Hello Dallas Maids’ Family!

I’m so glad you are here with us to celebrate our 20^th anniversary! Over twenty years ago I had a dream of building a first-in-class, five-star home cleaning service in the Dallas area. I had no idea then the journey that lay before my team and I, and how it would eventually bring us all to this moment.

Dallas Maids began in 2004 out with a tiny team with immense entrepreneurial spirit. Now twenty years later, it’s funny to think about that time when the internet was so new and in many ways, our lives seemed simpler. One thing that was not so simple was getting the word out about our fledgling business to potential customers. Those days were marked by scrambling to make sure it worked for our customers and pounding some pavement to get even more customers. My first office manager, Esther Kim, came up with the idea of passing out flyers at 4am during the week. My stomach turned with the idea, but it worked! We generated business from that nitty gritty resolve to succeed.

If you’ve been with us for over a decade, you may have noticed our office address has changed a couple times. We started with a tiny place that I’m convinced was a utility closet. Even better was that it was near Harry Hines. New to the Dallas area, I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. But we made it work. Our tiny office space had all of two tiny desks (the ones from Walmart that you assemble yourself) and a cubicle wall that we used to build a supply room for all our cleaning materials. A few years later we moved into a condo – again, we made it work! Determined and focused on our dream of being the best home cleaning service in the area, we kept going even with the odd office arrangements.

I’m confident those days taught us so many valuable lessons. Here’s a few that just come to mind readily:

• Dreams take hard work – it’s one thing to dream and even plan, but it’s another to execute. Don’t get discouraged when the payoff isn’t immediate. Roll up your sleeves even further and get to it.
• Accept your present situation but don’t let it define you. If I had known Dallas better I wouldn’t have rented our first office space near Harry Hines. But limited resources and experience landed us there. But we didn’t let that location seep into our character or way of doing business. We worked harder, believing that one day we would not only want a different office, we would need one because of our growth.
• Be flexible. I can’t remotely recall the number of times I would clean one of our customers’ homes or apartments when the need arose. As a small business, one sick callout can be really disruptive. But we kept our word and adjusted whatever we could to make sure our customers had their cleanings done on time. I’m sure we had to reschedule on occasion, but when things got tight or chaotic, we all flexed, shuffled, and worked longer together.
• Hire excellent talent. Dallas Maids wouldn’t be here if not for our stellar team. We are incredibly selective with our hiring process and it shows in the quality of our work. We don’t expect you to trust our team if we don’t trust them. Being picky in staffing our team has been at the heart of our business. Quality people do quality work.

By now, many of you have come to know and care for our team. You probably even recognize the sound of your cleaner’s car pulling up or Monse or Nelly answering the phones when you call our office, which thankfully is now much larger and in a better part of town now. Our team makes Dallas Maids successful.

From the start I knew I needed help to manage the office and take calls so I could work on growing our fledging cleaning company. Many of you may not have heard of Dallas Maids first office manager. She was an Olympic Taekwon-do athlete, Esther Kim. I’m not pulling your leg either. We hired an Olympic athlete in those first days. But her athletic zeal wasn’t contained to just Taekwon-do. Esther was a fiery competitor through and through. Those 4am flyer runs? Those were Esther’s idea. She helped instill that “never quit” mentality into our DNA early and remained with us to see our success as we went from barely surviving to building a solid business to thriving as a company. Esther sadly passed away a few years ago, but her presence remains embedded into our work every single day.

As we grew, we expanded into a number of new areas. We went from a small utility-closet office to my condo to a full-fledged office building in that first decade. We also began to solidify our reputation as the premiere cleaning service in Dallas. Our team and business grew steadily and we were realizing our dream of making our customers’ homes feel like home again. It may sound silly but hearing from customers that they could come home, take off their shoes and just watch TV is such a gift. No dishes to wash. No laundry to fold. We handled that so you could enjoy the gift of a clean home.

Our reputation not only helped build a strong business, it sustained us in 2020. As we each isolated in our homes, as a company we faced real stress and anxiety. How do we clean a customer’s home safely? How do we survive the next month? How do we keep the lights on? In those dark days and weeks, you stepped in to help us. We had customers pay for cleanings that never happened just to keep us afloat. We had others tip generously because they knew our business slowed down and they wanted to make sure their team was taken care of. What a marvelous gift we received those days.

With your support and a PPP loan from the government, we made it through those turbulent months. We came out stronger for it and with the lesson further driven into our souls: care for other people and they will care for you.

Whether you have been with us since 2004 or you are one of our newest customers, we are so glad to have you alongside us on this journey. The author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, once wrote

                                “There are far, far better things ahead,

                                  Than any we leave behind.”

I didn’t know it back then but that small phrase would be the Dallas Maids story. We would put long hours, hard work, and faith together on that journey and end up here 20 years later. As the owner, I look back on these past 20 years with a lot of nostalgia. We laughed. We cried. We worked early mornings. We worked late nights. We put one step in front of the other, every day, for 20 years.

I’m so glad you are on this journey with us. I can’t wait to see where the next 20 years takes us. I’m sure there will be good and bad days. That’s just the way life goes. But I am confident that we will approach these next 20 years with the same commitment to our work and each other. Those guiding principles have made the last 20 years remarkable and I’m sure they will make the next 20 years even better than I can imagine.