We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Andrea Ponce a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Andrea, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

My husband and I bought our initial MaidPro in May 2018 in Miami, FL. It was an established MaidPro that was up for sale. It was in the neighborhood we lived in and it was the best decision at the time. This is how we began our MaidPro journey.

Less than a year in, we found an opportunity to expand our territory within Miami. MaidPro is a franchise and we were very honest with the franchisor from the beginning that our goals were to grow our MaidPro and that we were open to opportunities to expand. We have always been very active in the MaidPro community and when we heard that a nearby MaidPro just 40 mins away in Cooper City was up for sale, we immediately reached out interested in exploring the option to purchase. We purchased MaidPro Cooper City in November 2020. We had two years of experience in Miami and felt confident we could operate MaidPro Cooper City with our Miami staff given the relative proximity.

Just one year later, we were approached to purchase two additional MaidPros in Central Florida. I was very hesitant at first as they were both on opposite sides of Central Florida and more than four hours away. My biggest worry was how were we going to manage the day to day. My husband and I had two kids under 3 at the time and we did not have the flexibility to drive and be there on a weekly basis. We met with the owner and what really convinced us was meeting the amazing manager (Amber) he had. We took the leap, with a little more fear than previous expansions, but confident we could make it work. We purchased MaidPro Hudson and MaidPro Volusia in October 2021.

More than five years later, we now have four fully operational MaidPro offices throughout Florida. The biggest challenges have been finding the right managers to manage the team, finding an ideal marketing strategy since each branch has very different customer profiles, and optimizing costs.

Our biggest takeaways have been to really understand each of our office staff’s strengths and weaknesses and work towards delegating them more tasks that rely most on their strengths. We have also learned that we need to support all offices in our marketing efforts equally. Sometimes we default to giving more attention and support to our Miami branch since it was our first and it is where we are based out of but when we look at the bigger picture and implement the same marketing activities across the board we have been pleasantly surprised with the results that we have seen.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Andrea Ponce, married and a mom of two. I always knew I wanted to be a business owner. When my first daughter was born, my husband and I were living in Chicago, far from family. I had a remote sales position and my husband was in finance – mergers & acquisitions. Looking to move back to Miami, to be closer to family, I started looking at possible businesses for sale in Miami and best franchises to own. My husband and I were clear we did not want to get involved in any food-related business but other than that we were open to anything else.

MaidPro kept on popping up in numerous articles as one of the best franchises to own. It just so happened there was a MaidPro for sale in Miami. Long story short, we bought it and that began our journey as business owners.

I have loved being a part of MaidPro. We offer professional house cleaning services to all types of clients including working parents, young professionals, seniors, and airbnbs. We treat all our customers with our utmost care as they trust us to clean their most private and personable spaces. We treat our team with the same respect as well and we make sure to let them know how much we value their service as without them we would not have a business to operate.

We are so grateful for MaidPro as it has opened our doors to other business opportunities. My husband and I are also the proud owners of two other franchises, Men in Kilts Miami and our most recent venture, JETSET Pilates Merrick Park.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I believe in the power of reviews, referrals and word of mouth. We constantly instill the importance of delivering top quality service to our employees because only this way will we have happy customers, and happy customers leave great reviews and give us referrals. I am proud to say we have a combination of over 1,000 Google Reviews across all of our MaidPro locations with an average rating of 4.6 stars or more.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

My business partner is my husband. I met him in pre-school! We ended up going to different schools and even living in different cities and reunited again in our last year of college.

We were both driven by business aspirations. His family had a family business in farming and agriculture and I studied Business Administration at University of Miami. We both had in our plans to get our MBA’s and we decided to study together at INCAE Business School in Costa Rica (one of the best business schools in the region) and got our masters in Finance and Economics.

After our masters we both entered the corporate world and thanks to that we had great mentors and leaders who we were both able to learn the skills and the knowledge to operate a successful business. We are happy we had that experience as it gave us both more confidence in our business decision making with our own business.

Even though we are husband and wife, we love working together. Each one of us has our own strengths and weaknesses and we are pretty good at delegating to each other different responsibilities. I am more marketing and financial focused and he is more operations and sales. We tend to stay in each other’s lanes but consult with each other when we are confronted with a challenge or when we need help. He is my favorite co-worker.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.maidpro.com/miami-beach
• Instagram: instagram.com/maidpromiami
• Facebook: facebook.com/maidpromiami
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/maidpro-miami-miami