“If I want anything for Christmas, I have to make sure that the house was clean,” Kyress Todd says. That was the rule in the house where he grew up. The ordinary days had a rule too. “Even as a child, I had to clean my room before I go outside.”
Todd was the oldest child, so cleaning meant his own mess and his siblings’. “I had to clean up after my siblings, I had to clean up after myself,” he says. When he later had to pick a line of work, he went with the thing he already knew how to do. “It just came natural because I’ve been doing this forever.”
He runs KT Facility Experts, a commercial cleaning company based in Bellflower. He started it when COVID hit, while he was working in a hospital. With so much shut down, he says, he had room to decide whether he wanted to keep working for someone else or work for himself. Businesses that had closed needed disinfecting before they could open again. His wife was pregnant, and the germs worried him. “I was just kind of scared of everywhere we went, how much germs and stuff was everywhere,” he says.
His first contracts were a dentist’s office and a few other small medical buildings. At the start it was only Todd, with his wife helping until she went back to her own job. Then he hired two cleaners. They now handle some of the contracts on their own, so he does not have to drive to every site. He still cleans, too.
The work is commercial only. Todd does not take residential jobs, and office buildings are what he wants the company known for. His clients include a church and a couple of warehouse companies.
One customer who booked a one-time cleaning described the start in a review: Todd came out himself to walk the space before giving an estimate, and when the customer called back to schedule, he had them on the calendar in less than a week.
Todd says he keeps the work in his own company rather than passing it along to someone else. Once a business signs on, he says, the job is his company’s responsibility. He puts the client’s needs ahead of his own hours, “even if I have to stay an extra hour or so and not getting paid for the extra time.”