Hi! My name is Martin Jongejan, and I am the founder and owner of ZOOM! Home Cleaning Experts.
ZOOM! was conceived in the fall of 2010, about 2 years after a motorcycle accident derailed my career as a photographer and a graphic designer. Over the course of my recovery, I lost pretty much everything. I lost my business, my house, my marriage. I ended up living in a rooming house, deeply in debt, and everything I owned fit in my 1999 Ford Taurus. It was a pretty bleak time for me and I was actively looking for an opportunity to turn my life around.
That’s when I came across the idea of home cleaning, and I got quite excited about it on a couple of levels. One was because I wanted to be a part of a team rather than being a solo entrepreneur. And I also wanted something that would give me an opportunity to have more of an impact in my community. So I borrowed some money, bought a vacuum and a mop and a bucket, and at the tender age of 46 I started cleaning toilets. And now here we are about 13 years later, with 24 amazing staff, a couple of managers, and going strong!
The cleaning industry doesn’t have a particularly good reputation for looking after employees. It tends to have fairly high staff turnover. So I determined at the outset that I wanted to base my company on the core value of care… and that meant putting the well-being of our team members first, even before our customers. That sounds kind of counterintuitive, but we recognized that if we make happy team members, they will go out and in turn create happy customers… so it becomes a win-win.
ZOOM! is based on what I call our “Circle of Care”, and it all starts with our crew, in the centre circle. We believe that if we provide our team members with a work environment that is safe, nurturing, gives them an opportunity for personal growth and development, to advance their career, to improve their income and their responsibility – basically provide them with a happy work environment and a happy work life – that they will go out and in turn create happy customers… the second circle. And through the resources that we get from serving our customers, we can then go out and positively impact the communities in which we operate… the outer circle.
We affectionately refer to our team members as lionesses. That that came out of a team building exercise. The ladies were asked what animal they felt best represented them and one of our team members mentioned the lioness. There was immediate consensus. The group was very excited about it, because of the attributes that a lioness has. So the lioness – and all that she represents – has become an integral part of our culture. We really celebrate that. Every quarter we celebrate one particular team member who demonstrates a lioness heart. She is the one who best represents the lioness mindset towards her fellow lionesses and the cubs in our pride. The team gets to vote on that, and the winner each quarter gets a Z.O.L.A. (ZOOM Outstanding Lioness Award) trophy, and other rewards as well.
Our Share the Care program is something that I am immensely proud of. Every month we offer up a team of our ladies to clean the home of a local individual or a family in need, for free. There are no strings attached. We don’t pepper their house with brochures. We don’t put a sign on their front lawn. It’s purely an opportunity for us to serve and to give back to the community that supported us. And it’s a real win-win because it gives our team members a sense of purpose, something bigger than themselves, and an opportunity to make a difference in the life of somebody who really needs it.
We have been the fortunate recipients of numerous awards over the years. Most recently, Top 3 Home Cleaning Services in Langley. Prior, we’ve been voted Best of the Best in our business category. And that’s not my doing; that is squarely on the shoulders of our amazing ladies. They get full credit for those awards; they are the experience that our customers have with ZOOM!, and they are the reason we’ve garnered those rewards.
My vision for the future is to change the cleaning industry, to bring our level of care to more areas in the Lower Mainland, and to provide our team members – our Lionesses – with a greater level of ownership so that they can share in the rewards and the benefits that healthy growth brings.