At Oakville Maids, we’ve always believed that the people who do the work are the business. Not the logo. Not the mop. Not the scheduling software. The people. That’s why we’re proud to be a certified Living Wage Employer, something we wrote about last year when we officially earned that certification.

But recently, something pretty cool happened: Oakville News noticed.

In a recent article titled “How can Oakville businesses afford to pay living wages?”, Oakville News highlighted local companies, including Oakville Maids, that are choosing to do things a little differently. And yes, a little more responsibly.

So… how do businesses afford it?

Short answer: by not running their business like it’s 1998.

Longer answer: paying a living wage isn’t about being a charity or lighting money on fire. It’s about building a sustainable company where staff actually stick around, care about their work, and don’t need to work three jobs just to survive.

When you pay people fairly, turnover drops (training new staff constantly is expensive, by the way), quality goes up (happy cleaners do better work… shocking, we know), customers are happier (they see the difference), and management spends less time putting out fires.

In other words, it’s not magic. It’s math.

The Oakville News article does a great job addressing the question many business owners quietly ask: “Sure, that sounds nice… but can we actually afford it?” The answer, increasingly, is YES, if you’re willing to run a modern business and not squeeze every last dollar out of the people doing the hardest work.

We won’t pretend it’s always easy. Paying a living wage means being thoughtful about pricing, efficiency, and growth. It means saying no to shortcuts. It means playing the long game. But here’s the thing: the long game is where the good businesses survive. As Warren Buffett’s famous advice on this is usually summed up with this line:

“Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.”

We’re proud Oakville News chose to feature this conversation, and we’re even prouder that Oakville Maids is part of it. Cleaning homes is what we do, but taking care of our people is how we do it.

And frankly, it just feels like the right thing to do. Even if it’s not always the easist path.

Thanks for reading,
Oakville Maids