Norma Jean Garcia started cleaning at 14, helping an aunt clean her business, mostly dusting at first. As she got older she helped more and learned how the business ran. She married, the years went on, and there was always a cleaning job on the side.
At some point the side work stopped making sense as side work. She asked herself why she didn’t make it official, get her license and go at it full force. She went downtown, got the paperwork done and gave up the full-time job. She puts that at around 2021.
It was not an easy step. She admits she was scared to start the business and worried about it. She told herself she had to think positive, and she did it.
Garcia is the sole owner of Cleaning With Care. When she needs extra people, she calls agencies in Tulsa, the city where she was raised and has lived all her life, and she likes that the work goes to Tulsa people. New workers hear her rules first, and respect, for each other and for the customer, comes ahead of everything else. Anyone who doesn’t fit is told plainly that they don’t quite fit the team. A worker who does something extra on a job, like carrying a customer’s groceries in, won’t get yelled at for it and may get a bonus.
She says she has been cleaning all her life, long enough to know which solutions are safe on different flooring, appliances and furniture and which will ruin them. She specializes in commercial cleaning and mold removal, and during COVID she fogged buildings and apartments to disinfect them. In homes, she listens first and cleans to what the customer asks for, because it is their home and they want it their way.
One apartment customer described Garcia and an assistant working through the kitchen cabinets and drawers, steam-cleaning the carpet and organizing her belongings so she could find them afterward.
A lot of her customers have a disability or a medical condition that keeps them from cleaning their own homes. She tells them not to feel bad about it, and that they are the reason she is in business and the ones who keep her in it.
She tries to be on time every time. When she can’t be, there is a rule for that too. “If I’m not, I’m human,” she says. “I always call. Listen, I’m 10 minutes late, I’m five minutes late. I explain why. Usually it’s traffic or, you know, rain or something.”