2024 Annual Letter | By Matt Graves, Owner at Cleen Detailing
My name is Matt Graves and I am the Managing Partner at Cleen Detailing.
3 years ago, I became the new owner of Cleen Detailing. I saved everything I had (and even moved back in with my parents) so that I could invest my heart and soul into building a mobile car detailing business with a 2-part mission:
1) To save customers hours of their time, by delivering the most convenient, reliable, and fair-priced car detailing service that comes to YOU, rain or shine.
2) To set an industry standard for employee treatment, by creating jobs that pay livable wages, and empower employees to succeed inside & outside of the workplace.
To date, over residents in Ottawa & the GTA have entrusted our exceptional front-line team of detailers with revitalizing their vehicles. This means we've saved our customers a collective 15,000 hours – time they might otherwise have spent driving to and from or waiting at detailing shops.
That’s 15,000 hours more for our clients to spend with family and friends, or doing the things they love.What's more - the support from our customers has allowed us to kickstart the car detailing careers of over a dozen employees in Ottawa, while providing them with livable wages 40% above the industry average.
To put that in perspective, while the “Living Wage” in Ottawa is $21.95/hour, with GTA at $25.05. The average employee in Canada's car detailing industry earns $17.50/hour. When employees earn below a Living Wage, they are forced to live paycheck-to-paycheck and struggle to pursue goals like home ownership, or raising a family in decent living conditions.
Our mission is grounded in the belief that the businesses of the future will flourish by prioritizing the customer experience AND employee well-being. For every dollar we save through improved efficiency and innovation, we can invest more in our employees and offer more competitive prices to our customers.
Our team works hard every day to make our business better.
This year we launched an innovative fleet of self-contained vehicles, fitted with industry-leading equipment and their own water & power supply. When operating from our "Cleen Vans" in 2-person crews, our team can detail the interior of a vehicle back to "feels like new" in just 1-2 hours. We had a 97% success rate for "on-time" service with customers, and we're honoured to now have over 1000+ 5-star reviews online (the most of any mobile car detailing service in Canada).
On behalf of the WHOLE Cleen team, a huge thank-you goes out to all of our customers (and others who support us by sharing our story). We've been given the opportunity to set a gold standard in the industry while giving back to customers their most precious resource: their time. ❤️
We look forward to providing you with the #CleenEffect
-Matt Graves
Owner, Cleen Detailing.
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