Every great entrepreneurial journey begins with a spark that ignites one’s passion for creating a disruptive yet successful business that serves its community. Carolina Alvarez is one such individual, who avidly transformed her business operations experience into creating a remarkable cleaning service provider. Carolina worked in customer service for a national janitorial company after graduating from college, eventually rising to Vice President of Operations. Carolina realized her long-awaited passion for starting a business when one of her clients encouraged her to do so in 2017. She founded J&S Building Maintenance, Inc, followed by J&S Construction Clean-Up. At first, she started with a commercial janitorial business and later entered into a construction cleaning, prevailing in both sectors. “When my parents moved us from Argentina to the US my father worked odd jobs and essentially became an entrepreneur, and my mother took care of us at home. I always saw his hard work and ability to provide, and I knew I wanted to do the same,” reminisces Carolina. Carolina successfully applied these inherited values to achieve success in the male-dominated janitorial industry. They currently have a Commerce office for J&S Building Maintenance Inc and a Garden Grove office for J&S Construction Clean Up Inc.
Carolina is adamant about following a path that validates the mission of J&S, which was founded on the idea “to simply be the best.” She and her team utilize innovative solutions and provide excellent leadership in all of their job sites and projects to achieve their mission. “All the while achieving the highest cleaning standards and competitive pricing,” she asserts. Carolina says the company’s core values, are straightforward and reflect its people. With every client and project, irrespective of the size, its knowledgeable team, supervisors, and crews incorporate the highest quality control for cleaning. These aspects are grounded by its core values of safety, integrity, care for its employees, excellence, and innovation. She believes in doing the righteous thing by uncompromising standards of integrity and ethical conduct; building lasting relationships through honesty, respect and trust. She has created an environment in which the company’s employees can do their best work while maintaining a high level of safety. Furthermore, she asserts that the company’s most significant accomplishment is the way it connects with and cares for its employees. “Every employee who works for us is paid above minimum wage and industry averages. Because this sometimes means we come in higher than our competition, I try to educate potential clients. Paying a little more means happier employees, less turn over rates, and better cleaning. It is not always successful, as many companies believe that janitorial services should be inexpensive and lowest price should be chosen.” says Carolina. “We must change the way we do business as an industry and as a community because if we do not, and continue to accept the old ways, nothing will change. I’m hoping that our company will be part of a new wave of businesses in this industry that are doing things differently.” The company strives to provide opportunities and support to its employees to help them reach their full potential, while also instilling personal responsibility. “I 100% agree that our success is because of our employees, our retention rates, the recognitions they get, and our involvement with our community,” says Carolina. Along with this, she feels that serving with excellence is the key to success. The company consistently delivers on expectations, through constant improvement of their services by innovation and an attitude to achieve excellence. She mentions, “We provide our team members remarkable skills so that we provide high-quality services and excellent customer service.” The end goal is to be the largest woman–owned company of choice for commercial and construction cleaning services for general contractors and various markets and industries by exceeding customer expectations and providing excellent communication.