Maid Bright – Cornerstones

SMALL BUSINESS LEADER

Sharing Their Success Like Family

Maid Bright is an expression of the importance of family in the lives of Yusuf and Zeynap Mehmetoglu and what distinguishes this successful business from other house-cleaning businesses. Family helped Yusuf get established when he moved to the United States. Family helped the two of them establish and grow their successful 10-year-old house-cleaning business. And the concept of family is expressed in the way they deal with customers and employees.

Zeynap, who emigrated to the United States from Turkey as a child, and Yusuf who emigrated as an adult, say that their initial motivation in founding Maid Bright, like most people, was to “provide a better future and opportunity” for their family. Being active, contributing members of the Northern Virginia community, they say, is not only good for growing a business but also “natural,” an inherent part of their culture, in which sharing the fruits of your success is expected.

The payback, Yusuf explains, is that you experience “a different kind of happiness that you can’t get anywhere else. It allows us to set a good example to our children and future generations.”

Finding different opportunities for strengthening the community that we are part of is actively coordinated by their office manager who is assigned to seek out ways Maid Bright may contribute. Employees also are encouraged and rewarded for participating.

Maid Bright has made a difference by providing free house cleaning services to women with cancer, catering dinners for the past two years for the hypothermia shelter and doing “move-out” cleaning for Cornerstones’ transitional housing units so incoming residents find “a sparkling clean welcome.”

Maid Bright participated in the 2013 Love Your Body fundraiser for Cornerstones. They consistently offer discounts to seniors, veterans, firefighters and teachers; participate in the annual Reston Help the Homeless walk; and donated to the plight of Syrian refugees.

Their hope, they say, is to inspire others to “do good.” Explains Zeynap, “Start with something and it snowballs. That’s how it started with Maid Bright.”