“Our cleaners actually have a say,” Adam says. “It’s not like we’re their overlords. It’s more like we’re partners with them.”
Adam is one of the owners of Wexford Cleaning, the house cleaning company he and his friend Ash founded in Wexford in 2024. Its cleaners work in homes and light offices across Allegheny, Butler and Beaver counties. The way the company treats them goes back to what Adam saw before he ran a company of his own.
He came out of the corporate world, where he spent a long time in management. “People get too focused in the corporate world on the bottom line,” he says, “and the two things that get sacrificed are the well-being of their employees and the satisfaction of their customers.” He watched both slip. When the partners started Wexford Cleaning, they agreed from the beginning that it would not happen there. “We’re going to make sure the clients are happy,” he says. “We’re going to make sure the cleaners are happy.”
The people who made that agreement are family and close friends. Adam runs the company day to day with Ash and Ash’s wife, Abeer. Adam’s father, Djamel, is the fourth owner and keeps the books. Adam is happy to call it a family-owned business.
Treating cleaners as partners starts with pay. Paying them well was one of the ideals the owners shared from the outset, Adam says, and it has drawn people who know the work from the other side. Several of the company’s cleaners once ran cleaning companies of their own. Now they take their jobs through Wexford Cleaning, which handles the administrative side and makes sure they get paid, leaving them to do the cleaning.
Most of that cleaning happens in houses, about three-quarters of the work by Adam’s estimate, with light offices making up the rest. He likes both, but homes offer something offices don’t. “Residential is nice because you make a relationship with the people,” he says. The company keeps that relationship steady by sending recurring clients the same team each visit, so the cleaners learn the house and how the family likes it. Every cleaner is background-checked and interviewed in person before working in a home, and each carries insurance in addition to the company’s own policy.
Each visit comes with a 24-hour promise. If a client spots something missed, Adam says, cleaners go back to touch it up, no questions asked. The owners follow up personally as well. A customer who booked a move-in clean noted afterward that one of them called to make sure she was satisfied.
Inside the company, Adam says, there is no hierarchy. Suggestions come from the cleaners, the staff and the partners alike, and he sees his job as empowering everybody on the team. “We take their feedback, things like that,” he says. “They like it, actually.”