Real EstateThe Making of a Maverick Cleaning Company

//August 9, 2005//

Listen to this article

Date: June 28, 1995

Location: Rutherford

Title: Real Estate/The Making of a Maverick Cleaning Company

Author: Mukul Pandya

Subject: How a Cuban immigrant overcame hurdles and hardship to achieve his American dream

Jos “Pepe” Garcia loves horses. A painting of a cowboy riding a stallion hangs on the wall of his office at Maverick Building Services, the cleaning services company he started eight years ago in Rutherford. In a sense, Garcia”s love of horses–and fondness for actor Tom Cruise”s pilot character in the film Top Gun–inspired the company”s name. “A maverick horse always leads the pack,” Garcia says. “It”s a very stubborn animal.” Garcia believes he, too, has that trait in large measure. “When I set my sights on something,” he declares, “I really go after it.”

Garcia, 33, has lived by that creed at least since 1979, when at age 17, he started cleaning offices at night while attending school by day. Today, he has built Maverick into a business with more than 200 employees, who clean out some 3 million sq. ft. of office space in Northern and Central New Jersey. Garcia”s clients include property owners like Burroughs Development in Paramus, Cali Realty in Cranford, and Prodevco Management in Edison. Maverick has grown by an annual average of 20% during the past five years, Garcia claims, adding that he expects to maintain that pace. “Maverick will double in size in five years,” he says.

Some of Garcia”s clients find that easy to believe. Among them is Cathy Dooney, senior administrative coordinator of Playtex Products, a hair products research firm in Paramus, which has been a Maverick client for five years. “Pepe is like one of the family,” she says. “Few company presidents come on site to do audits themselves, but he is one of them. Ordering janitorial supplies used to be a cumbersome task. He has saved our company a lot of money by getting supplies at a reduced rate.” Garcia did not start Maverick until 1986, but he was born into business long before that. His grandfather ran a sugarcane-distribution agency in Cuba, and his father owned a sausage company. After Castro came to power in 1959, however, these fortunes declined. In 1968, when young Jos was barely six, his father left for Spain, while his mother flew to Florida with her three sons. “When we got to Miami airport, the first thing I saw was a Coca-Cola bottle,” Garcia recalls. “I had never seen Coke before. It was like heaven for a little boy.”

Garcia was soon to learn that for impoverished immigrants, heaven can be a lot like hell. His mother, a schoolteacher, found it difficult to find a job after the family moved to New Jersey, first living in Irvington and finally settling in Union City. “Life was rough,” Garcia remembers. “My mother worked at three jobs. School was very hard in the beginning. All the classes were in English, and I didn”t speak the language.”

After finishing school, Garcia was eager to enter college, but his mother could not afford it. He then went looking for work at shops in Union City. “I had to help myself, and I took it as a challenge,” he says. “I knocked on every single door on the street, and found a job moving furniture.” Garcia worked at the furniture store for three months, and then he met a man who supervised the cleaning of an office building in Newark. That meeting led to Garcia”s joining Madison Building Services, a Long Island janitorial service. One of his first assignments was cleaning rest rooms and offices in Newark. Though it was hard work, Garcia was delighted that he was making more than the minimum wage, which was around $2.35 an hour during the late 1970s. The job helped him pay for courses at Seton Hall University, though, where he studied marketing during the day. “I”d study during school hours, go to the library during break rather than hanging out at the cafeteria, and at 4:00 I”d head down to Newark to start cleaning buildings. I worked until midnight, and the next day I”d start the cycle all over again,” Garcia says.

By 1983, when Garcia got his bachelor”s degree in marketing, he had become an account executive at Madison. He initially saw the degree as his ticket away from cleaning, but as real estate boomed during the 1980s, demand for janitorial services soared. Garcia saw he could make more money as a cleaning industry executive than as an entry-level employee. In 1985 Malvern Burroughs, head of Burroughs Development, encouraged Garcia to work for himself and offered to be his first client. “Mal Burroughs had come up the hard way himself, and maybe what he saw in me was a parallel with his own life,” Garcia says. Before he could start his company, however, he needed $20,000 for start-up costs to meet payroll as well as buy equipment, liability insurance, and worker”s compensation insurance. Garcia”s mother gave him half the money. By 1986, Maverick was in business with a staff of six, including Garcia.

Maverick grew with help from many of Garcia”s supporters, including Alan Marcus, who runs a public affairs firm in Secaucus, and Arthur Imperatore, whose company runs a ferry service along the Weehawken waterfront. “We would clean offices, or ferry terminals, and do whatever needed to be done,” he says. Maverick also landed Prodevco Management in Edison as a client. “Prodevco manages eight buildings,” Garcia says. “Our company cleans all of them.”

When real estate collapsed, cleaning services were hit as hard as other property-related businesses. Competition became vicious, and as developers lost buildings to financial institutions, they began to haggle over fees. Garcia says his charges have dropped by nearly 20% from 1980 levels. In response, he has started using teams to clean properties, which increases the productivity of his employees. “I”ve faced setbacks. Raising money to meet payroll and tax payments has often been tough,” he says. “I”ve often had to go backwards before I could go forward again.”

With new construction still mostly on hold, Garcia believes Maverick”s future growth will come from cleaning schools and transport facilities. He insists, however, that once his clients sign on, they rarely leave. Maverick in April took on Cali Realty, the Cranford real estate investment trust, as a client for a single building in Fair Lawn. “Now I”ve got my sights on doing more buildings for Cali,” Garcia says. “I”ll keep working and working and working until I get them.” The maverick pilot of Top Gun would undoubtedly recognize that sentiment and approve. u