“I lost around eight clients,” says the owner of MC Cleaning Services, Inc., remembering what COVID did to the business she had just started.
She had begun with residential work, cleaning houses. When the pandemic arrived, the calls went one way. Clients told her not to come, that they would call her later. By her count, she was left with a single client. The reason, she says, was simple: the business was new, and it had no deep roster of regulars to absorb the loss.
So she went to work for someone else. She stayed about two years. Then, as she puts it, she came back to the idea of having her own business again.
The company that came out of that second try was established in 2022 and works across San Joaquin County. It no longer cleans only houses. It takes commercial and janitorial jobs as well, and its Google listing names deep cleans and post-construction cleanups among the work.
Those deep cleans have won over people who see a lot of cleaning crews. One contractor hired the company to clean a rental property after the tenants moved out. The contractor had used many cleaning companies before and singled this one out for its attention to detail and professionalism.
The owner holds herself to a standard she worries can tip over. She can be too reliable at times, she says. She trains her crew to take each customer seriously because she does, and she expects them to follow her lead.
Her son, who has worked jobs alongside her a couple of times, has seen it up close. “She takes it very seriously,” he says. “It’s something that she does 100%.”
She wants the company to grow.
The reason she went into business in the first place had nothing to do with cleaning. Her sons were teenagers, and she wanted to spend more of her days with them. Running her own company gave her that. “I was getting more time with my boys,” she says.