run into some strange ones. There is a procedure for a cat getting out of a client’s house. There is a procedure for what to do if someone encounters something inappropriate in a home.
“If something happens once, my mindset is usually, ‘Okay, how do we make sure the next person knows exactly what to do?’” she said. “We stopped building a company where Rosie knew how to handle everything and started building a company where the company knew how to handle everything.”
A CEO Who Happened to Be a Therapist
For years she ran two professional lives at once: a licensed social worker and therapist with a private practice, and the owner of a cleaning company that would not stop growing.
“I think for a long time I still considered therapy my ‘real’ career because that’s what I went to school for,” she said. “Cleaning was this thing I had accidentally become really good at building.”
Doing both meant neither got the version of her she wanted to give it. She would sit in a therapy session thinking about something happening at the company, then work on the company carrying the emotional weight of the session.
She resigned from therapy in December 2025.
“Leaving therapy was a huge identity shift because I worked really hard for that title. I don’t regret becoming a therapist at all. I actually think it made me a much better leader,” she said. “But eventually I had to admit what had already been true for a while: I was a CEO who also happened to be a therapist, not a therapist who happened to own a cleaning company.”
The training did not leave with the license. It taught her how to listen, how to have uncomfortable conversations, and how to recognize that behavior usually has something underneath it.
“Someone can be a great employee and still be going through a divorce, struggling financially, raising kids, grieving somebody or just having a really hard season of life,” she said.
It also taught her the part she says she learned the hard way as a business owner.
“Empathy and accountability can exist at the same time,” she said. “I can understand why something happened and still say it can’t continue happening.”
Some days the job is keeping the two straight. “Sometimes I have to actively remind myself that I’m their CEO and not their therapist.”
Ten Years of Everything Else
The decade the company grew through was not a quiet one.
Her older daughter, Brielle, was four when the company started and is fourteen now. Aurora arrived right after the launch and is nine. In between, Selvaggio finished her undergraduate degree at Cedar Crest and her master’s at Marywood, became a licensed social worker, built a private practice, went through a divorce, remarried and blended a family. She lost friends and family.
“I’ve had really hard seasons personally while simultaneously being responsible for employees, clients and a company that doesn’t stop existing because something difficult is happening in your life,” she said.
Asked whether the business was a burden through those stretches or the thing that carried her, she said it was both.
“When other parts of my life felt completely outside of my control, there was always a problem here that I could solve. There was always something I could build,” she said. Eventually there were people whose jobs she was responsible for creating and protecting, which gave the company a meaning beyond herself.
“At different points I think Hocus Pocus distracted me from hard things, supported me through hard things and forced me to grow through hard things.”
“The funny part is that I started this company because it was supposed to support the life I was building outside of it,” she said, “but somehow it became one of the biggest parts of the life I was building.”
Empathy, Excellence, Experience, Evolution
Hocus Pocus employs about 30 people, and right now all of them are women. Selvaggio is careful about how she describes that.
“It wasn’t designed to be an all-women company. We’ve hired maybe two men in ten years,” she said. “What is very intentional is how we hire.”
The company’s four core values are empathy, excellence, experience and evolution, and the interview is built around them: how a candidate responds to feedback, handles difficult situations, treats clients, thinks about growth, and what kind of teammate they are going to be.
“We really aren’t hiring for cleaning experience first. We can teach someone how to clean our way,” she said. “We’re much more interested in whether they’re coachable, dependable, emotionally intelligent and aligned with the way we want people to feel when they interact with Hocus Pocus.”
Men, she said, have not typically made it far through that process. “Not because they’re men, but because the candidates we’ve had haven’t usually been the strongest fit for what we’re looking for.”
She is not neutral about the result, though.
“It does mean something to me to look around and see a company made up of women building real careers, moving into leadership, earning good money and supporting their families in an industry that people still sometimes minimize,” she said. “I’m really proud of that part.”
Training has traveled about as far from a rag and a good luck as it could. New technicians spend their first several days with dedicated trainers learning skills and systems, then move into observation and lighter solo work as they are ready. There is testing, there are quality checks, and development continues after someone is technically trained. Deep cleaning is a later step, because, as she puts it, nobody should be thrown into the company’s hardest work just because they finished their first week. All of it is written down in what the company calls its Cleaning Training Bible.
“We’ve gone from knowledge living entirely inside my head to having a repeatable system that someone else can teach without me even being in the building,” she said.
Nine Call-Outs and a $6,000 Drive
The staff gets paid holidays, PTO, earned time off and a 401(k) match. They also get nine call-outs a year, no questions asked, a policy Selvaggio notes with a laugh that they are currently tightening up.
Then there are the things no policy covers. When government benefit disruptions hit, some of her employees depended on that support.
“We weren’t going to pretend that wasn’t happening just because it technically wasn’t a workplace issue, so we stepped in to help,” she said. The company offered to match up to $2,000 in donations and opened the drive to unaffected employees, the community and its own client list. It raised more than $6,000.
At Christmas, the company scales its support by how many children an employee has, on the theory that Christmas for somebody with three kids is a different financial event than Christmas for somebody with none.
“I’m not interested in creating dependency or removing accountability,” she said. “I just think you can run a profitable business and still recognize when the people helping you build it need a little extra help.”
The Million-Dollar Year That Made Her Miserable
Hocus Pocus crossed $1 million in revenue for the first time in 2024, did roughly $1.3 million in 2025 and is tracking toward about $1.7 million this year. Selvaggio agreed to put the numbers in print, along with how the first one actually felt.
“I thought crossing a million was going to feel incredible, but instead, found myself extremely depressed,” she said. “I had spent years looking at that number like it was this magical finish line. It’s a milestone relatively few small businesses ever reach, so in my head I think I expected to cross it and suddenly feel successful. And I didn’t.”
What came out of that was a harder question about what she was building. “If the only goal was to make the revenue number bigger every year, I knew that wasn’t going to be enough for me.”
The answer was to get specific about who Hocus Pocus is. They rebuilt the website, invested in the brand, and got clearer about voice, client experience, standards and which services they wanted to be known for.
“We became much more intentional about building authority in the Lehigh Valley so people didn’t just know us as a company that cleans houses, they knew Hocus Pocus as a trusted local service brand,” she said.
Operations grew up alongside the brand: leadership, formal training, SOPs, sharper pricing and profitability, a more strategic service mix. And the owner stopped being the answer to every question.
“For a long time, growth meant, ‘How many more houses can I fit on the schedule?’ Now it’s, ‘What does this company need to become in order to support the next level?’” she said.
“I’m proud of the revenue, but crossing a million actually taught me that revenue couldn’t be the thing I built my identity around. The part I’m proudest of now is that we have a recognizable brand, a real leadership structure, a team with careers here and a level of trust in this region that took ten years to earn.”
The client base is still overwhelmingly residential, but commercial has become the growth story, with more than 30 accounts now. That work includes offices, auto dealerships, property management spaces and event venues, plus a substantial seasonal operation turning over college dorms. The service area runs roughly 30 miles out from the Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton core, reaching Mertztown in the west, Easton in the east, Saylorsburg in the north and Sellersville in the south.
“Commercial has been extremely exciting because it’s expanded what Hocus Pocus can be,” she said. “This time around, we have a better idea of what it takes to grow and build a niche business.”
Transferring Judgment
“I used to think being a good business owner meant being involved in everything,” Selvaggio said. Every client issue, every employee issue, every strange situation came to her, and for a while she mistook knowing everything for leading well.
“Eventually I realized that if every decision still needed me, I hadn’t actually built a company. I had built myself a very complicated job.”
Her right hand has spent almost four years watching how she thinks, how she responds, what she prioritizes, what she will tolerate and what she absolutely will not.
“In most situations, she reacts almost exactly the way I would. That’s incredibly valuable to me because it means the company can still feel like Hocus Pocus even when I’m not the person handling the situation,” she said.
“Not disappearing. Not caring less. Not handing over the keys and hoping for the best. It’s been about transferring judgment.”
This year was the proof. Selvaggio took about two and a half weeks off between February and March. Between a vacation and a bereavement, she was essentially gone for the month of June. She took another two weeks in September and plans two more around Christmas.
“And the company kept operating,” she said. “Clients still got serviced. Payroll still happened. Problems still got solved. People made decisions without asking me. The company continued to grow.”
“That’s not because I’m unnecessary,” she added. “It’s because we intentionally built leadership and systems so that the company isn’t dependent on one person.”
“For years, I thought success would feel like hitting a certain revenue number. Now I think one of the biggest measures of success is being able to be completely present with my family somewhere else in the world and know that 30 people aren’t waiting for me to come back so the business can function.”
From the Wrong Crowd to the Wall of Honor
The recognition has stacked up quickly. In 2025 Hocus Pocus won the PA Small Business of the Year Award from the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry. It has been a Morning Call Readers’ Choice winner for Best House Cleaning since 2022 and for Best Commercial Cleaning since 2024, a Community Votes Allentown/Bethlehem platinum or gold winner since 2022, and a Lehigh Valley Style Who’s Who in Business honoree since 2024. Lehigh Valley Business named Selvaggio to its Empowered Women Award and Women of Influence lists in 2024, and its In the Lead: Best Women-Owned Business list in 2024 and 2025. That December, U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie sent a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition marking the state award on behalf of Pennsylvania’s 7th District.
Two stand apart from the rest.
“Professionally, probably the Pennsylvania Small Business of the Year recognition,” she said. “Being recognized at the state level as a business, not ‘good for a cleaning company,’ just a good business, felt different.”
The other is a wall in a school district. In 2026 Salisbury School District named her to its Alumni Wall of Honor. The version of her who went to Salisbury would not have seen it coming.
“If you had told anyone who knew me in 2008 that I would someday be inducted into Salisbury’s Alumni Wall of Honor, I think there would have been some genuine confusion,” she said. “I was smart and capable, but by high school I had become pretty committed to pretending I wasn’t. I had stopped applying myself academically, gravitated toward the wrong crowd, and was making choices that didn’t exactly suggest ‘future award-winning entrepreneur.’”
She does not think the two people are as different as they look.
“I was always independent, determined, outspoken and willing to take risks. I just didn’t always know where to put those qualities,” she said. It took growing up, becoming a mother and a lot of life to learn how to channel them.
“I think 2008 Rosie would be absolutely shocked by my life today. But I also think she’d be really proud. Maybe even relieved. Because I don’t think she lacked potential. I think she just hadn’t figured out what to do with it yet.”
“Having my picture on an Alumni Wall of Honor in the school district I actually came from hits an entirely different part of me,” she said. “One recognizes what we’ve built and the other makes me think about who I was before any of this existed.”
The Part That Isn’t a Sponsorship Banner
“I don’t think community involvement should just be writing a check because it looks good on a sponsorship banner,” Selvaggio said. “I like supporting organizations whose work we actually believe in and where we can understand who the support is helping.”
Hocus Pocus has donated to the Pediatric Cancer Foundation of the Lehigh Valley’s Hearts of Gold Gala every year since 2022, and to The Kindness Project’s Christmas drive, which supports children and families affected by foster care, every year since the same. In 2023 the company ran a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Visionary of the Year campaign and raised more than $8,000. It has sponsored Greenway Pride in support of the local LGBTQ community and previously supported Family Promise Neighborhoods.
The longest relationship is with Aspire to Autonomy, which became known locally for its work with survivors of human trafficking and has since grown into a broader human services organization focused on accessible, trauma-informed mental health care. Years ago Hocus Pocus built a trauma-informed workplace where survivors could re-enter the workforce. The organization honored Selvaggio with its Victory Through Service award in 2021.
“Mental health access and trauma-informed care are things I cared about long before they became part of my role as a CEO,” she said.
In 2026 she gave the keynote at the LadyBoss Summit, under a title she chose herself: “I’m a Survivor.” The talk traced limiting beliefs, periods of self-destruction, rebuilding, and then something she had not expected to have to name. Overproductivity.
“Rather than defining survival simply as overcoming difficult circumstances, I focused on what came afterward,” she said, “recognizing when constant achievement had become its own survival mechanism and learning to build a successful company and life with greater intention and alignment.”
The Next Ten
“I think the first ten years were about proving we could build it,” Selvaggio said. “The next ten are about seeing what it can become without losing the things that made people love it in the first place.”
That means more commercial work, geographic expansion beyond the current footprint, more premium services, and career paths inside an industry that has not historically offered many.
“I don’t necessarily want to build the biggest cleaning company, I want to build one of the best service companies, and I think there’s a difference,” she said. “If we’re substantially bigger ten years from now but the people who work here still feel cared for, our clients still trust the person walking through their front door, and the company still feels like Hocus Pocus, I’ll feel like we did it right.”
Asked what she would tell a woman in the Lehigh Valley starting something on the side of a life that is already full, she went back to the version of herself tracking revenue in Apple Notes.
“You don’t need to know what it’s going to become. I think people sometimes don’t start because they’re trying to figure out the entire ending first,” she said. “I just kept solving the problem in front of me. I made a lot of mistakes. Some expensive ones. Some embarrassing ones. Some that took years to undo.”
“You don’t need an MBA. You don’t need to have your entire life organized first. You don’t need everyone around you to understand what you’re building. You need to be willing to learn faster than your business grows.”
“Maybe the thing you’re starting ‘on the side’ isn’t actually the side thing,” she said. “You might just not know that yet.”
At a Glance
- Who: Rose Selvaggio, founder and CEO, Hocus Pocus Cleaning
- Founded: September 2016
- Based: 2844 Township Line Road, Orefield
- Team: About 30 employees, currently all women
- Clients: More than 425 recurring residential and commercial accounts, including over 30 commercial
- Service area: Roughly a 30-mile radius around Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, from Mertztown to Easton and Saylorsburg to Sellersville
- Revenue: $1 million in 2024, roughly $1.3 million in 2025, tracking toward $1.7 million in 2026
- Commercial work: Offices, auto dealerships, property management spaces, event venues and seasonal college dorm turnovers
- Core values: Empathy, excellence, experience, evolution
- Recognition: 2025 PA Small Business of the Year (Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry); Salisbury School District Alumni Wall of Honor, 2026; Morning Call Readers’ Choice Best House Cleaning since 2022 and Best Commercial Cleaning since 2024; Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, December 2025
- Before this: Licensed social worker and therapist, resigned December 2025
- Contact: 484-554-3218, office@hocuspocuscleaningservices.com
- Online: hocuspocuscleaningservices.com
