Ok, since you don't plan on being in the field to have hands on experience cleaning for residential homes, then I highly recommend educating yourself as much as possible in regards to chemicals (dos and donts) as you will definitely have maids come to you for questions/help. The more you know the better, but if you can't answer a question, have at least several people that you can pull from to get a quick answer. Again, you don't want your maids to cost you thousands of dollars because they weren't trained properly. I've seen several maid services die due to lack of knowledge and quite frankly, being run by a person that had no prior experience in the residential maid cleaning service. Profit margins aren't high in this industry (5 to 20%) so you could easily eat up your profit on poor management.
Secondly, DO NOT allow maids to hold on to the keys of your customers' homes. You cannot trust no one!! I'm serious!! There's many horror stories of customer's homes being broken into by not necessarily the maids but their boyfriends/friends/family, etc. Ultimately, it is YOUR responsibility not theirs.
As for pay, some companies do a percentage of what the customer is billed (example: 40%) and some pay hourly. If you opt for the hourly, I would start as low as $8.00 per hour for the training period and go from there. As for Team Leaders, generally they make a little bit more but it's good to also give them quality control incentives...the better the team the better the bonus, pay rate, etc. You have to give them something to make them strive to be a STAR TEAM!
You'll will you provide the cleaning products to your maids or will they use their own? MSDS sheets are require for EVERY product and need to be in the vehicle with the maids at all times. If they use their own products, they need MSDS sheets on those as well.
You'll also want to do Inspections, some planned and some surprises.
Also, you will need to keep inventory/control of the amount of products given to your employees, it will give you a good idea if they are using too little, too much or just stealing from you!
As for teams, I would say you can do both...some like to work by themselves and some prefer teams. There's pros and cons to both.
I still highly recommend for you to be in the field hands-on! You'll be better boss because of it, it'll be beneficial in many ways, especially for estimates, etc.
Do you have a mission statement on hand, do you have an employee handbook, estimate sheet, etc.
Sounds like you are doing a lot of planning which is GREAT!!
I'm a self-employed cleaning lady and working on my own with NO employees as of yet. I will NOT hire anyone for another year as I'm planning on doing a lot of planning/organizing/learning before I expand and hire.
I plan on personally training each of my employees for a minimum of 6 weeks before they go off on their own...which means, I'll be in the field hands-on for a very long time and I'm OK with that.
Jeazzzzz...I could go on and on .... LOL