Jasmine Price grew up in Northern Virginia “wanting to do whatever I wanted to do, so I was very hard-headed,” she says.
In her telling, other people turned that around. “I had a lot of great people to keep me in check, a lot of mentors for sure,” she says. She went through Fairfax County public schools, where “it was just so many teachers who poured in me consistently.” She doesn’t single out one mentor. She describes teachers and people in her community who kept investing in her.
She founded M & D Cleaning Service in 2014, and it started as a hobby. “Just helping people around,” she says, “and then it kind of just snowballed from there.” In the early days that meant older folks and anyone else who needed help around the house. It is still a family-owned company, she says, now with about 20 to 30 employees and an office on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria.
The work has grown well past those first house calls. The company handles turnover and biweekly cleanings, medical offices and event cleanup. Price counts the 2017 inauguration among its event jobs, and she says the company has cleaned shelters throughout Alexandria and Fairfax County. On its Google listing, M & D describes itself as a certified minority- and women-owned business enterprise offering contract cleaning to commercial and high-security facilities.
Price runs the crew by showing people what she expects, and she doesn’t talk about policies or training manuals. “Lead by an example. That’s number one, definitely, and just showing them the work ethic that I would like, just being the role model,” she says.
The same instinct points outward. She describes the company as small and hands-on, “always doing something as far as with the youth and different things.” She says it likes to give back, especially to female entrepreneurs, women and girls. She doesn’t name specific programs, only that she tries to do a lot.
The early work of helping people who couldn’t manage on their own still turns up in how customers describe her. One man hired the company to clean his grandparents’ home after his family could no longer get around the way they used to. He needed someone he could trust, he wrote, and Price took the time to learn what he needed down to the details.
New jobs follow a set order. Before any home or office goes on a recurring schedule, the company’s service policy calls for a deep-cleaning team, led by an initial-cleaning supervisor, to scrub the whole place. The regular visits keep it that way after that.
On the larger scale, Price says, M & D is known for janitorial work: getting facilities back up to par for inspection, the kind of “places who need a lot of TLC who haven’t had it in a while.”