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NESTLED IN THE HILLS outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico, there is a breezy neighborhood where a shy kid loved riding his bike up and down his street. On any given day you could've seen Samuel Mejía doing long wheelies on his bicycle. When he wasn't on his bike he spent hours drawing characters from his imagination, listening to movie soundtracks on vinyl records or climbing on the roof of his house to watch distant airplanes land on the runways next to the ocean. At the age of 16, his family moved to Georgia and settled in North Decatur. After graduating from Shamrock High School (presently Druid Hills Middle School) Sam studied mechanical drafting at DeKalb Technical Institute (presently GA Piedmont Technical College). In 1992 he moved to upstate New York and worked as a volunteer for a nonprofit educational organization, spending 3 years learning the value of service and hard work. Afterwards, he settled in northern New Jersey, got married and soon became a father to a cute baby girl. While supporting his family he learned more about the meaning of service from two very different lines of business, each providing valuable lessons that would be formative to Home Clean Home's service to its clients.
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Early in 1996, Sam's service to people expanded as a delivery driver for Coffee Associates, Inc., a long-established coffee roaster for restaurants in New York City and the tri-state area. Delivering coffee throughout New York and New Jersey meant carrying a beeper and relying on paper maps to find one's way. He even delivered coffee to the original Carlo's Bakery in Hoboken, NJ, featured in TLC's Cake Boss. Sam acknowledges, "I quickly learned that timely response and building rapport with customers were key to building customer satisfaction." The hustle and bustle of Manhattan's streets demanded everything from swift driving maneuvers to carefully slipping his Ford Econoline between stopped vehicles, sometimes with no more than a 2-inch clearance on each side! With parking nearly impossible, he recalls double-parking his van, unloading anywhere between 50 to 200 pounds of coffee and taking it to the restaurant basement. After exchanging pleasantries with the manager and collecting payment he'd run back to his van before NYPD could pin a ticket on the windshield. Remembering those days, Sam says, "New Yorkers love their coffee and it better be hot and freshly brewed. Restaurants, diners and pastry shops depended on the company's deliveries to keep customers coming through their doors and ordering from their menus. So when a diner called the company and said they needed more coffee ASAP, you were hoping on the way there that they didn't run out before you arrived, or the restaurant manager would eagerly meet you in the kitchen with a few choice words—loud and clear!" Learning from his early experiences on the job, Sam gave it his all. Honing diplomacy skills while working against the clock proved a superb way for Sam to polish his customer service skills. After two and a half years, he was promoted to Assistant Plant Manager.
In summer of 2000, Sam shifted gears when he was hired by Bell Atlantic, the telecommunications company for the Mid-Atlantic region at the time. Unbeknown to him, the company was in behind-the-scenes negotiations for major expansion. Weeks after joining the company, Bell Atlantic announced the acquisition of GTE and changed its name to Verizon Communications Inc. Interestingly, Sam never worked for the better-known wireless division. He was hired by the company's landline division which would reinvent itself in the years to follow. Sam already had joined its sales and service department and engaged with customers across several states. As landlines continued disappearing through the early and mid-2000s, Verizon looked to bring fiber optics to the forefront. Sam's job entailed closing sales of fiber-optic data and TV service across the New York metropolitan area. This major push for fiber-to-the-premises greatly expanded the fiber-optic network by connecting fiber directly to individual households and businesses, eventually making it the largest end-to-end fiber region in the nation.
Although enjoying these transformative developments, Sam also experienced the frustrating limitations of corporate bureaucracy. Like a locomotive engineer is isolated from his passengers, corporate's preoccupation with spearheading the business isolated it from customers' needs and projected a sense of indifference that is common among large enterprises. Despite the high-pressure demands of the job, Sam faced the challenge as it trained him to be keen on customers' concerns, listening to them and doing everything he could to make people feel valued. He endeavored to serve customers the smart way and went on to gain valuable experience at the company for 14 years. Looking back at his experience there, Sam says, "An important lesson I took away was how the intimacy of a small business is better suited to serve a community. I firmly realized that a business strengthens the connection to its customers when the leadership engages in handling people's concerns in a perceptive and friendly way, as opposed to solely assigning that responsibility to its workers."
Some time after widowing, however, Sam realized the need to focus on his daughter, seek support, rediscover his daughter as well as himself. Eventually, he returned to Decatur with his daughter in 2014.
He wanted to start a low-tech business that busy people could need and ultimately decided to dive into the residential cleaning business. He chooses to participate in the cleaning work and not just manage the business. This leading style allows him to better understand the workers' perspective and provide knowledgeable guidance that they can better appreciate and respect. Having spent over 20 years serving people in non-profit and companies small and large, Sam is happy to serve Atlanta's communities, bringing satisfaction to clients with the help of his workers. His customer service experience helps to provide Atlantans with the kind of service they have been waiting for: A quality home cleaning service with good value from a hard-working team of friends. Atlanta's homes now radiate bliss with Home Clean Home.
In summer of 2000, Sam shifted gears when he was hired by Bell Atlantic, the telecommunications company for the Mid-Atlantic region at the time. Unbeknown to him, the company was in behind-the-scenes negotiations for major expansion. Weeks after joining the company, Bell Atlantic announced the acquisition of GTE and changed its name to Verizon Communications Inc. Interestingly, Sam never worked for the better-known wireless division. He was hired by the company's landline division which would reinvent itself in the years to follow. Sam already had joined its sales and service department and engaged with customers across several states. As landlines continued disappearing through the early and mid-2000s, Verizon looked to bring fiber optics to the forefront. Sam's job entailed closing sales of fiber-optic data and TV service across the New York metropolitan area. This major push for fiber-to-the-premises greatly expanded the fiber-optic network by connecting fiber directly to individual households and businesses, eventually making it the largest end-to-end fiber region in the nation.
Although enjoying these transformative developments, Sam also experienced the frustrating limitations of corporate bureaucracy. Like a locomotive engineer is isolated from his passengers, corporate's preoccupation with spearheading the business isolated it from customers' needs and projected a sense of indifference that is common among large enterprises. Despite the high-pressure demands of the job, Sam faced the challenge as it trained him to be keen on customers' concerns, listening to them and doing everything he could to make people feel valued. He endeavored to serve customers the smart way and went on to gain valuable experience at the company for 14 years. Looking back at his experience there, Sam says, "An important lesson I took away was how the intimacy of a small business is better suited to serve a community. I firmly realized that a business strengthens the connection to its customers when the leadership engages in handling people's concerns in a perceptive and friendly way, as opposed to solely assigning that responsibility to its workers."
Some time after widowing, however, Sam realized the need to focus on his daughter, seek support, rediscover his daughter as well as himself. Eventually, he returned to Decatur with his daughter in 2014.
He wanted to start a low-tech business that busy people could need and ultimately decided to dive into the residential cleaning business. He chooses to participate in the cleaning work and not just manage the business. This leading style allows him to better understand the workers' perspective and provide knowledgeable guidance that they can better appreciate and respect. Having spent over 20 years serving people in non-profit and companies small and large, Sam is happy to serve Atlanta's communities, bringing satisfaction to clients with the help of his workers. His customer service experience helps to provide Atlantans with the kind of service they have been waiting for: A quality home cleaning service with good value from a hard-working team of friends. Atlanta's homes now radiate bliss with Home Clean Home.
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