May 1, 2017

Meet Richard Sparacio of MaidPro in Boston

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Richard Sparacio.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Richard. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
MaidPro’s original office opened in the fall of 1991 in Beacon Hill in Boston. It was a tiny office about the size of a parking space. My co-founder, Mark Kushinsky, and I lived in the neighborhood, so our walk to the office took us five minutes at the most. We had two desks (one was a drafting table), two phones, no computer, and a partition wall that separated us from the cleaning supplies. We did some dumpster diving to find a filing cabinet and chairs. Since we did not have a computer, we used the computer lab at a nearby college. The carpet we purchased for the office was a leftover cut. The bathroom was so small that you could barely turn around; the toilet was right next to the stackable washer and dryer we used for laundering cleaning towels. We would go around at night hanging advertisements on doors and would take turns with a pager that was connected to our phone line, allowing us to return clients’ calls and give in-home estimates during evenings and at odd hours on weekends. But we felt like kings in our little business because each week, little by little, we were adding recurring clients. We were determined to run a successful and resilient business and we always felt lucky.

Fast forward 25 years, we now have over 225 MaidPro franchise locations across the United States and Canada. Our original office, MaidPro Boston, ranks in the top 30 of all our locations! We have even been featured by Forbes, USA Today, Entrepreneur and Fast Company. Our beginnings were humble and we are glad to be able to say we have stuck to our original values on how we treat both our MaidPro customers and employees. We are thrilled to be bringing a valued service to the Boston community and homes all over North America.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
When you start a company from the ground-up, it is never a smooth road. Fun, but never smooth. We encountered many struggles that new business owners face as well as some surprising ones that came along with the home cleaning industry.

Once we got MaidPro rolling, we learned there was much more to running a cleaning business than we had imagined. We had to train, equip, bond and insure our staff; capture, store, and process customer payment information; schedule and reschedule cleans if customers canceled or staff called in sick, plus hundreds of other details that had us toiling in our tiny MaidPro office each evening until 10 or 11 pm. We knew we needed to find a better way of operating otherwise our business would never grow.

Eager to find a solution, we decided to design a piece of software that would automate all critical functions of the maid service business. We hired a programmer to write the code and called it MaidSoft. I remember vividly the first week we installed and started using it. Suddenly, I was going home at 7 pm, and the paperwork, schedules, and billing were all done!

Over the past 25 years, MaidSoft (now called Cloud) has developed into a complex, cloud-based software that works to run all of our MaidPro locations. Built and managed in-house, we have the ability to customize Cloud to fit the exact needs of our business.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about MaidPro – what should we know?
MaidPro gives both space and time in this very busy world. We are a relief system for our clients. We help people keep their homes and belongings clean so they can focus on the more important aspects of life, the people. MaidPro has been cleaning apartments, condos, and single-family homes with our 49-point checklist for 26 years now. We love making people happy from our employees to our clients. We are proud of being one big MaidPro family.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
We care. When people trust you to enter their home, it’s all about a mutually healthy relationship.

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