When Joey opened Bora Cleaning Services, the first jobs were houses, and he cleaned them himself. “I started doing residential work just to learn the business and get the clients,” he says. “I would go out myself and go and clean.”
One homeowner who hired him to deep clean a bathroom later described the visit. Joey ran a steamer over the mold in the grout and tile. Afterward, his father came in and replaced the old caulking around the tub.
Joey did not come to cleaning cold. He had worked for a cleaning company before he started his own. Since leaving school, he had spent about five years working for other people and trying different things. Because he already knew the work, he opened Bora to see how it would go.
The houses were meant to be a starting point. Joey saw a ceiling on what a home job could bring. The one real upside was that a household could go on a standing schedule. “I didn’t really see no value in it, so I switched over to commercial,” he says.
The commercial work is “mostly janitorial stuff: stripping, waxing, floor buffing,” he says. Joey is based on Staten Island and works in all five boroughs. He still takes a residential job when one comes in, but commercial work is what he is after.
Bora is a one-man company. Joey does most of the work himself. When a job calls for more hands, he brings someone in to help. If you have people working for you, he says, you need “systems” in place for how they act around customers.
He also keeps a regular job, and Bora is what he does on the side. He wants that to change. “I see the vision in it,” he says, comparing the cleaning company with working for someone else. “You’re having your own schedule, and you’re the one that has to deal with all the problems, but it’s worth it.”
He tries to give customers the respect he would want from a contractor himself. He answers a call or a message as soon as he can. If something is going to throw off a schedule, he tells the customer ahead of time. “Everyone’s human,” he says. “If something comes up, something comes up.”
When a job goes wrong, he does not wait for the customer to chase him. “I’m not the type to run away from problems,” he says. “I’m going to figure it out, whether I gotta come back or even if I gotta spend money out of my pocket to fix the problem.”