We were lucky to catch up with Jon Tavarez recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jon thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

Some of the biggest trends we see in our industry include the following: 1. How people have placed greater importance on cleanliness once the pandemic started
2. An increase in short-term rental owners requesting our turnover services
3. The cost of labor going up due to the increased cost of living

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Prior to starting Pro Housekeepers, I had created multiple online businesses including several e-commerce shops and a digital marketing agency. One day I stumbled across an article about another entrepreneur in a different city who started a cleaning services company with a twist. They allowed customers to book their services and pay online instead of having to schedule a walkthrough. Within the first year, this entrepreneur claimed to have generated 7 figures in revenue. After doing some research in my local market, I realized there was an opportunity. That’s when I started Pro Housekeepers. It was 2015 and there weren’t many technology-savvy cleaning companies in Tampa Bay. The business took off a few years later and became my primary focus. It was hard to adapt to the industry, but it soon became clear how technology needed to be a core component of the business in order to succeed.

Recently, Pro Housekeepers launched a suite of services called ‘Harmony’ which are meant for companies who manage a portfolio of properties. This includes short-term rentals, corporate housing, apartments and more.
Since starting Harmony, we’ve been able to decrease logistical headaches for operations teams at these companies by providing a centralized team to oversee all of their properties across the US.

We’re now in over 23 markets and have plans on expanding to another 10 in the next 12 months.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Pro Housekeepers started as an experimental side-hustle in 2015 and only a few years later did it grow sufficiently to become my main business. The growth we experienced was mainly thanks to our SEO efforts as well as a new advertising program that we were invited to participate in which had low costs and high conversion rates. In 2017, we expanded from Tampa Bay to Miami and by 2018 had grown to over 15 locations. Today, we service over 23 different markets in the US.

Have you ever had to pivot?

It was early 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic had just started making a big impact on our lives. In April 2020, we experienced a significant decline in revenue due to the fear people had of having others come into their homes. It was at this point that I realized we needed a way to make up for that lost revenue. An idea came to me: people would rather clean themselves and not hire a housekeeping company at this time. So, I looked for multiple cleaning and sanitization products we could sell online. That’s when I launched Germaphobix – an e-commerce store that provides high-quality disinfecting and cleaning products. The pivot worked. We were able to offset the losses from the service side of the business with the product side!

Later that year, Germaphobix became its own separate company and is still going strong to this day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://prohousekeepers.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/jontavarez
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jontavarez
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/jontavarez
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jon_tavarez
• Other: https://germaphobix.com