4 BUILD Facilities Management Awards 2023 high-end hotels, resorts, restaurants, clubs. We strive really well in high-end hotels. We clean, I believe, one of the largest hotels, which is a box hotel, and what makes it a box hotel is the event space and how many rooms they have.” Danielle goes on to tell us how every year, these hotels are visited by an outside company to perform quality assurance (QA). During the QA, the rooms are checked from back of the house to the front drive, and the hotel is provided with a score that goes public. Preferred Cleaning Service works with its client hotels to make sure everything is 100% spot-on ready for their QA visit. Thus, the company prides itself on helping one of these large hotels to gain the largest QA score for 11 years running! Also, Preferred Cleaning Service is proud to be delivering its services for one of the largest land and real estate owners in Texas, whose properties include shopping malls, hotels, and a hospital. Danielle states, “In the industry, if you’re good, when people move to new locations, they bring you with them. Almost everything we have that’s really large is all referred. So, we just took over a new client who moved over from another location and now they’re having us bid out a lot of their stuff and to take over what the other people were doing. It’s really exciting and we have a lot of big potential coming up. I just bid a whole chain of lavish hotels across Texas.” Meanwhile, Danielle loves cleaning factories, too, saying, “I strive in factories. I really like that. I think it’s because I like working in the deep industry part and the factory kind of reminds me of home on the camp, with all the guys and all the workers and the vests and everything. We’ve done really well with the factories and industrial. We work for Boeing, so we clean their Astro cleaning rooms – their aerospace stuff.” Preferred Cleaning Service also has a bottling factory client, who originally brought in a team that weren’t equipped for the work. They hadn’t been provided with the supplies needed in order to do a good or safe job, being left to figure it out on their own and using only the chemicals they could get hold of to clean – which is dangerous since chemicals can be explosive! Eventually, hen Danielle Vest was growing up, she lived on a commercial property in the middle of nowhere as her dad was a caretaker. This meant that she and her brother would help to maintain a Christian camp, where there would be a new group visiting every week, and sometimes there would be six groups visiting in a week! Danielle explains, “My dad had to clean the mess halls and take the trash out and clean the cabins, take care of the waterfront and all the other stuff in the commercial kitchens. And he didn’t have much help, so my mom would give us the guilt trip if we didn’t go help my dad. “So, my brother and I, we’ve been pretty much working since we were little – as long as we could push a broom. We were running machines and everything; learning how to strip them, wax floors, clean commercial kitchens. And then my mom, also for money, she would clean houses on the side.” She tells us more about her youth: “When I was 12, I lived out in the middle of nowhere and I wanted something to do, so I begged my parents to have a horse. Horses are expensive, so I had to work at the stables.” “Basically, I was cleaning and doing maid service since I was, like, child labour age,” she laughs, “but you know it’s good, because I’m a really hard worker and my brother is a hard worker, and everything I have is because I was pushed as a child. I love to work – it’s fun. I’ve always loved cleaning.” By 2013, Danielle was cleaning high-end homes on the side, which she enjoyed, but she didn’t really see a future in it. So, in 2015, she decided to establish her own company, Preferred Cleaning Service, wanting to take on a project that she could grow and build, yet not have to be involved as much, opting for the commercial side and offering herself as a mentor to her growing team. Danielle’s business venture grew significantly early on, extending across five states with 220 employees! Speaking of her experience of such fast business growth, she says, “I was overwhelmed. I was working 80- to 120-hour weeks. But I loved it. We have some of the best clients in the industry. We’ve cleaned the Soho House, with many different locations. We had to clean the ones in Hollywood. It’s white glove, every morning, 7AM, once the sun starts rising. We cleaned up very Commercial Cleaning Contractor of the Year 2023 - USA Danielle Vest has been working in the cleaning industry for over 30 years – and she’s only in her 40s! She is the owner of Preferred Cleaning Service and is highly passionate about what she does. With the help of her team, Danielle’s company delivers the cleaning service that clients deserve, specialising in cleaning all types of commercial properties, from offices to hotels to restaurants to medical environments. Following Preferred Cleaning Service’s success within the Facilities Management Awards 2023, we sat down for a chat with Danielle to learn more about her time in the industry and her company’s outstanding offering. W May23382 “I am so blessed and cannot express how happy I am that we have such a great team.”
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