Journey
“Homework came about just for that reason. ‘My woman Friday’, as I like to refer to her, still just couldn’t understand why I won’t allow her to douse my bathroom with buckets of water. I realised that my pain was the pain of a lot of other women. Gurgaon has a lot of expensive real estate and the already high levels of dust and hard water make it hard to keep things looking clean and neat all the time. And that’s how and where we started.”
What started out as just a cleaning service, went on to become a one stop shop for all home services. “Today, we have been able to build a trust in the market and people are more than willing to give us bigger jobs other than cleaning, like painting of their homes, woodwork and other odd jobs around the house.”
Wide range of services offered include Interior & exterior painting; making modular kitchens; wardrobes and other furniture; electrical, plumbing and masonry services; complete turn key services including civil work; marble floor polishing; Deep cleaning of full homes, offices and other commercial establishments; bathroom cleaning, kitchen cleaning, sofa and carpet shampoo; and pest control, termite treatment and pigeon netting services.
The materials and equipment used are different as per the jobs at hand. Diversey and Taski for are used for cleaning.
Challenges
In this business, every day is a new day. One is dealing with people on all fronts — be it your employees or the client. No one solution fits all problems. “First and foremost, getting manpower to understand what sort of cleaning we wanted to deliver in itself was a challenge.
Also, as we went along, we had to improvise and change our process. However, once a process was taught to the employees and the older they get in the system it’s difficult to get them to accept the change easily.
“Secondly getting older employees to train and share knowledge with new employees is not always easy. Once they feel they are skilled, they are not always ready and willing to share that skill. Thus, changing the way, they think about things was a challenge.
“My father and I believe very strongly that great attitude is a key to success and drilling that into our teams to agree with our philosophy hasn’t been easy. One would think politics exist only in the white-collar jobs but they are everywhere and more so amongst the labour and dealing with that is a challenge that we wake up to each day. And managing people at all these levels and keeping the peace is an uphill task.
“From the customer perspective, educating them on what our service delivery and what our promise is has sometimes been a struggle.”
Approach
“We have a simple methodology — no work is too difficult, and nothing is impossible. And we always believe in being positive and saying “YES” is where it all starts for the customer. Also, we are very transparent with our existing and potential customers. Our pricing is always available on line for people to see. We have open lines of communication with our clients and we never shy away from a problem or from accepting a mistake. We also make huge efforts to deliver projects back to clients in time and try and keep any inconvenience to them at the minimum.”
