Wes Bobek started House Keep Up after reading an article on Reddit.
He had been managing a truck repair shop, and it was coming apart. “The shop kind of started going in the wrong direction and everyone was kind of quitting,” he says, “so I decided to quit as well.” He had two things to go on. Before the shop, he had worked for a commercial cleaning company, stripping and waxing floors and running carpet extraction. The shop had taught him something too. “I picked up some business acumen there,” he says. Then came the article. “I stumbled upon this article on Reddit and I just started the cleaning business.”
That was in 2016, and Bobek still runs the company without a partner. His crews clean homes in Chicago neighborhoods and in suburbs such as Evanston, Oak Park, Skokie and Des Plaines.
The company’s About page traces its founding to Bobek’s frustration with cleaning companies that missed both their customers’ calls and their customers’ needs. He still describes the business that way. “We’re never a place where we just don’t answer,” he says. “I feel like the communication is the most important part.”
He does not limit that to customers. “If you’re communicating well, that solves a lot of the problems,” he says. He wants everyone “on the same page between the technicians, the office, the customers and everything else.”
The crews are the other half of the arrangement. “Our teams are background checked and they’ve been with us for years,” he says. The company tries to send the same cleaners back to recurring clients. A visit follows a written room-by-room checklist, the crew brings its own supplies, and a standard clean usually takes two to three hours.
The pandemic tested the business early. When reports suggested the virus could spread through surface contact, Bobek bought disinfection equipment and offered a flu buster package. Demand for surface disinfection faded quickly once people understood the virus spread mostly through the air, and he had kept the bet small. “We didn’t lean into it too hard,” he says.
“It was a little bit scary, I’m not going to lie,” he says. For a while it felt like “a temporary pause.” Once restrictions started, crews had trouble getting down some streets in Oak Park. “After a week or so people started calling back in,” he says. He used the slow stretch to step back and look at the whole business. “It was a time for me to figure out how do I reposition.”
The old floor work came with him. Most of what House Keep Up does is residential, and some companies hire its crews for corporate turnovers. Its commercial accounts also include senior living facilities, where the job is carpet extraction and floor waxing, the same work Bobek did before he ever ran a shop.
“That’s something that I was familiar with when I was working in the industry myself,” he says.