Heather’s Home Works Celebrates 21 Years of Service
Pictured: Heather DeMarie is the founder and owner of Heather’s Homeworks.
Ocean View, DE – August 9 , 2024 – Over the 21 years that Heather DeMarie has been the owner of her cleaning company, Heather’s Home Works, she has refined it significantly. She said they have become more consistent and stable, their training for new employees has gotten better, and the business has, all around, improved, since its doors opened back in 2003.
In 2002, DeMarie had no intention of starting a cleaning company. She had just recently moved from Virginia and was still settling into her new environment. She soon found a job completely unrelated to cleaning houses. It was only after a neighbor of her parents needed help cleaning around the house that she started what would eventually evolve into Heather’s Home Works.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna start Heather’s Home Works, and it’s gonna be a business,’” DeMarie recalled.
Once she took up the job of cleaning her parent’s neighbor’s house, word got around the neighborhood. Eventually, she started to offer her services to other residents of that neighborhood. On top of her other job, she now had a side hustle, and for months, that was all she saw it as. But, soon, she would see the potential of her cleaning services.
For her main job, DeMarie worked as a trainer at the women’s fitness club, Curves (which has since closed its doors).
“The ladies that were working out there would talk about, ‘Oh, what do you do when you’re not training and you’re not here?’ and I’m like, ‘Well, I clean houses and blah blah blah…’ And then they were like, ‘Oh, do you have a card?’ And that’s how it started,” said DeMarie.
Shortly after that, she capitalized off of the newfound interest from the women at her workplace by obtaining her business license, incorporating her business and, of course, getting herself business cards. DeMarie stationed her company’s headquarters at a rented townhouse in Ocean View and opened the doors to Heather’s Home Works on May 1, 2003. At that point, she had been cleaning for around six months.
For the first four years of running her company, DeMarie was the only cleaner. In 2007, she moved her business from the townhouse into a little house on Vines Creek Road. It was at that time that she started to hire other cleaners.
“I would find somebody and then they would work with me for a little while, and I might not have enough work for two whole people, so it was a little hard until I built up enough clients where I could really have that second person have enough work to stay with me full-time. So, it took a year or two to get the employee side of things going,” DeMarie said.
As the clientele grew, DeMarie finally had enough work for full-time cleaners.
In order for the cleaners to maintain the expectations that Heather’s Home Works sets, DeMarie created coherent policies and procedures that the cleaners would have to learn. That would make the cleaners all be “on the same page, saying the same thing,” said DeMarie.
“People want to make sure that if you’re coming into their house every week that they’re gonna get the same service every time,” DeMarie explained.
Check-ins are conducted on their clients’ houses or buildings throughout the year to make sure their standards are being maintained.
“And then the trainees, obviously, get checked in their training period and a lot right after training, when they first go independent.
”When hiring on new recruits, Heather’s Home Works has a training period where the new trainees shadow a more experienced cleaner for at least 10 days and sometimes up to 15 days.
“The trainer can tweak things that they’re seeing that aren’t the way we want them,” explained DeMarie.
New trainees will read the company’s training manual, which teaches them all the company’s policies, procedures and core values. When their training period is over, they will take a written test to ensure that they retained what they learned. After all of that, the new recruits become independent, meaning they are able to clean houses on their own, without guidance.
DeMarie has continued to grow and improve her business.
They introduced three different services that she said helped expand their clientele. Residential cleaning is for people who live in the area year-round. They have seasonal cleaning for those who own houses in the area but only visit during the summer. Finally, commercial cleaning is for business buildings and community buildings. Each of the services may be tailored to fit each client’s specific needs.
In 2017, Heather’s Home Works would outgrow its previous headquarters and be relocated to a house in Dagsboro, on Vines Creek Road beside Prince George’s Chapel. It was around that time that DeMarie would focus more on the marketing and accounting side of her business and step away from cleaning. She would also focus on community events that they held, such as Cleaning for a Reason, which provides a series of free cleanings for families that are undergoing cancer treatment, and then they discount the cleanings going forward.
Today, they have nearly 35 cleaners and four other employees handling the business side of things, alongside DeMarie, and are still hiring year-round.
“This community, as you know, is growing by leaps and bounds. Every day, you turn down a different road you haven’t been down in a month, and you’re like, ‘There’s a new neighborhood going in there?’ So, we used to lay people off in the winter — even my in-office staff, ’cause the phones wouldn’t ring really, you know, in the off season as much. So we would be, like, ‘Well, you can have Fridays off,’ or ‘You can have Mondays off,’ or whatever.“
But now, in the last two years, so many people are working from home that they maybe sold their home in Virginia and they moved to their beach home. So, we have now all these new residents to take care of. We’ve been fortunate in that way as well.”
As the years passed and her company matured, DeMarie said she was surprised she had made it to where she is today.
“I couldn’t have gotten to 21 without a good team of support people,” said DeMarie. “One of our cleaners just celebrated nine years with us, so I think that that really says a lot about how she feels about our company. There’s probably been tons and tons of opportunities for her to take other jobs over the last nine years, and she’s chosen to stay with us.
“I have a lot of really good friends in the community who believe in us and who tell their friends about us. So, yeah, it’s definitely been a team effort and a community effort.
For more information on the areas Heather’s Home Works serves or any other information, go to https://heathershomeworks.com.
