Dust Busters

Dust Busters is a small residential and commercial cleaning company, servicing homes and small business offices in Holland Landing, Newmarket and surrounding areas in the GTA!

Dust Busters has been in business since 2001. As a single mom with a 5 year old, I decided this was the best situation, allowing me the best opportunity to be there for my son on my schedule. I started with a flyer put out in my neighborhood.

One by one slowly my business grew. I hired my first employee (cleaning technician) in 2013! This was so exciting for me. My son was then 15 years old and becoming more independent, which enabled me to be able to put more time into hiring and training. Dust Busters uses “The System”, which I incorporated into my business after some research which is used in very large and small businesses all over the world. I’m always looking for ways to improve our service.

As of January 2019, I was just about taking myself out of the cleaning technician position as I had been growing, working in the field and running it for 18 years! I now had 3 employees, I took a full time job in March 2019 with the York Board as a caretaker for a change, while running the business and burnt out by December 2019 so decided to come return to run the business, cleaning only when needed and one time jobs such as move-in and move-out cleans.

I had 43 clients as of January 2020. Things were looking good. (In January 2019 I also hired a marketing company to help me gain more clientele and get my company known) I also purchased some magnets for my vehicle.

In March of 2020 I went to a cleaning convention in Texas and learned more skills. The pandemic had just hit and we were the only convention in the Hotel! All others had cancelled. Here we learned how to pivot and get ourselves out on social media as much as possible. When I returned back on March 14th, sadly everything was closed down. Sadly as much as I tried, all clients put us on hold. I still persevered, making cleaning videos at the odd jobs I received for move-in, move-out cleans. I did not panic and stayed professional throughout.

The summer of 2020 business started to return although I had lost 75% of clients, new opportunities arose and my phone started ringing!! The marketing was paying off and I was hopeful now at 4 employees. Excellent!

Now in January 2021, I have 1 employee and went from 43 clients down to 17. Talk about challenging! I am back cleaning in the field again after finally seeing some light after many years of hard work. I have lost business because we honour the no masking right. I mention to clients that physical exercise is not healthy, therefore our cleaners will not be masked. If we or they show any Covid-19 symptoms we will reschedule. We practice social distancing while cleaning, use safe protocols such as hand washing, hepa filters for vacuums and fresh cloths etc., are exchanged after every client.

We are all in this together!! I am still very grateful that my business is still running, not like others who have put there heart and soles into their business and now it is gone. This breaks my heart.

That’s it in a nutshell. Probably went on too long…sorry. Let me know if I should takes some things out.