ALTAMONT— A local business has taken on what many larger companies have yet to do: clean a house and be good to the environment.

Michelle Boyle, 27, is the CEO and owner of two companies she describes as “environmentally and health conscious businesses.” Green Genies is a cleaning service tending to homes in Albany County and surrounding areas. Boyle’s company uses only cleaning products with no synthetic chemicals, products produced by her other business, Tidy Thyme.

Boyle began her cleaning business at age 12 as a sole proprietor. Despite comparing her cleaning service to babysitting, she can remember filling out tax forms for her business even as a child. After graduating from high school, she hired her first employee. Nine years later, her business now has eight employees and operates under Green Genies, LLC, which officially began in 2012, having become a cleaning service promoting its use of “green” products.

“There were a lot of facts that motivated me to go green,” she said.

Boyle said she has been health conscious for most of her life. Her nanny, who had raised her, died when Boyle was 12, and Boyle said her nanny’s poor health choices made her more aware of living healthfully, but at first not in regards to cleaning products.

“At the time, I didn’t make the connection between chemicals and cleaning products,” she said.

In 2008, Boyle met her husband, Mark.

“He’s extremely chemically sensitive,” Boyle said, describing how he couldn’t use her first gift of cologne to him because of his sensitivities to the chemicals.

Boyle said she became more environmentally aware of her cleaning products around this time, and how even the so-called “green” products she could buy in stores had potentially toxic chemicals. Because of this, Boyle decided to make her own cleaning products. After nearly a decade of using them for herself and her cleaning service, she has only recently decided to sell these products.

In 2014, Boyle’s company Tidy Thyme was officially formed. The products, created in a converted dining room in Boyle’s Altamont home with her husband and one of her employees, use ingredients like essential oils, vinegar, lemon juice, and baking soda — ingredients, Boyle said, you could very well eat if necessary, though she wouldn’t recommend it.

Although Tidy Thyme is in its “infancy stage,”Boyle said,  Green Genies has seen years of growth, change, and obstacles. Two years ago, Boyle said, her business was extremely busy, serving clients from Saratoga to Schaghticoke and paying employees travel time and mileage to reach these clients. Her business was not turning a profit, and was barely paying employees’ payroll and the company expenses.

“I had nothing to pay my own expenses,” said Boyle, “It was kind of a make or break year.”

Boyle decided to take a “mini-MBA program,” the Capital Region Chamber Entrepreneurial Bootcamp, an intensive 60-hour program that goes over lessons in finance such as a five-year plan and topics like payroll and cash flow. Boyle said she wished she could have taken the program years ago.

Upon finishing the program, she decided to shrink the area she served to its present region of Albany County and surrounding towns like Niskayuna and North Greenbush. She also changed her rate from $20  to $45 an hour. Boyle lost two clients due to this change, but was astonished by how many others did stay.

“We were surprised at the support of our client base,” she said, “That was a big leap of faith for me.”

The changes paid off, and at the end of 2015 Green Genies made a profit.

Besides her Tidy Thyme products, Boyle’s cleaning services also uses microfiber clothes (reducing the use of paper) and Miele vacuum cleaners sold by the local business Lexington Vacuum that filter the air.

Boyle warned that, while it’s encouraging to see environmentally oriented products grow in popularity, consumers should be aware of “green-washing” of products, in which products are falsely presented as good for the environment. Since there is little regulation requiring that cleaning products disclose their ingredients, products can use harmful chemicals without disclosure, according to Boyle.=

She described how an ingredient listed as “fragrance” in a cleaner could be trademarked or patented and therefore not disclosed. Boyle advised that consumers do their research in order to know what is in their cleaners.

Boyle is looking to expand her cleaning product business, and possibly make larger batches, but said that it still goes back to a process very similar to when she was using trial-and-error methods in her kitchen to create the cleaners.

“It’s still very grassroots,” she said.

Boyle has recently been promoting and selling her products at the Hudson River Exchange’s Farm and Flea on Saturday and Sunday in Hudson. She will return for the organization’s annual Summer Market on June 25 and 26.