“We did some training on how to do COVID cleanup, like terminal cleaning,” says Huq, who runs the house-cleaning side of J & H Cleaning Company in the Bronx.
Once the company took on COVID disinfection, requests came in for houses, church buildings, apartments, medical facilities and schools. Huq says the response was huge. He describes that stretch as the time J & H established its base, and he dates the start of its commercial work at scale to the same year. “In 2020, on a big scale, we started doing commercial cleaning,” he says.
The company’s website describes the equipment behind the disinfection work. Ultra-low-volume fogging machines turn liquid disinfectant into very fine droplets and spread them evenly through large spaces. The site also says commercial jobs are taken around the clock, across a territory that runs from the Bronx through the other boroughs to Long Island, Yonkers and Westchester County.
The business is older than the pandemic. It started in 2011, Huq says, when his wife, then working as a cleaner, began building her own list of clients. A couple of years later they formed J & H.
Three people run it now, and they divide the work by client. Johanna handles the commercial accounts. Jackie handles the finances. Huq takes the homes.
The commercial side is where he sees room to grow. He talks about taking commercial cleaning into other states, naming Florida and saying he is studying the California market. Selling is not part of the plan. “Company is my baby,” he says.
Most of his house clients are on recurring service. “We clean their house and they call us again,” he says. He credits two habits: attention to detail and punctuality. Crews arrive when they said they would, so the customer doesn’t miss whatever comes next on the calendar. He tries to fit in last-minute requests, and for same-day cleanings, he says, “we are always available.”
He also pitches in on site. A customer who bought a deep cleaning of an aunt’s one-bedroom apartment as a gift wrote afterward that the job was tough enough that Huq jumped in to help the crew.
When a job can’t happen as scheduled, Huq says, the customer hears about it early, sometimes a week ahead. “If for some reason, for an emergency or anything, we cannot make it, we let them know beforehand so the customer can take action on that, or they can switch the date,” he says.
The company’s website lists community commitment among its working principles. Huq puts it more plainly. “We work for community,” he says, and he means something specific by it. “If there is a cancer patient in the house, we work for them free.”