Before Tina started a cleaning company, she ran a wine cellar in the City Market, the kind with members. Then it shut down suddenly, and she had to decide what came next.
“I didn’t really know what I was going to do, so I started the cleaning company,” says Tina, who owns Kansas City Professional Cleaning Crew in Independence. Most of the wine club’s members moved over with her as clients, and that gave her a start. She also wanted work that left her time for her son instead of keeping her gone all day.
The company dates itself to 2016. The stretch of its history Tina dwells on came later, when the client list she had built disappeared.
When COVID arrived, she was still cleaning solo, with a full roster of regulars. It hit hard. “I went down to zero so I had to build from the ground up after COVID,” she says. Then comes the other half. “We started over. We got most of our regulars back.”
Twice, then, the business has stood on people who chose to come with her: first the members of a wine club, then customers who returned to a schedule that had gone empty.
The crew grew the same way, through people she already knew. Tina is the only owner, and the cleaners are subcontractors, many of whom she met early on. Her first contract came through a real estate company, and she paid attention to who that company used: the carpet cleaners, the window cleaners, the extra cleaners who turned up on its jobs. She got to know them, and they sent her people they knew and vouched for.
“I kind of knew them on a personal level,” she says.
She still picks people that way. “Most of them I just kind of judge off character,” she says. She does not try to remake anyone. “We don’t try to change them and make them become anything. We see who they already are and just go off that.”
There is little formal training. “They either have it or they don’t,” she says. “We show them what we want done, and then they do it or, if they don’t do it well, then we just use other contractors.”
The approach shows in who they clean for. A lot of her clients are elderly, and some of her cleaners have worked as caretakers for years. “They work well with the elders,” she says. She describes the team as close to a family, a group that has worked together a long time.
The same idea of keeping a familiar face carries into homes. One client who wanted the familiarity of having the same cleaner come every visit said in her review that the company made it happen.
These days the work leans commercial. Tina says commercial cleaning is what the company does best, though it began in houses and still does both. Its commercial accounts include offices, medical and dental practices, churches and daycares, with after-hours service available. Cleaners arrive in all-black uniforms, and the territory runs from Independence to Kansas City, Lee’s Summit, Blue Springs and Greenwood.
Tina plans to hand the company down. Her son is young, and she says he has been learning the business. “He’s taking it over, let him tell it,” she says. “We’re going to grow it, and then that way he has something to walk into.”
He already has a job. “He’s doing trash. He’s vacuuming. He’s polishing wood,” she says.