Once a client lets an Allora Cleaning New York crew inside, the crew asks whether it’s all right to play music. Clients say yes, owner Samantha Wallace says, and what comes out of the speaker depends on the house. Crews have played Spanish music, southern music and calypso. One of her cleaners, a man in his 30s, put on Al Green, and the customer wanted to know what he knew about that song.
Wallace treats that exchange as part of the work. Her company, based in Jamaica, Queens, cleans homes, Airbnb units, move-outs, post-construction sites and commercial spaces across the five boroughs and parts of Long Island. The client is part of the visit, not someone waiting in another room for the crew to finish.
“We take our time. We talk to our customers,” she says. “We don’t leave their house until they are happy.”
In a home, that means the crew stays while the client walks through the apartment. “If we miss a spot, we’re on site to make sure and take care of that,” Wallace says. She does not want the call that comes after a crew has gone, saying something was missed. She adds a check of her own. When a job wraps up, she does a virtual walkthrough with the cleaner still on site and signs off on it. A customer who used the crew for a move-out mentioned afterward that Wallace sent videos of the place once the work was done.
The company is young. Wallace first ran a smaller business, SLMP Cleaning Services, which started out cleaning for elderly clients. She then took on the Allora Cleaning name through a franchise, and the work widened to residential, post-construction and Airbnb jobs. Her own description of the model is short: “a different way of cleaning.”
The talking is why she hires the way she does. Before she brings anyone on, she says, “I make sure and drill down on their communication skills.” She wants people persons, because, as she puts it, “some clients just want that conversation.”
The same rule covers the times a crew runs late. Wallace says she picks up the phone herself to tell a client the crew is 15 or 20 minutes behind because of traffic. “Communication is the key,” she says she tells her team. With older clients the call goes to the landline, since some of them don’t accept text messages.
She traces the habit to her mother, who went to work on time and made sure the children got to school on time. “Never be late,” Wallace says. “Even if it’s five minutes, you just apologize.”
She has 15 cleaners, and they meet monthly. She uses the meeting to ask what problems they are running into and to check attendance, and she says none of them has an attendance problem. Her instruction for the day before a job is specific: “look at your phone and make sure you know where that client is, how far that client is, and how long it will take you to get there.” A cleaner coming from Brooklyn to a job in Queens, she says, should plan on an hour and a half.
Sometimes a cleaner can’t make it at all, because of a family emergency or a child to pick up. The client still gets a crew. “I will step in and go to that client and clean myself,” Wallace says.