Eva: “I want to introduce to you Fatukanu Kabia, she is the owner of Diamond Janitorial Services, they provide excellent cleaning services for residential cleaning, commercial cleaning, move in and move out cleaning, Air BNB, office cleaning and more. Thank you for taking this interview with me.”
Eva: “Firstly, I’ve noticed you have a lot of passion for your work and this business. Where does that come from?”
Kabia: “The passion for my work comes from just the need to help people better their lives and deliver easier stress free life. For me I know I have two kids and I work about 12 plus hours a day and my home and my space is my is my serenity. I need it to be clutter free and I need it to just be clean in order for me to just come home and put my feet up and just rest and relax so I can be rejuvenated to go on with my day. So I think it’s just the ability to want to help people and to just want to make their lives easier and more stress free.”
Eva: “What made you get started in this business? Did you receive Someone guide you through it to get it started or how did it start?”
Kabia: “I have always been a neat freak. I hate clutter.
I hate smells, am a nosy person. I would like to say.
“So for me, when I first got a job with a cleaning company, I mean, it wasn’t nothing that I had to be taught. It was just something that I knew. I was just a natural at the business. And from there on, I just kept working with this particular cleaning company to learn everything that I could learn. And I just felt very under appreciated by the whole process of what they were doing. And all my attempts that I had given this company to try to help was falling on deaf ears. So I took it upon myself after a series of events into starting my own business. But that didn’t take off right away. I had to work for a couple other companies while my business was getting off the ground. So yeah, I did work with somebody for a little bit, kind of learned a little bit more about running the business of cleaning. But as far as the talent for for cleaning, that was always in me. I mean, I’m African. We have a lot of people in our family. And you got to always keep behind those kids picking up every day.”
Eva: What’s this thing or the strangest thing you’ve found missing in someone’s home that you were able to return to them?”
“Maybe something behind the fridge.”
“Those are the best. Like you might be doing a move out clean or thing for somebody and you’re cleaning under their vanity and you cleaning under the sink. And you know, you have that gap that goes under your sink and sometimes you can clean your bathroom, but you can’t really get under there. So we had clean one of my client’s homes. I’m not going to put her on the spot or anything.”
“So we found a binky under her van. It’s like the thing that the baby’s stuck on. And her oldest kids, she had been living in that house for about 20 years. Her oldest kid was 17.”
“So you can only imagine. Well, her youngest kid was 17. You can only imagine how long that Binky has been under there.
It was there for a long time. We found first generation iPhones and people’s couches.”
“And that’s first generation there, although we have iPhone 11s now. So when they get these things that they just look like dinosaurs. And then when it comes to doing move out Queens, we found some things in there that definitely the tenants probably left that they want back. But the owners just want us to throw it out.” “So we saw some pretty interesting things with this cleaning jobs, so definitely makes it exciting every day to do it.”
Eva: “Can you tell me about your community outreach?”
“I think we do a lot of community outreach. Personally, the type of lifestyle that I’m from and all my experiences that I’ve had has given me the compassion to be able to work with ladies in this community that want to change your lives from what they used to do before. So we work with a lot of sober living places. We work with a lot of people in recovery that do want to change. I do want that opportunity to do better for them and their kids. So we do a lot of outreach in that in that aspect.”
“I think of myself as more of like a big sister to a lot of these ladies. If I can do it, they can do it, too. And it’s my pleasure. And I have it in my ability to be able to lend them a hand with anything that they need.”
Watch the interview highlights on our youtube channel:
Eva: “What is the work environment like?”
Kabia: “Well, for a lot of you guys that have used our services. The work environment, you can see it’s like a family unit. We have fun at work. For us, it’s our happy time. It’s art therapy. It’s our friendship time. We just love the the atmosphere that we’re around. And the ladies just love what they do. So for them, we keep it light. We keep it fun. I mean, we’re telling jokes the whole time. We’re talking about our lives the whole time, as well as doing a wonderful and great job for our clients. They love interacting with with us as cleaners. And some of them actually like to stay in the home while we’re cleaning because they love laughing. They love interacting with us. And they love hearing all our different stories because all our girls are like chatty Cabbies. They want to talk to you. They want to know what you’re about and they want to know how we can better help you.”
Eva: “What kind of products do you use?”
Kabia: “We use all green products; we know that everybody’s different. Some of our clients have a high irritation to strong smells and some of them don’t mind. Some of our clients, they think if they smell bleach, it’s clean. And some of them, they don’t want to smell bleach at all. They just wanted to be, you know, a light scent. So we offer our clients a couple of different options. We have a green option and then we have a regular option. Our regular option is very green in itself.”
Kabia: “We use just regular basic products like simple green spray a way glass cleaner regular pledge. And we dilute the simple green, of course. And we use Bohner for wood floors and then laminate for cleaners for our regular floors. So when it goes to doing green cleaning, we like to introduce them to either to Melaleuca or Mires Clean Day, something that they would like using even seventh generation or thieves would work for them.”
Kabia: “I personally provide the Melaleuca because I have a membership with Melaleuca so far off some of our clients who want Melaleuca products. We offer that to them and see if they like it and they do like it. We just charge them $10 more on their bill because those products do cost a lot of money. But if they do want H2O or any of those other products, we can refer them to somebody that sells those products so they can be able to buy it for themselves. So our products are pretty green. We don’t have a lot of clients that have a lot of problem because we do ask them if they’re allergic to anything and what their irritation level is to smells when we do a walk through.”
Eva: “What can we expect during a walkthrough?”
Kabia: “There’s a lot of fun time. I love doing my walkthrough. You get a chance to get to know the client, get a chance, an opportunity to ask them what they are really looking for and why they’re getting cleaning services. Everybody has a different reason why they’re getting cleaning services and what a walk through really enables us to do and enables us to see the walk through of the house, kind of get the vibe with a client, can offer him a couple different options and just kind of really put their mind at ease into as in who they’re having in their homes. And one thing that we also offer our clients is we do have the ability and the we just love working around people. Some clients want to get to know their cleaners before they just give them clothes and stuff like that inside their home. So we always offer the client to do their initial clean on the Saturday because we know a lot of people are home on a Saturday. So we get to meet the whole family. They get to meet the whole staff. And on top of that, they get to hang around and they get to kind of see how we interact with each other, how we joke around with each other and the process of us getting the house clean.” “And at the end of that initial cleaning, they get a very calm sense of they’re comfortable. They’re happy that this is these this is just a bunch of girls and a group of people. They’re just they’re having fun and they’re talking about.” “Girl, what do you do yesterday? How did the movie you rented go? You know, we were just talking about real life things that are happening in our lives. And we’re just focused on getting your space clean. It’s nothing shady. It’s nothing weird. We’re just doing our jobs and just having a fun time doing it.”
Eva: “Do you have any cleaning tips for us?”
Kabia: “Well, if I have to tell you, I have to kill you.”
Kabia: “But when it comes to cleaning tips, there’s a bunch of different things that people just don’t know. And what can get things really out like one thing you definitely need in your home is a juga, simple green.”
Kabia: “You need that just because when you’re cleaning your tubs or things that have really that deep ground in it, kind of dirt, you kind of just need pure version of simple green with your other best friend, which is a box of magic erasers.I f you don’t have a box of magic erasers, you’ve been doing way too much work cleaning your own house. I’m telling you, if you haven’t called us yet, that that is. But Magic Erasers and simple green are your best friend because those two combine can get almost just anything out of your out of your home, out of your tub, out of the sink, out of anything that you’re cleaning. And then on top of that, the reason why we use spray with glass cleaner is because it just leaves that streak free shine. We know everybody loves their Windex. Everybody loves their wooden nicks. Well, we’ve had some instances where Windex had left the film on the windows and it doesn’t really do a good enough job. So for me, the best tip is to get the right products, even if you are the best cleaner in the world. If you don’t have the right product and if you don’t have that knowledge and you don’t consult with an actual professional cleaner, you can be scrubbing for days for something that takes me 2 minutes to clean. Thanks.”
Eva: “Can you tell me about the work Brush Pic did for you?”
Kabia: “The work that brush Pic did for us and is continuing to do for us is just custom branding. It’s really just liberating to feel as if I can sit down with a fellow sister, explain to her exactly what I need, what I’m looking for, because I’m busy. I don’t have time. I work twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week where I get this extra time, I don’t know.”
“But Eva the owner BrushPic is really good at just getting my ideas all together and just making sure that it is delivered in the way I want it to be delivered. She does a wonderful job and we will continue to keep using her for our branding because oh, I love the ability to be able to call somebody my like girl. I need this done. I’m going to get it written out for you. And then she shows up and she’s like, did you write it out? I’m like, I’m too busy. Those are the really, really intuitive and fun to work with. And she’s good at getting it done and getting it down and making sure that she fills in those gaps for you that I know I’m only one woman, I can’t do everything. So she’s an extra arm that I have that can kind of help us up with the branding things that we need.”
Eva: “:)Thank you.”