Jackie Le Vvintre is the owner of Le Vvintre Living, a luxury cleaning service that specializes in residential and commercial cleaning.
Born in Illinois, Le Vvintre and her family later spent two years in Idaho before settling down in the Twin Cities.
“I call Minnesota home,” Le Vvintre says of the frozen tundra, also known as the state of Minnesota.
An avid rule follower, as a kid Le Vvintre was militant in her approach to authority, rarely deviating from the guidelines imposed by her parents or teachers.
“I’m not a rule breaker, and I never have been,” she notes, but she’s always been ambitious.
After high school, she left the Midwest and moved to New Orleans to attend college, citing the desire for change as the key factor in her decision to jet south.
“I wanted to get out of Minnesota and experience something different,” Le Vvintre says.
“I initially wanted to go to school in California, but I didn’t get accepted. In fact, I actually didn’t know anything about New Orleans other than they had Hurricane Katrina.”
The social mores of the south clashed with Le Vvintre’s Midwest affability, but she also made many friends in New Orleans, many of whom she still keeps in contact with today.
“We all have the same ideologies, and there is a bond that we share because a lot of us are entrepreneurs,” she mentions.
Ironically, Le Vvintre, a kind and positive wife and mother of two, admits that she is not overtly social, yet, despite her aversion to the limelight, in the last four years, she has built and established a profitable cleaning business (Le Vvintre Living), a company that was started in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That [cleaning] was one thing that I knew I was good at,” Le Vvintre says, adding that the costs associated with starting a cleaning company are low, which gave her even more incentive to ditch conventional employment and become a business owner.
Early on, Le Vvintre had little trouble attracting clients, but within months her book of business contained more clients than she alone could service.
“When I got too busy, I added my sister into the mix, and then later my sister-in-law,” notes Le Vvintre, a woman who once struggled with delegation, but now looks for various ways to give other people opportunities.
“Once I added employees, it became a snowball effect because we started getting a lot of word-of-mouth referrals.”
For context, often when Le Vvintre agreed to clean a home in a residential neighborhood, within weeks several of a client’s neighbors would inquire about her services.
“The first house I ever cleaned, we ended up helping six other people on that block,” she says, which was good for business, but also brought about new challenges that forced the detail-centric Le Vvintre to cede control and allow her employees to assume a level of agency.
“That was tough, because I might have fluffed a pillow or laid out a blanket a little differently, but in time I learned that not everything had to be done the way I would do it, and so long as we were doing a nice job and satisfying the client, I could fret less over the small stuff.”
In the last four years, Le Vvintre has also developed systems and processes that have helped her staff clean more efficiently, but also better cater to their clients, a lengthy list that includes elderly men and women who can no longer physically clean, younger families pressed for help, and professionals who view their time as money and would rather take a phone call than spend several hours cleaning.
In each case, before her staff ever begins cleaning, Le Vvintre does a comprehensive walkthrough with a client in order to determine what type of service would be most beneficial for them, at which point, if each party agrees to terms, an initial cleaning commences.
Typically, an initial cleaning will take 4-7 hours, depending on the size of the home/business, and Le Vvintre always has three members of her staff carry out the work.
“After that initial cleaning, once everything is at a maintainable level, we will price out our services by the room,” Le Vvintre says, in remarking that by doing so her clients will have a precise idea of how much they will be spending every time Le Vvintre Living comes out for a professional cleaning.
“It’s also easier to price things out by the room because then clients can see what specific areas are being cleaned, and then, if there are areas of the home that don’t need to be cleaned, or if they want to fall within a certain budget, then we can accommodate that.”
For reference, Le Vvintre Living is not the lowest priced cleaning service on the market, but they’re also not the highest either.
For home cleanings, rates range anywhere from $135-250 for biweekly cleanings, to $150-300 for monthly packages.
For businesses with commercial spaces, those figures increase to about $135 per hour, but what makes Le Vvintre Living unique is that they pride themselves on superior communication with their clients, as well as assigning the same cleaners to the same properties.
“The thing that separates us from being solo cleaners, or just having a team of one or two people is the fact that we are reliable and have excellent communication systems in place,” Le Vvintre explains.
“Whether we’re early or running behind, we try our best to communicate that to the client so they know what to expect.”
Adds Le Vvintre:
“Trust is also a huge thing. We try to send the same teams to the same homes every week or month so that there’s a level of continuity, which makes the clients feel comfortable because they not only know who is in their home or business, but they also know what kind of quality they can expect with every cleaning.”
This approach is counter to what many of the larger cleaning companies in the Twin Cities take, in that the bigger players routinely send different employees to different properties, robbing homeowners of a personal touch that all too often gets overlooked.
“At some places, the dedication to the clients isn’t there, but for us, we want to get to know our clients and we want to give them a service that makes them feel good about hiring us,” Le Vvintre remarks.
“We don’t want them to think that we’re just showing up and doing the minimum every week and taking their money., And so by going the extra mile to show that we care, that’s really ingratiated us to our consumer base and lead to a lot of referrals.”
Looking ahead, it’s difficult to predict just how Le Vvintre Living will grow.
Just a few years ago, Jackie Le Vvintre didn’t own any company vehicles, but today, Le Vvintre Living has four vehicles wrapped in company insignia, which gives employees transportation to various jobsites, but also serves as a traveling billboard and active lead generator.
“As we have built up our clientele, we have made more moves on the branding and marketing side to attract more customers, but I didn’t anticipate doing that initially, so a lot of our growth is being able to adapt and evolve, plus think of creative and innovative ways to appeal to more customers,” Le Vvintre says.
“Realistically though, if I had to put a number on it, in the next 3-5 years, I would like to get to the point of having 6-8 teams who can clean for 3-4 clients per day.” QS
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