Local residential cleaning business owner Jennifer Fitzwater has scheduled a series of speaking events across Portage County to discuss the benefits of environmental hygiene, beginning with an appearance at the West Main Street Winery at 234 W. Main Street in Ravenna on May 11 beginning at 6 p.m.
“I am very excited,” Fitzwater told The Weekly Villager on May 1. “I tried to talk to several businesses and that led me to the conclusion that education is going to change the industry. I am all about changing the standard of the cleaning industry. There is so much that must change.”
Fitzwater is the owner of JeniMaid, a residential cleaning service, and Sanivra Environmental Services, an environmental disinfection service, both based in Ravenna. Her companies perform residential cleaning that not only cleans at the surface level but at a microscopic level that disinfects residential properties of bacteria. Fitzwater’s business is exclusive to Portage County, mostly servicing residents of Streetsboro, Ravenna, Kent, Brimfield and Rootstown. JeniMaid is also a member of the Ravenna Area Chamber of Commerce.
“JeniMaid is leading the way in that conversation as the first residential cleaning service to speak about this topic,” the 1982 Aurora graduate said. “Think of it like this, washing your hands is a fundamental form of environmental hygiene that you can do because that is part of the health care setting process.”
She has been in the residential cleaning industry for 47 years, having worked in eight sectors of the economy and hosts a weekly podcast, called ‘Cleaning Conversations with JeniMaid – Real Talk with a Pro Cleaner’ that streams across several platforms such as Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio and YouTube.
According to Fitzwater, JeniMaid is the only residential cleaning service in the State of Ohio that provides access to Breezy Blue, a turnkey and touchless supplemental disinfecting solution that produces an aerosolized hydrogen peroxide fog which fogs the entire room in seconds, disinfecting the entire area.
Only three other residential cleaning companies can offer this disinfectant technology and they are all out of state.
“You can set it and forget it after everyone has gone home,” Fitzwater added. “I have to train them how to use it because you can kill yourself if you don’t know what you are doing. This is not something that you can get at Walmart and purchase and do all of that, they don’t do that. It is not in the mainstream market yet; we are trying to bring it to homes.”
For Fitzwater, her summer of speaking events revolves around educating the public about residential cleaning on a deeper level, which requires keeping one’s environment sterile and drastically reducing the bacterial threat level.
“Even though you clean, you can still have germs leftover and we are not dealing with that, so we are and that is why I created my own disinfectant division Saniver Environmental Solutions,” noted Fitzwater.
Fitzwater said that a person’s environment affects their daily life more than they realize and wants people to take their environmental care into their own hands as much as they are responsible for those who enter their residential or place of business.
Fitzwater said that it is important to recognize that cleaning and environmental hygiene are not the same and plans to encourage people to take their health into their own hands to reduce the viral spread.
“This is why I do my cleaning conversations because I have handled these different subjects every Monday night on my podcast and my YouTube to inform cleaners and bring them up to a higher standard of cleaning and also homeowners so that they know who they are hiring,” she added.
Originally from Aurora, Fitzwater credits her parents for instilling in her the benefits of maintaining a tidy home environment and experienced the residential cleaning business when she was only 15, working alongside her friend and her mother to clean offices in Twinsburg.
Fitzwater continued doing private residential cleanings throughout her life, working several jobs at once but remained active in the residential cleaning industry before making it her full-time career.
In addition to speaking at the West Main Street Winery, Fitzwater has four other speaking engagements scheduled throughout Ravenna. She will appear at Books A Go Go on June 6, Reed Memorial Library on June 13, The Bean and The Baker on June 24 and Sunshine Cupcakes on July 14.
“I stay around here that way I can serve the clients, and I am not rushing from house to house, and they get the service that they are paying for but the environmental hygiene has been practiced in health care for decades but not widely introduced to the private sector,” she said. “That is the gap that I am addressing in my talk.”
