Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Tammy Russell, owner and operator of New Age Cleaning since 2008, puts the shine to a floor at a home in St. Mary’s Valley Lee community.
Liz Bradshaw was busy raising two sons, now 2 and 6, before they went into day care and kindergarten and she decided to find a way to raise some money.
Both before and after the births of her children, the 30-year-old Hughesville resident cleaned the homes of a couple of friends and family members. That helped her choose a new vocation.
“I wanted to find something that I was good at and would enjoy doing, and still have the flexibility to have the time to be with my kids, and have an active role in their lives,” Bradshaw said on a drizzly afternoon at a coffee shop near her home. “I filed the paperwork with the state in May of last year.”
Bradshaw’s not alone in launching a solo cleaning business in Southern Maryland, an area that benefits from hosting military facilities and a nuclear power plant but is not totally immune to the effects of the worldwide economic downturn that struck hard a little more than three years ago. For fledgling business proprietors, the tasks include getting supplies, customers and a good trade name.
Bradshaw came up with Cleanest Castles.
“I was writing down every name I could think of,” she said. “Darn near everything I could think of was taken.”
She chose one that she said played on the old slogan “Your home is your castle.”
Bradshaw had been using supplies available at the three homes she’d been cleaning before she got her own stock for the new business.
“I pretty much cashed in everything I had raised in hopes of turning it around and supporting my family,” she said. “The bulk of my funds were spent at the Oreck store in Waldorf.”
That included buying vacuum cleaners, a steam mop, microfiber rags and “just about one of everything they had in cleaning products,” she said.
She put a classified ad on a regional website, built her own website and got her business listed on the Google and Yahoo search engines.
“I had a huge decal put on the back of my truck,” she said. “I walked the commuter lot in the middle of the summer, with my 18-month-old on my hip, putting business cards under windshield wipers.”
The Internet proved to be the best tool for attracting customers, Bradshaw said, and she now has about 20 of them.
“It’s been fluctuating with the economy,” she said. “A client’s husband has lost their job. It goes up and down.”
Bradshaw said her standards help her achieve a good livelihood.
“I set my own expectations for myself high, and I haven’t had any problems meeting other people’s expectations,” she said. “It’s listening to their needs, and striving to be consistent.”
Bradshaw said she has little interaction with other people in the cleaning business, but that she suspects that others who are insured and bonded like herself are “pretty much in the same ballpark” as far as what they charge for their services, and ultimately offer a better deal than someone operating on their own and not having an actual business.
“Hopefully, people will finally get what they pay for. They tell me their experiences,” Bradshaw said, including stories from customers about maids who don’t show up or are not consistent in their work. “Two of them have told me,” she said, “that the people who came in were hanging out and talking on the cellphone, like they actually lived there.”
Bradshaw’s husband has been self-employed for 25 years doing custom carpentry and remodeling. She cleans six to eight houses a day in the tri-county area.
“I feel if I want to build up any security for myself and my family, this is the best way of going about it,” she said. “There’s not a whole lot out there to be had.”
Tweaking her past work
into a new career
Tammy Russell of Tall Timbers started New Age Cleaning in January 2008, after garnering work experience as both a home health care provider for terminally ill people for 11 years and a shorter period of employment with a local business specializing in fire restoration, mold cleanup and carpet cleaning.
She said “the toll of having patients die at every job” as a caregiver, and the skills she acquired with the cleaning business, motivated her to try something different, on her own.
“I cleaned houses for everybody I took care of as patients,” Russell, 31, said during an interview at a country store near her home, and those houses included ones where the occupants often hosted parties and other gatherings, such as an 18th-century manor home along the Potomac River with walnut walls and historic paint.
“It got me to learn how to talk to people more,” she said, and that helped as she launched her new business.
“I went door to door with fliers,” she said. “I got involved with some advertising companies. It got my name out further than the fliers.
“It was slow in the beginning. When you start your own cleaning company, it takes a few years. Things don’t happen overnight. Every year, it’s been a little bit better.”
Russell had six clients by the end of 2008, the farthest from home located in Mechanicsville, and she drew upon her father’s experience as a businessman running an auto repair garage.
In addition to the cost of business insurance and advertising, Russell has invested at least $5,000 on supplies including commercial vacuums, plus the purchase of two vehicles in the continuing pursuit of better gas mileage. One of them is a hybrid.
“I now work in four counties. I’m driving 600 miles a week,” she said, but she doesn’t have to pass her fuel costs onto her customers. “I don’t have to charge extra for gas.”
With 28 clients now on her schedule, Russell is cleaning 70 houses every 25 days. She has taken on an assistant, one day a week, which means also making sure the employee has insurance coverage and Social Security.
“We’ve known each other as family friends for quite a long time,” Russell said, and they work together at the same destination. “She does a different section of the home. I’m at every job that I have.”
Just as she doesn’t charge clients for her travel expenses, Russell said she doesn’t look to tack on fees for what’s needed by different clients.
“If they need something extra done for a holiday, I do it for free. I don’t charge them,” she said. “I don’t walk around with a clipboard.”
Russell has seen other cleaning businesses also starting up in Southern Maryland.
“There are always new companies cropping up,” she said. “If one loses a house, we hear about it. It’s pretty much the St. Mary’s County way. Everybody knows everything about everybody.”
The bad experiences that do occur, between a homeowner and a cleaning service, can create lingering trust issues that the next one will have to resolve over time.
“It takes a year and a half to earn their trust,” Russell said. “They’re giving you their keys, their pass codes. You have to earn that.”
Returning to a crowded field
Molly Casazza, 59, of St. Leonard started working for a fire-restoration business in the 1970s, got experience in servicing carpeting and upholstery and first started her own cleaning business in 1984.
“I had five crews at one time, back then,” she said. “I’ve always been hands-on. I would work with the crews.”
Casazza opened up a consignment shop in Calvert County in 2006, but she closed it three years later amid the economic downturn and resurrected M.C. Cleaning Services from her home early last year.
From the onset, she’s focused on a professional understanding of what she’s doing.
She took classes on the fire-restoration work as she got into the labor of removing soot from the walls and ceilings of damaged homes and making furniture, clothes and other items useable again.
She was living in Anne Arundel County when she was invited to work at a carpet-cleaning business owned by a friend who was a trained textile chemist, and learned how to operate and maintain a truck-mounted Hydromaster cleaning machine.
A back injury halted that work, but the same friend later suggested that Casazza should start her own cleaning service.
“It went off like a rocket” with about 50 clients in three counties, she said, but she observed firsthand the cost and control problems of a large workforce. “You get people who don’t show up. Many people find out this work is too hard.”
Casazza and a friend’s daughter tried something different, cleaning office and commercial properties.
“It’s totally different. The Realtors do not want their desks touched,” she said. “It’s not as detailed as your residential.”
Casazza and her husband moved to New York before returning to Maryland in 1994, when she first started the M.C. Cleaning business and worked on her own for a growing list of returning customers, even after the couple relocated in 2002 from Annapolis to Calvert County. She gave that job up in 2006 to open her Second Hand Sue consignment shop, first in a Prince Frederick shopping center and then off Route 231 in Barstow.
“It went well. We had a beautiful store,” she said, but times changed. “My sales dropped, not only from moving. The economy started dropping.”
Casazza found herself in the midst of a wave of new cleaning businesses when she resumed that work last year, but has relied on her lessons learned and clientele preserved to carry out her comeback.
“You have to be very people oriented [and] get to know your business,” she said. “Do little extra things for them. They’re going to give you a key to their house, so they want to trust you. They want to say, ‘Not only does my house look good, but it smells good.’”
As she resumes her business, Casazza said, “This time it’s a little slow. What I have now is all from word-of-mouth referrals.”
She thus far has four residential clients and two clients in real-estate offices who hire her to clean rental properties, as they transition from one client to another.
Part of Casazza’s return to the business was motivated by the questions she got from her successors.
“I was telling these people what to do, and I decided I might as well get back into it,” she said. “It’s not a real expensive business, to get into it. Sticking with it, without advertising, that’s the trick. The key is to keep it going with your same clients. After 25 years, I must like it, because I keep going back to it.”
jwharton@somdnews.com