When Ingrid Sampaio arrived in the United States from Brazil in 2011, she began cleaning houses to support herself while she built a new life in a country where she didn’t yet speak English.
She cleaned for someone else first. When she went out on her own, she worked alone and hired as the work grew. Today Ingrid’s Team LLC, based in Woburn, Massachusetts, has cleaners in the field, a field manager who checks their work and assistants who stay in touch with clients. Her family is part of it. “I have my family that works with me today,” she says. Her mother and sister work with her, and her brother works from Brazil as one of her assistants.
Sampaio is frank that a standard house cleaning is something most companies can handle. What she wants her business known for is two things it does beyond the cleaning. It gives work to women, many of them from other countries. And it donates cleanings to people in treatment for cancer.
“As I came from Brazil, being an immigrant, I hired people from different countries,” she says. The point, as she puts it, is “helping other families to build their own life here.” The company describes itself on its website as woman-owned and immigrant-founded.
The cancer work runs through Cleaning for a Reason, a nonprofit that partners with residential cleaning companies to offer free house cleaning to households dealing with cancer. Ingrid’s Team joined in 2024, according to the nonprofit, which says the company takes on up to two patients a month and cleans each home for two consecutive months at no charge. Patients apply through the nonprofit, and the program covers Greater Boston, including Woburn, Cambridge, Somerville, Waltham, Medford and Lexington.
Sampaio does not treat it as a side project. “We provide free cleanings for patients with cancer,” she says. She sees it as part of the deal with her paying customers. “It’s not just taking from them, but we’re also donating and helping other people,” she says.
Sampaio hopes to spread awareness of the program beyond her own clients. Anyone who knows someone in cancer treatment can share information about Cleaning for a Reason and encourage them to apply.
Most of the company’s work is residential, and Sampaio calls that its main focus. Crews also take on deep cleans, move-outs, rental turnovers between guests and cleanup after renovation work, along with offices, medical facilities and airport-related commercial spaces.
The company keeps a standard list of tasks, but Sampaio says the crews don’t stop there. “We try to learn from our clients exactly what they need instead of just following a list all the time,” she says. A busy client might want the team to concentrate on particular areas of the house, and the visit is built around that.
What keeps the crews consistent, she says, is training. New hires go through a background check. For about their first two weeks, a trainer goes out on jobs with them. “We train them how to treat the customer, how to clean a baseboard, how to clean inside the fridge,” she says. A field manager makes sure the work is done properly, and cleaners repeat training when they need it.
She names communication as the company’s strongest point. Assistants contact clients about delays, and also when a crew is running early, so clients know before anyone walks into the house. The company offers a satisfaction guarantee: if something isn’t done right and the client calls within 24 hours of the cleaning, it schedules a return visit at no cost. Its website lists the company as bonded and carrying general liability insurance.
Sampaio owns the company alone, with no partners, and her crews work within 25 miles of Woburn. One customer wrote in a Google review that the crew’s deep clean was impressively detailed and that the time it took to make sure of the quality was the best he had seen. Another called the service dependable and consistent.
Outside the business, Sampaio studied photography and art history, according to the company’s Nextdoor page, and she has used her photographs to tell the stories of immigrants.
Her plan for Ingrid’s Team is to grow it, hire more people and perhaps serve more towns than it does now. The hiring is the part she returns to. “Just grow my business, be able to hire more people,” she says. “Be able to provide more jobs.”