talking business
Marvel Maids: Clean and Green
by Emily Landes
Steve Collins was in the market for a business—any business. As a sales manager in the tech industry, Collins traveled around the world for work. But the family man was growing tired of life on the road and decided to leave his old jet-setting life behind to acquire a Bay Area business that would keep him close to home. “At the end of the day, I didn’t really care what the business did,” he explains. “I was looking for a good growth stream and revenue stream, and also something I could put my sales, marketing and management experience into and take to the next level.”
By matter of fate or coincidence, just as Collins was in the process of making a clean break from his old life, a cleaning company popped up on his radar: Marvel Maids. The San Francisco-based service was formed in 1979 and had a steady clientele of residential and commercial owners. Collins thought that, with a few tweaks, he could take the company from good to great.
In 2003, he bought the business and spent the next two years analyzing the company’s strengths and weaknesses before making any major changes. Strength: an established and varied clientele. Weakness: no efficient way to get the cleaners to and from those clients. By 2005, Collins had bought the company a fleet of cars with the charming Marvel Maid logo emblazoned on each side. With the cars, not only could the cleaning staff move from job to job more efficiently, but they could also bring their cleaning supplies with them, rather than using the clients’ products.
If the company was going to have its own supplies, Collins knew he wanted those supplies to be environmentally friendly. That position was reinforced early in his fact-finding days when he went out to clean houses with his employees. “The fumes that result from spraying those products are wretched,” he recalls. In older San Francisco homes, in particular, there’s often a lack of ventilation, so those odors can linger long after the cleaning crew is done for the day.
Collins says he searched high and low for the best green products, but found most to be “stinky”: either they smelled even worse than traditional cleaning products, or they smelled great but didn’t clean well. Finally, he found a line of citrus-based cleansers that could cut through grease without leaving a harsh chemical smell behind. For him, the extra time and research was well worth it. “We’re being friendly to our employees because they’re around these products every day, all day long; and we’re being friendly to our clients, and to pets and kids in those buildings, so that’s important,” Collins relays. “But it’s also important that it works.”
Marvel is well known in the industry for being not just friendly to its employees, but generous as well. Staff members receive health benefits and paid vacation time; they are also on a profit share model that rewards them for good work. These perks allow the company to choose from the best of the best. “We get a lot of calls from people who want jobs,” Collins says. “We’re very selective in who we will hire. That’s another thing that changed when I took over. We wanted to make sure we were focusing on quality and trust.” Part of earning enough trust to become a Marvel employee involves passing a full background check, including a credit check and drug screening.
Rigorous requirements lead to a happier, better quality workforce, and that higher level of employee doesn’t come cheap. Collins says a certain segment of customers who came on board under the old management did leave the company when standards, and prices, started to go up. He further concedes that they are not the cheapest cleaning company in town. But that’s okay, since Collins is trying to be the most trusted cleaning company instead. “By taking care of our employees, we get people working for us that we can trust in our own homes, and that our customers can trust in their homes,” he explains. “There is a premium to pay for those kinds of services.”
But how difficult is it to get people to keep paying that premium in a time when everyone is looking at their bottom lines? Collins says that, like every other business, Marvel is feeling the pinch of a nationwide belt-tightening. But rather than being stymied by these stringent economic times, the company is instead expanding its reach in an attempt to fill in the gap of attrition. When Collins came on board, the company primarily served San Francisco residents. Now, it can serve customers as far north as Marin, as far south as Los Gatos and as far east as Livermore. The idea behind expansion was to be able to serve new customers, but also to serve current customers more efficiently. “We wanted to make sure we were providing a solution, “ he relays. “So if you have a residence in San Francisco, a residence in Danville and a corporate office in San Ramon, we can service all three of those locations for the same person.”
The company hires people who are familiar with the neighborhoods where they’ll be working; and every area is covered by a field manager, who supervises the cleaning crews and can troubleshoot on location. Collins believes that most problems crop up due to unspecified expectations. He learned early on in his time at Marvel that everybody has his own definition of “clean.” He recalls receiving angry calls from one owner because the soap dispenser was put back at a slightly different angle. After that call, he made sure the staff working at that home put extra attention to putting things back exactly as they were. That’s just one example, but Collins says almost every residential client has her own slight differences. He has discovered that it’s best to learn what those are up front, rather than come back out and reclean. (Marvel’s policy is send out a “reclean team” any time an owner is not 100% satisfied.)
Mostly, this level of specificity only applies to residential owners, with commercial owners more interested in seeing that the job is done well and on time. But Collins says that because Marvel has this experience with detail work, it brings that same level of care to all of its properties, be it a one-bedroom condo or the lobby of an apartment building with hundreds of units. “We come in with a set of eyes that is used to the little intricacies of how the soap dish is turned; so when we come to an apartment building, we’ll make sure that that lobby is taken care of too, and that when a resident enters that lobby they feel pride because every little thing has been taken care of and watched,” he says.
Collins feels that it is important not only to take care of the buildings in the communities where Marvel operates, but also to take care of the people in those communities. “If people pull together for the greater good, everything’s better,” he posits. He has a particular soft spot for children’s causes, so the company makes charitable contributions to everything from national organizations like the Make a Wish Foundation to local groups like the Taylor Family Foundation in Livermore, which gives sick children the opportunity to go to camp.
While Collins’s altruistic side may spread far and wide, his business focus remains entirely in the Bay Area. He says he has no plans to expand out of the region, and would rather add more field offices and employees in the areas where Marvel already operates. “We will continue to be a Bay Area company and to be the best we can be in the Bay Area,” he says. That outlook makes perfect sense for a guy who gave up a globetrotting life to clean up closer to home.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine. Copyright © 2009 by Black Point Press. All rights reserved.