LOCAL Faces of the Front Line
Owner not sure if customers will ever be back amid economic uncertainty
Sixth in a series profiling front-line workers of the pandemic.
The nature of Julian Gonzalez’s work as a professional cleaner has not changed in general, though the task of making sure everything is spic and span for clients has become a bit more involved of late.
“Let’s say, for example, before it took an hour to clean a place,” Gonzalez told The Telegram.
“Now, with the cleaning and the sanitizing, you add another extra hour to that. It will be two hours for cleaning . ... The sanitizing process is a bit slow, because you’ve got to spray the cleaning products, and you’ve got to leave them on the surfaces for sometimes up to 10 minutes before you even wipe after again.”
His line of work has changed in other ways, too, specifically when it comes to his client list. Gonzalez started his business, Coastal Cleaning Services, almost a year ago. Initially geared to serve the needs of residential and commercial clients alike, Gonzalez found it was the former category that showed the most interest in his business.
“My main source of income was residential before COVID-19,” he said.
But once the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic started to hit closer to home in Newfoundland and Labrdador in mid-march, Gonzalez saw those clients disappear one after the other.
“That changed completely overnight,” he said. “The government started putting in the regulations to stay home and all of that, so obviously that created a lot of fear in people in general. Obviously, clients I have that are residential, they started cancelling appointments, because they were concerned about other people coming into their household and potentially bringing the virus in.”
While revenue from residential cleaning jobs has just about vanished, Coastal Cleaning Services has picked up some commercial work to take care of cleaning and sanitizing.
“That helped me to stay open, at least,” he said. “Obviously, I’m not making the same income that I was before, but with what I’ve got now, it allows me to make a little bit of income and not be on any government program.”
Gonzalez has no contact with employees when he is on site to do a cleaning job for commercial clients, typically showing up in the evening or early in the morning.
As for what the future holds, Gonzalez is not banking on his residential client list filling back up to where it was before public health emergency measures were introduced in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“Sadly, most of my clients are working from home now,” he said.
“To be honest, I’m not sure of the future or what’s going to happen with the residential aspect of my business. I’m hoping that as things reopen and slowly people are going back to work, that will allow me to go into these places when the homeowners are not home and at work. They’ll feel comfortable about someone coming in and doing the cleaning and sanitizing.”
That said, Gonzalez is familiar with how the residential cleaning industry in Newfoundland and Labrador gained a lot of traction following the 2009 recession, which resulted in more households relying on two incomes, thereby making a third-party cleaner more of a necessity.
“Therefore, cleaning was not a luxury, but a necessity,” Gonzalez said. “The two parents were at work, and the house, there was nobody home to take care of that. In those times, the cleaning industry saw a rise in their business.”
With many people now out of work, Gonzalez wonders whether his services will be needed by residential clients at the same level they once were.