Sandra Naranjo’s cleaning company already hires single mothers. What she is building now is the training to go with the jobs. Evergreen Pro Cleaners is working with an outside organization on a project to “hire single moms and provide the training for them,” she says, and it is aimed at the Hispanic community. “We are working and create this project,” she says.
The company’s own pages describe the same aim in broader terms. They talk about helping single mothers, heads of households and other underserved groups find stable work and room to grow in the cleaning trade, and about partnering with nonprofits to do it.
The company is a family operation. Naranjo and her husband, Gerardo Rubio, started Evergreen Pro Cleaners in 2023 and run it from Kent. She is the owner. “My partner is my husband,” she says. “This is a family business.”
Most of its customers are property managers, Naranjo says. Much of the work is commercial-style cleaning inside residential properties: move-ins and move-outs, deep cleans and post-construction cleanups done alongside subcontractors. She works with realtors as well. Offices and janitorial contracts round out the list.
The territory is wide for a company founded in 2023. Naranjo says the first contracts were around Seattle. Since then the company has taken jobs in Vancouver, Washington, in Bremerton, and over the mountains in Yakima and Wenatchee, and she says it has started working in Spokane and Kennewick. “We try to cover all the state,” she says. After that, she wants to take the company into other states.
Covering that much ground puts pressure on the schedule. The company keeps its bookings in a CRM, and Naranjo says crews stay in touch with customers by text, call and email before and after each job, with reminders, notes when a crew is on the way and word of any change.
She knows what the alternative looks like. “We understand the frustration for the people sometimes is because the cleaners don’t show up or they are late,” she says. A customer is told 9 a.m., and the crew arrives in the afternoon or the next day. “They are just waiting and waiting and waiting,” she says, “and no one is calling.”
Her answer is to build slack into each crew’s day, so the people she hires are not set up to fail. “We leave them a pretty good frame time to get to the services,” she says. “Sometimes it’s hard, about the traffic or whatever.”