Kenia Thomas, head of the largest minority-owned business in the Hartford region, wonders what her life would have been like had her parents not fled Cuba after the revolution, when she was 5 years old.
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Kenia Thomas, head of the largest minority-owned business in the Hartford region, wonders what her life would have been like had her parents not fled Cuba after the revolution, when she was 5 years old.
The CEO of Charter Oak Building Maintenance Inc. in Rocky Hill credits the foresight of her father, an engineer with a wife and four children, for leaving.
“He's a very observant person,” said Thomas, 51. “Very quickly he realized it was not going to be good — that it was not headed in the direction everybody thought it was heading. One day, it was like, 'We've got to get these kids out of here.' They basically left with nothing.”
They emigrated via Spain, where they stayed for a year before coming to the United States to join her father's sister, who had left immediately after the revolution and was working in Connecticut. Her parents now reside in Port St. Lucie, Fla., where Thomas and her husband, John Thomas, president of Charter Oak Building Maintenance, also have a home.
The Thomases started their janitorial and maintenance business in 1988 after graduating from the University of Connecticut with degrees in business administration.
Then, John spent days making sales calls, while Kenia, who worked full time for Aetna, helped where she could. She switched to part time at Aetna as the business grew, then left the Hartford insurer when Charter Oak was about a year old and demanded her full attention. The couple cleaned clients' businesses at night.
She recalls one job where she and John spent all night stripping a mall floor. As they were driving home around 6 a.m., covered in old floor wax that had been removed, she remembers telling John, “One day, we're going to laugh about this.”
Today, the company has about 100 clients statewide, from small offices to schools and hospitals. For the latter, Charter Oak supplements in-house staff.
It averages about 300 employees, most part time, making it the largest minority-owned business in Hartford Business Journal's 2014 Book of Lists. Charter Oak ranked as the third-largest woman-owned business in the region.
Kenia owns 51 percent of the company; John 39 percent and her brother-in-law, Bill Thomas, 10 percent.
Charter Oaks' services include the usual cleaning — bathrooms, vacuuming, dusting, trash — plus windows, floor stripping, and “pretty much whatever the building needs to get cleaned,” Kenia said.
“Another thing, our philosophy is when a customer calls, whatever the request, we go above and beyond to meet it,” she said. “If it's humanly possible to meet their request, we do.”
That could include a last-minute request by a school needing an extra scrubbing before an open house, responding to water damage by removing carpet and wallboard, or clearing snow from roofs.
Being in business for 27 years has taught Kenia not to second-guess decisions.
“You can't go back and say, 'We shouldn't have done that,' because a lot of times the decision you're making is based on the information you have at the time,” she said. “You have to work with the knowledge you have.”
Also, it's important to keep up with technology, she said, especially company websites, often the first place potential clients go.
One constant challenge the Thomases have: dealing with Connecticut taxes and regulations.
Not a challenge: working together.
“It's actually been pretty easy,” Kenia said. “That's one thing that amazes me, it really does. When you think about it, we basically are together all day long.”
Adds John, “And we talk about the business all the time. It's just part of our life.”
Each has complementary strengths, he said. His are operations and sales; hers are administrative, recordkeeping, and technology.
The couple has two children, Julian, 18, who will attend UConn in the fall to study business, and Heather, 20, who will be a junior at Quinnipiac University and is studying accounting. Julian shows interest in possibly running the family business some day.
It may seem surprising, but Kenia likes to relax by cleaning her home.
“You don't have to think. It's down time to me; it's relaxing, it really is,” she said.
