Interview with the Greece Chamber of Commerce

Episode 10.

Special thanks to Sarah Lentini, President and CEO Emeritus of the Greece Chamber of Commerce (Rochester, NY). Sarah is a consistent advocate for the business community & its growth in Western New York State. The podcast is edited. It can be found in its entirety at the Greece Chamber’s YouTube Channel and at Greece Regional Chamber’s podcast platform. 

 

Sarah Lentini

Hi, everybody. You’re listening to Business Voice, a program of the Greece Regional Chamber of Commerce sponsored by Bartolomeo and Prato Funeral Homes. I’m Sara Lentini, your host, as always. I’m also the president and CEO of the Greece Regional Chamber. We have a great show for you today, starting with my first guest, Joel Craddock of Docks Facilities Solutions. Welcome, Joel.

 

Joel

Well, thank you, Sarah, thank you for having me here. And I’m excited to go through this process.

 

Sara Lentini

We’re delighted that you’re here, especially delighted because we get to put a spotlight on something very exciting that I think has happened recently. You were named the 2023 Small Business of the year by the Greece Regional Chamber of Commerce. Uh, and through a program and a process that has, since its very founding over a decade ago, been sponsored by Genesee Regional Bank. So congratulations.

 

Joel

Thank you so much and have been nominated many times in the past to actually win the award. As you saw that day, I just was overcome with so much emotion. It’s such an honor. It’s wonderful.

 

Sarah Lentini

Well that’s great, great to hear. Not because I want to see you cry, but it’s great that it’s that it means it’s meaningful. And and that was clear at the event itself that we held this past December, that, you know, that this was something, you know, that had a lot of meaning for you and your staff team. You have a great staff team, right?

 

Joel

I have a in my opinion, yes. I have a phenomenal staff team. And in the commercial cleaning industry, typically you see turnover rates of 4 to 500%. I have a lot of long term employees. Uh, Sonia, who is my right hand? Uh, she’s worked for me seven and a half years. She’s the real heart and soul of the company. I might be the face. She’s the heart and soul.

 

Sara Lentini

Oh, isn’t that nice? Yeah. It was lovely that you. You know, you came up and accepted the award together, and, you know, you were in photos together as well, which was really nice. And let’s take a step back. It’s docks, facilities solutions. Tell us about Doc’s. How long has it been around? You started the company, right?

 

Joel

I started the company actually. This month will be our 11th year in business. I was started partly because I got laid off from another company, and everybody that I interviewed with wanted to start me at the bottom, and I’m like, well, if I’m going to start at the bottom, I might as well start at the bottom working for myself nice and built it from the ground up with my former partner. Um, 11 years later, we have, uh, in the neighborhood of 35 full time employees. Well, we flex out to almost 50 full time in the summertime when we’re doing construction cleanups and flips and turns of college campuses and stuff like that. Um, we started the company in 2013, is a company that was going to clean for health. Yeah, rather than appearance. And at the time, I was laughed at because everybody in the industry is like, no, it’s all about appearance because everybody wants to pay nothing for cleaning. Um, so it was like, well, we’re we’re only a little more, but we take a lot more pride.

We have the right types of equipment. We have the training processes which lacked in our industry, and we spent a lot of time training our people to raise the bar rather than just be like everybody else.

 

Sara Lentini

And I mean, I’ve seen, you know, the posts that you put out there on LinkedIn also, I’m sure on Facebook, but I see them predominantly on LinkedIn, where you’re completing one certification or another or training or another. You really spend some energy, uh, making sure that you stay on top of things. Correct?

 

Joel

I do, I mean, and that was the other part about this industry. Nobody realize how important education is. They think that they can just bring anybody in and put a uniform or throw them out in the job without any type of training. And most of our jobs, we have to have continuing education because things change. Covid changed the cleaning industry just like it did for every business. But even the the, you know, cleaning industry as a whole was changed because we had to do things differently. Different types of chemicals, different types of, uh, pieces of equipment were made in manufacturing during Covid, which now are a big part of the nightly cleaning service.

 

Sarah Lentini

Yeah, that’s that’s terrific. So you were well positioned when, when folks were suddenly looking for more than just cleaning for appearance.

 

Joel

I do believe we were. Yeah. And we’ve been able to recoup because we lost 97% of our work because of Covid, because everybody stayed home. Yeah, everybody was closed. And we had very few essential businesses at the time. So we had to look at our business and reposition where we were going to focus our attention in order to stay alive and continue going. But it because we had the training and we had the equipment stuff, we were able to step in and work at a higher level right from the start.

 

Sara Lentini

Yeah. And um, how big a region do you cover in terms of, you know, people listening? This is, you know, YSL has a pretty, pretty big listening area. So how much area do you cover?

 

Joel

We are a locally owned company, not a franchise, locally owned, uh, locally operated. We work in Monroe County, Wayne. County and, uh, Ontario County right now. So and we have done work in some of the other counties and things like that, but it may be just a one off, like doing a construction cleanup or something like that.

 

Sara Lentini

But you’re covering a decent chunk of the region, you know, the, the region with the capital R, the Finger Lakes region, Rochester, Finger Lakes region as it is. So if somebody listening isn’t in one of those three counties, they still shouldn’t hesitate to call you.

 

Joel

I would say have them call our office. That would be.

 

Sara Lentini

Perfect. Okay. Wonderful.