Local cleaning company breaks barriers
Local entrepreneur Chavion Yeager established Impact Cleaning Service, located in New Hope, MN, in 2017. She said, “I started off doing residential house cleaning—bi-weekly, monthly cleanings—and then we were doing multi-family housing as well.”
Yeager is originally from Minneapolis. “I lived over South for a while, and North as well,” she said. She also graduated from Irondale High School in New Brighton.
Yeager expanded her business by offering commercial cleaning but said the process wasn’t easy. “I had a hard time with basically retaining staff, and the biggest thing I felt, like, was pay,” said Yeager. She aspired to compensate her team with “livable wages” and fair pay.
She elaborated: “I actually decided to join the Laborers Union, and we’ve been in the union for a year and a half now.” She broke barriers by breaking into the construction industry, which seems to be male-dominated.
As many local small businesses discover, it’s challenging to find a team of dedicated and reliable team members. Yeager explained, “I had a hard time with retaining staff,” but now she has “12 part-time and four full-time employees” as part of the team.
Entrepreneurship provided Yeager with an economic opportunity. She said, “I started it out of a means of survival. When I left from working at the other cleaning company, it was kind of. like. sink or swim, and this is something I knew how to do.”
Yeager chose to pursue her dreams. She said, “I took my last $3,000 and I paid my bills up for the month, bought some supplies, and hit the ground running.” The dream manifested quite quickly into a successful enterprise.
Perseverance is a key to success. Yeager said, “Now I just keep going because I really want to change the narrative in the construction industry, what it means to work with small businesses and minority businesses, and women[-owned] businesses. So, that’s pretty much my driving force right now.”
The COVID-19 pandemic caused her to modify the structure of the business. “We actually had an office in NEON, and I decided to scale my business a little bit, so now I have a home office, especially with COVID,” Yeager said. She converted her basement into an office.
It took passion and proper planning to launch her business. “Failure really wasn’t an option, and I had worked in corporate America for a long time, and there were so many different things I did not like [about] the way people were treated,” explained Yeager. So, she focused on being independent by becoming a business owner.
“When I was growing up, cleaning was always a part of the weekly ritual, everybody wakes up on the weekends, they clean up, you know as a kid you hated it,” said Yeager. In essence, her upbringing had a profound influence on her work ethic and cleaning business.
Skepticism and preconceived notions pose barriers to success, especially for Black-owned businesses. But Yeager is successfully breaking barriers every day. She elaborated: “My long-term goal would be to have my own development company.
Yeager said,“I think that we are more than capable to have the level of success and opportunities that other people have if we just put in the work.” She emphasized that she wants to employ more people and subcontractors in the future.
Fortunately, business is booming. The most popular service in demand involves the cleaning of major construction projects. “So basically, our biggest clients, we just did a project for Adolfson and Peterson [Construction] at the St. Cloud Prison. They remodeled all of the jail cells; we cleaned them out,” Yeager said. The team also cleaned out the trailers weekly.
Impact Cleaning Service customers can expect exceptional customer service, high-quality work, and fair prices. In regards to pay, Yeager said, “It fluctuates because we’re union.” She added, “My price point is dictated per job.”
Yeager also shared exciting news: “We’re partnering with Ryan Companies right now working on the Highland Bridge project.”
Although it’s liberating to run a business, independence has its ups and downs. “The most challenging thing is that cleaning is competitive by nature,” Yeager said. Despite the competition, she never gave up on her dream. As a result, “I try to focus on taking jobs with companies who kind of have the same core values as me,” she said. Although a lot of jobs can roll in, it’s important to have integrity and choose the right opportunities.
Yeager offered uplifting advice for upcoming entrepreneurs young and old: “I would advise people to make sure they’re doing research in the field they want to go into.”
She added, “Credit is always important—that’s the biggest thing is doing your research, making sure you have some money saved up. Entrepreneurship is not a get-rich-quick scheme either.” Hard work truly pays off, and “it’s very rewarding,” Yeager said.
For more info about Impact Cleaning Service, visit www.impactcleaning.org or call 612-900-8258.
This story was updated story to correct the city of Irondale High School to New Brighton.
Ashley Lauren is a contributing writer at the MN Spokesman-Recorder.