‘Tis the season to outsource everything you possibly can!
It’s the most joyful, yet stressful time of year and wether you’re being safe and spending time at home this season or going to see family why not get your home in order! There’s nothing better then a clean and organized place… AHHH so good.
In comes Supermaids! A local house cleaning service that makes it easy for you to sit back and relax and come home to a squeaky clean abode. BEST.FEELING.EVER.
I recently sat down with owner, Mike to get the 411 on his business and what makes them unique!
What’s your name?
Myco Momplaisir
What do you do?
I run a cleaning service called SuperMaids.
How long has it been in business?
Seven years.
And it’s in Hoboken?
We’re in Hoboken, NJ; Stamford, CT; Westchester County, NY; Washington, DC; and Westfield, NJ.
How did you start your business?
It was a bet! A friend and mine and I were trying to figure out what to start and I said, “Why don’t we start a cleaning business?” He told me, “You know nothing about cleaning,” and my personality is hyper-competitive so I said, “What do you mean? I can start it, it’s probably easy.” And literally just started a cleaning business to see if I could do it and shut him up. A $1 bet.
What were you doing before?
My background is in finance, I used to run a collections department for Wyndham.
So how did it go from working in finance to running your own business?
I had a stroke at 25.
Wow, sorry to hear that. How did you overcome?
A lot of PT. I had to learn how to retell time, use my phone… I was too stressed out working, and it was working that led me to jump into being self-employed. I was missing out on too much, I was working easily 120 hours.
Making the switch helped change your lifestyle, basically.
Yeah, it gave me time for myself.
That’s amazing. It’s a great story.
I guess. I almost died for it, but yeah!
You got a second chance.
I definitely did. I was 25.
So tell me a little bit about what you guys do and the services you offer.
We’re a home cleaning service. What differentiates us is that we’re more about quality. We’re not just going to send a body into your house and run through it as fast as we can. We like to take our time, and that’s why we price a bit differently. We realize every home is different, everybody is different. Cleaning is a subjective business – what’s clean to you may not be clean to me, and vice versa. So we take that approach and use that approach to help us get a leg up and increase that quality. When we get in there, we do a quick inspection to verify everything, figure out what we need and how we’ll approach it. The ladies will take care of it from there. We always send a team of two people; it’s never just one person trying to clean a whole house by themselves, so that’s for efficiency and security. We don’t want to send one person to a house, a stranger’s house that we don’t know. We bring everything on site so we can make sure we have everything we need to do the job right. We use green products, again from a quality standpoint. We don’t have to use something harsh to get the job done. A lot of misconceptions think the harsher the product, the better it’ll clean, and that’s not necessarily true.
I love that. What have you done, especially with COVID, to adjust with what’s going on today?
Like most places, we’ve been using temperature checks, masks obviously. But even before this, we were always mindful of germs and cross-contamination. We use red towels and red mop pads for the bathrooms. We use green towels and green mop pads for the common areas and kitchen. That way, you never have to worry about a towel that’s been near someone else’s toilet bowl being used on your kitchen countertop. We also use a chemical called BruTab 6S – it’s a disinfectant – and we pretreat the home with it. They wait the customary 4-5 minutes as recommended by the CDC, and then they start to clean.
How does it work? Are services done regularly like once a week, or a one-off basis?
60% of our clients are recurring; we go into their home weekly, biweekly, or monthly. The other 40%, especially for the Hoboken area, are move-in/move-outs. We do a lot of move-in/move-outs, getting the home ready since everyone wants their deposit back. They want to make sure it’s taken care of the right way.
That’s cool, that’s good to know! Are you from the Hudson County area?
I’m not. I was born and raised in Linden, NJ.
So how come Hoboken/Jersey City?
Funny story about that, actually. There was a business, I believe it was called Liberty beforehand, and it was a mess. The owner reached out to me and he was a bit tired of running it, and he was like, “Hey, you’re kicking butt in other areas, would you be interested?” I didn’t really know much about Hoboken, so I came here for a weekend and loved it. It was pretty cool and a nice, vibrant area so I knew this could work. I bought it and completely did a 180 with it.
How long have you been in Hoboken now?
We’ve been in Hoboken for four years.
What’s the most common thing you see that people need?
Everyone loves their bathroom cleaned! I think most people book a cleaning for the bathroom, cleaning the rest of the house is just a cherry on top. That’s usually the first area they go to when inspecting a home.
Has your business been affected by COVID?
Definitely. We shut down for the latter part of March all the way through June 1st because there was so much uncertainty. My staff was scared, I didn’t know what was going on, there was too much craziness. We had to gameplay everything. Rather than just wing it, we shut everything down and we gameplanned how we were going to reopen safely.
How do you feel things are going?
I think it’s improving, from a business standpoint. We’re still about 30% from where we were when we shut down in March, but we’re grateful people are calling in and still want us. We used to be about 80% recurring, now we’re at 60%, so they want people in their home less frequently but are still willing to give it a shot.
Especially as more and more people work from home. I know the more time I spend at home, the more of a mess I make.
Right, and that’s created a change, too, because our most popular time frame used to be 8AM or 10AM. Our most popular time slot is the 3PM time slot. Everyone’s finished working and they’ll go for a walk or coffee while we clean. We had to make a switch because afternoons are our most popular time.
What’s the easiest way to contact you guys?
SuperMaids.com. Everything is completely web-based so you can book, schedule, reschedule, everything online.
Do you have any particular services for the wintertime that you guys do?
A lot of oven cleaning, although I’m not sure how it’s going to trend this year. Everyone may have less visitors, but oven cleanings are a very popular service.
That’s awesome. Is there anything else you want people to know?
Just that we really are different. One of the things that I’m proud of is that we do take the time to clean the house and it does equate to paying a little bit more, but the quality is there. Especially in these times, the cleanliness is there. You can hire someone who may charge you want you want to pay, but is it really clean? So many times, I’ll be in the elevator and I’ll see a cleaner with the yellow gloves from another house and I’m amazed most customers allow that. A lot of them don’t notice because they’re not home. Or they’ll use the toilet bowl brush from someone else’s house. All these things matter. There’s a difference between a house that was cleaned and a clean house. We go for a clean house. If you are a customer, we’ll give you a clean house.
Leave a Reply