North Country Janitorial Inc. Expands Workforce and Builds Community

North Country Janitorial Inc. is located at 188 Dix Avenue in Glens Falls. It was founded in 1974, by Ron and Rosemary Montesi… It’s now a second-generation family-owned business, currently run by Ron and Rosemary’s son, Matt Montesi, as the President and Owner; while  Chris Barden is the Chief Operating Officer, and has been part of the North Country family for almost 12 years. North Country Janitorial Inc. has about 230 employees, and over the last few years has found new and innovative ways to fulfill their employment needs, build community, and provide opportunities and services to their employees.

North Country Janitorial has continued to grow over its almost 50 years in business: “When I started, we didn’t have clients above Warrensburg, and now we go to the Canadian border… However, the majority of our customers are 15 to 20 miles from our offices here in Glens Falls,” Chris said.

North Country Janitorial has recently expanded into cleaning healthcare facilities and medical manufacturing plants: “Here in Glens Falls, we’re in the center of it… There are medical manufacturing facilities all around us, and it has taken hard work and opportunities to build those relationships,” Chris said.

Chris is aware of the importance of a reliable workforce to fulfill the needs of their clients: “We are a business that lives and dies by the availability of labor. Finding labor, retaining labor and training labor is key,” he said.

It was with this aspect of their business in mind that they kept working to expand their labor pool… About three years ago, the labor expansion that they had been looking for became a reality! The addition of a bilingual territory manager to the North Country family was the catalyst for this change – the ability to communicate with a new group of potential employees has helped bridge the gap between North Country Janitorial, and the hispanic labor market.

“The work is not easy. Finding people was a challenge, and about three years ago, we hired our first bilingual manager. That opened up the opportunity to recruit and talk to folks that we had previously not had access to. These folks are Spanish-speaking… They have gotten here legally to work, and to live and to support their families. So that opened up the ability to start recruiting from a larger demographic than we had been able to before… For us, that is huge, and has grown and has been part of our success. We have been able to work and take on more work and staff properly,” Chris said.

To support this new workforce, North Country Janitorial had to create infrastructure – the pool of labor that they would be drawing from mostly lived in Albany, and therefore, transportation was an issue: “Living in Albany and working in Glens Falls created some logistical challenges for a lot of these folks. Transportation was an issue. A lot of these folks didn’t have cars… Getting them from point A to point B was something that we had to figure out. Getting them to come up from Albany made us get creative and create systems for housing and transportation. We spent a lot of money on Uber for many months transporting our workforce. We needed to get our employees where they needed to go to support our customers. We went out and bought a minivan a little over a year ago, and we use that to shuttle people to some of the larger accounts. That’s worked well,” Chris said.

To help support their employees, North Country Janitorial has used innovative thinking to create real world solutions for their work force – they have reached out into the community and helped their employees find housing and services in the area. They have provided simple solutions like translating the bus schedule into Spanish… They have also relied on technology to translate information when needed: “The phones are great. They translate information so that everyone can communicate,” Chris said.

However, as they hire and support this new labor market, human interactions are important as well. The HR team at North Country Janitorial are enrolled in Spanish language classes, so that they can more effectively communicate with employees: “The HR team is the underpinning of the program. We really only wish we had done it sooner! Our customers are happy to have competent people, and that has helped strengthen some relationships,” Chris said.

For more information about North Country Janitorial, please visit northcountryjanitorial.com