STAUNTON – Rick Landes loves to smooth. When he turned into preschool, he said he skipped out to go nearby his aunt’s home. The first query he requested her was, “Where is your Comet?”
He wanted to smooth her bathroom. “I’ve usually been a neat freak,” he stated.
He laughs while he tells this tale, but it suggests that he unearths pleasure in what he does. So an awful lot, he determined to make an enterprise out of it. In 1978, he and his father Harold started H&R Contractors, a cleaning service.
“I noticed there has been a need in the region that humans wanted stuff achieved,” Landes said.
The business enterprise is an assortment of different services — together with cleansing offices, rugs, window washing, groundwork, building renovation, and document shredding. It has grown from an employer of just three people to 89 personnel.
Now, 40 years later, the business enterprise has a 30,000 rectangular-foot facility off Commerce Avenue – a specific growth from a small workplace area on New Street. Landes credit Gordon Barlow for giving him his first contract working at the Staunton Medical Center. It then snowballed into serving as many as 500 clients — mainly through word of mouth.
The corporation has clients spanning from Rocky Mount as much as Winchester.
The commercial enterprise began out with just cleansing offerings. Then it morphed into one-of-a-kind odds and ends. Landes ended up getting his Class A preferred contractor license which brought about extra job possibilities. Either solving a door right here or refinishing floors there, it essentially supported their customers in other things besides cleaning. Think a whole fleet of available human beings focusing on industrial, commercial enterprise desires.
It’s not a one size fits all enterprise either. Every provider is customizable.
“It’s no longer when you have a hassle, and it’s when you have a problem,” Landes said. “We tailor what we do for customers.”
However, Landes credit his employees, who aren’t simply his team of workers, have turned out to be like a circle of relatives.
Juanita Funk has been running for the business enterprise for 25 years. She started when her parents were having health issues; Landes and others had been highly cooperative in attending to her own family.
H&R has some of the personnel who has been there for extra than two decades.
“I nonetheless enjoy coming into paintings after 28 years,” said Brian Beverly. “I bear in mind this my own family far from my own family.”
It additionally helps that Landes will do something he asks his personnel to do. He’s palms-on and could alternatively be out in the area running with clients.
“I nevertheless get out there,” he stated. “I do not ask them to do something I wouldn’t do.”
“There are no longer many employers at the moment and time that might be available sweeping flooring or cleaning toilets right in conjunction with their co-employees,” Armstrong delivered. “He’d alternatively be accessible on the process website online than right here in the office doing paperwork.”
Landes took over the agency, which he co-owned with his father once he retired over a decade ago. Now, Landes is starting on the subsequent era to take the reigns of the legacy he’s established at H&R. His son Scott Newman heads the shredding department, and the next set to take over the own family employer as soon as Landes retires. Newman has worked with the company for the beyond ten years.
