By 1985, David Myers was living the hard-working American dream. A native Midwesterner, Myers had completed college, joined the Navy where he did three tours in Vietnam, and moved to Massachusetts, where he established a family and enjoyed a successful career in real estate as an investor, a developer, and an owner of both commercial and residential real estate firms. He and his wife had even built a home on Hilton Head Island, where he was retired and playing golf, all by the ripe old age of 40.
In 1986, his American dream was shattered when the bottom fell out of the real estate market. Myers knew that he had to return to work, so he and a business partner opened a dry cleaning business on Hilton Head Island. Two of Myers’ most regular customers were owners of large property management companies on the island, and during conversation one day, they were discussing the woes of their business—the biggest of which was housekeeping.
“One of the guys looked at me in all seriousness and said, ‘If we could find a competent housekeeping service, we would definitely outsource,’” Myers recalled.
A bulb immediately lit up in Myers’ thinking cap, so he set a meeting with his business partner. Within a few weeks, they had formed a company, written a plan and mission statement, hired employees, and signed contracts with both of those big property management companies, and Housekeeping Services of Hilton Head (HKS) was off and running.
HKS is the Lowcountry’s largest and most diverse cleaning company, providing resort housekeeping, residential maid service, business janitorial services, and carpet and window cleaning services. They also offer a large-scale commercial laundry and food and beverage linen program for the area’s hotels, resorts, restaurants, and property management companies. All these services are provided year-round, seven days a week.
In 1989 when HKS began, Hilton Head property management companies and their employees were mainly seasonal—late March through mid-October being the busiest times—and homes and villas were rented on a weekly basis, with Saturday “turns” (one guest leaving and another arriving).
“That pattern wreaked havoc with all the support services,” Myers said, “not just housekeeping. We were faced with telling prospective hires, ‘We can keep you working two or three days a week for seven months a year,’ which is a hard sell for recruitment and retention of a motivated labor base.”
Offering a quality product was equally difficult. On those busy seasonal Saturdays, HKS might be challenged to turn 300-400 homes and villas in a single day. Even when HKS attempted to change the system—for example, turning on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, or offering mid-week cleaning—they were met with reluctance from the management companies they worked with. So inevitably, at the end of the season, the reliable and hardworking labor force that HKS had recruited and trained would leave for their “winter” jobs.
It became clear that if Myers and his team wanted to deliver a stable, superior professional product, that meant developing a full-time, year-round, well paid workforce offering full-time, year-round work.
So HKS went to work. They targeted resorts whose clients were less seasonal and less weekend intensive, including those few off-island resorts whose typical season counterbalanced usual patterns; they targeted residential housekeeping, post-construction cleaning, and apartment move-out cleaning; and they targeted offices, clubhouses, and facilities cleaning operations. The success is evident. All HKS team members who want full-time work now have it, and because of great pay and benefits, the labor base is strong. To strengthen their base (who typically arrive unskilled), HKS develops and trains their employees into a highly skilled work force.
“To understand cleaning methods, the right products to use for different situations, and the right methods of applying products requires intensive training and commitment to learn,” Myers said. “We give our employees 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and we pay substantially more than minimum wage. The result is good energy going into people’s homes, and we are all proud of that.”
From that strong base, building and growing a professional and recognized brand has been easier. HKS has six divisions, each with its own division manager. Every trained employee is in a uniform with a name tag and appropriate insurance coverages. A fleet of 53 clean and logoed vehicles is outfitted with industry elite cleaning chemicals and equipment, and all of this is professionally managed. Overall, they employ 200 team members, divided among housekeepers, supervisors, inspectors, laundry workers, technicians, trainers, assistant managers, and managers.
“Our assistant managers and managers have almost exclusively come through the ranks,” Myers said. “Our team members are terrific people who work hard, and we reward them with employee recognition programs. This is not a fun job; it’s hard work, and our people take it seriously.”
As HKS has evolved, a process called electrostatic spraying has become important. If someone in a residence or hotel has tested positive for COVID-19, HKS will spray the entire facility using this process to kill 100 percent of the virus. Effects are residual and last beyond the application. It is effective for boats, airplanes, private residences, private homes, and businesses. Some customers utilize this service every time a guest departs their property.
HKS is also proud of its commitment to community. They donate post-construction cleaning for every home built by LowCountry Habitat for Humanity. They support Cleaning for a Cause to provide residential housekeeping at no cost for women fighting breast cancer, and they donate a substantial amount of the proceeds of their residential housekeeping division during Breast Cancer Awareness Month to worthy charities promoting research and care for breast cancer.
“Unlike some of our franchised competitors, every cent of what we generate stays in the Lowcountry, through our employees to our vendors and our suppliers,” Myers said. “We’re local, and that’s the way we’re going to stay.”
The mission statement that guides all the services and interactions of HKS is completely appropriate and not surprising: “While adhering to the highest ethical standards, we will deliver consistent, reliable cleaning solutions to a dirty world.”
And it is the “highest ethical standards” part that is most important to Myers. “A customer once sent me a letter that said, ‘Everybody and every business makes mistakes. The best part about HKS is that you guys own it, you fix it, and then you get on with life. You have no idea how that separates you from the pack,’” Myers shared. “I get lots of great letters from satisfied customers. This one was by far the most meaningful and most professional business compliment I have ever received.”
For more information, visit housekeepingserviceshhi.com or call (843) 815-7377.
