When a new client calls The Premier Cleaning Service of Camarillo, it is usually Lizzie who comes out to walk through the place. Her husband, Tony, who runs the company with her, calls her very detailed and very fussy about cleanliness in their own home.
That fussiness is the job description. “She wants that standard of what we want in our own home with every single client,” he says.
The walkthrough is also where the couple wins their work. “There’s barely a time when we go out to see a client, carry out a walkthrough, that we don’t win the job,” he says.
The standard came out of an earlier line of work. Before the cleaning company, the couple, originally from the United Kingdom, flipped houses. They kept getting stuck with the last step. “We used to flip houses and would end up doing the cleaning ourselves because there wasn’t any decent cleaning providers that could clean a property to a high standard,” Tony says. They had found it frustrating to hire cleaners who were reliable and did good work, so they started their own company.
The company now cleans homes and offices across Ventura County, Malibu, Calabasas and Santa Barbara County. Tony says most clients fall somewhere in the middle: people in apartments, nurses and doctors, firefighters and other first responders. Most are on recurring schedules. The work includes move-in and move-out cleans, which he says the company has done for a long time, and post-construction cleanup. That is the kind of mess the couple used to face at the end of their own projects.
Keeping a home standard across that many houses comes down to small habits. When traffic makes a crew late, someone calls the client before the crew shows up. “Look, I’m really sorry, we’re going to be about 30 minutes late today, is that okay?” Tony says. Clients have told him they never got that call before.
A sick cleaner stays home. Crew members with a stomach bug or the flu often want to work anyway, he says. “They’ll want to come in and work and we won’t send them out to clients.” If no other team can cover, the office phones the client and offers another day. “We can normally fit someone in the next day,” he says. In his experience, clients who get that kind of flexibility are flexible in return when a visit has to move.
The crews work Monday through Friday. Weekends are off unless someone wants the hours, because most of the staff have families. Most have been with the company six or seven years. Hiring follows what Tony calls a regimented process, and the company is insured and bonded. “We’re not a hire and fire company,” he says, “so you get consistency with us.”
One family saw that routine up close. The client had hired the company to clean for older parents who don’t like surprises, and wrote online that the crew works from a scripted routine, spells out ahead of time what will be done and when, and that a supervisor named Alyssa walked the client’s mother through the finished tasks after a visit.
The uniform carries its own reminder. The company says its staff wear shoes as part of their attire so they remember to put themselves in their clients’ shoes.
Two of the company’s very first clients are still on the schedule. Both called in the first week it opened.