Building Relationships That Last: The McGarr Way

At McGarr Service Corporation, we’ve spent over five decades building a commercial cleaning model around a simple idea: no two buildings are alike, and the people cleaning them should know the difference.

We know that true customization can’t be rushed. It’s earned over time by consistent, dedicated people who show up for you day after day. As a family-run business, we pride ourselves on building a team that stays. Because when frontline faces remain the same, they don’t just learn your building’s layout—they learn its unique rhythms.

This is the story of how that longevity shapes our work at Curry College, and what it tells you about how McGarr shows up for every client we serve.

Curry College, and a man named Efrain

For most of the past two and a half decades, the cleaning operation at Curry College has been led by the same person: Efrain Portillo, a McGarr general manager who marked his 25th anniversary with the company this year.

Efrain knows the campus the way the registrar knows the academic calendar. He knows which residence halls take the worst beating during finals and which admin buildings get quiet at the same time. He knows the difference between a normal Monday and a Monday after a big campus event. He knows the older buildings’ quirks and the newer buildings’ rhythms. He knows the staff at Curry by name, and they know him.

None of that is in a binder. It’s the kind of operational fluency that only gets built one academic year at a time, by the same person, year after year.

But here’s the part of the Curry story that matters most for the rest of McGarr’s clients: Efrain isn’t the only one.

Noraly, and the deeper bench

This year, McGarr also celebrated Noraly Agramonte’s 15-year anniversary with the company. Fifteen years on a Custodial Services team that prides itself on staying.

She’s one name on a longer list. Across McGarr’s operations — in cleaning, in security, in concierge — there are supervisors, crew leads, and frontline team members who have been with the company for 10, 15, 20, 25+ years. The leadership team has been there for decades. Chris Lykins, McGarr’s Vice President of Operations, brings nearly thirty years of his own service leadership experience to the role. Efrain has, in many ways, grown up at McGarr alongside dozens of his peers who have done the same.

This is where Curry College becomes more than just one campus story.

When Efrain has a tricky operational call to make on his campus, he isn’t reasoning from scratch. He’s pulling from a network of long-tenured McGarr managers who have collectively spent hundreds of years learning the unique rhythms of dozens of different facilities — campuses, hospitals, corporate headquarters, residential towers, multi-tenant office buildings. The same network that supports Efrain at Curry is what stands behind every new McGarr account on day one.

What Efrain has learned at Curry feeds back into how the next McGarr account is run. What another long-tenured McGarr manager has learned at a hospital downtown can shape how Efrain plans for flu season on campus. What Noraly has seen in 15 years of frontline work informs how the next person on her team is trained.

That cross-pollination — between people who have all been in the same company long enough to actually know each other — is the thing competitors can’t manufacture. It’s not a process. It’s a depth of shared experience, and it produces a really specific outcome:

That’s why a new McGarr client doesn’t start from zero. The team showing up on day one is backed by people who have spent decades learning how to learn a building — fast, accurately, and without making the client teach them the basics.

What that looks like for a facilities director

For a facilities director, the day-to-day experience of working with this kind of provider is hard to describe in a brochure, but easy to recognize when you’ve lived without it.

It looks like a team that’s already adjusting for finals week before you’ve sent the email. It looks like never having to re-explain your building, your calendar, or your event schedule to a new account manager — because the account manager hasn’t changed. It looks like the same friendly faces in the lobby year after year, the ones your staff know and your tenants notice. It looks like a 2 a.m. issue routing to people who know the property, not a national call center reading from a script.

And maybe most importantly, it looks like a vendor relationship that quietly disappears from your list of things to worry about.

That isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when a company is structurally built to keep its people — and to let those people get good at what they do, over a very long time.

The McGarr difference, in plain terms

A few practical things make this possible:

McGarr is women-owned and family-run, WBENC-certified, headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, and led by President Kelly McGarr. The company has 52 years of continuous operating history in Greater Boston. Leadership is directly accessible — clients reach decision-makers, not regional middle layers. Operations run 24/7/365, with real coverage from people who know the properties they serve. And the workforce is built to stay, which means the institutional knowledge is too.

It’s not flashy. It’s not new. That’s kind of the point.

So what’s the question to ask your current provider?

If you manage facilities for a college, a hospital, a corporate headquarters, or a multi-site portfolio, here’s the one question worth asking your current cleaning provider:

Who’s been the longest on my account, and how long have they been with your company?
It’s a small question, but the answer tends to reveal a lot — about how well your building is really known, and how consistent your service will be over the years.