Combat Cleaning

I attempted to engage Tony for end of lease cleaning services. We booked a few weeks in advance and his only invoice terms were “COD” (cash on day). I would be interstate and not at the premises on the day of the clean and told Tony. I was busy with the move and noting the invoice terms COD I thought an instant transfer on job completion would be ok.



When I called to arrange final details the day prior I was quite polite to Tony and asked if he was okay with 50% upfront and 50% on completion. Tony insisted on full payment upfront the day prior. I calmly and politely explained the situation that I’m not paying $800+ prior to a job completion the day prior when the terms of the invoice say COD. Tony then became unnecessarily rude and aggressive, he raised his voice to me accusing me of dodging the payment terms, negotiating, “nah what you are doing is negotiating last minute”, yelling “the boss isn’t happy about this!” (It’s a family business so when I asked to speak to the boss to allay the concerns Tony told me that would not be possible as the boss is his mother and that “I was not going to go over his head”.). The whole time he is doing this, I am literally organising and overseeing movement of my things to storage and really it was pretty awful having to deal with someone yelling at me (because of this distraction I also couldn’t direct the storage move properly and it ended up a bit a mess).



Because of this behaviour, I told him on the call several times not to attend the property for key collection from me anymore. However, shortly after Tony sent a text to me but he was 10 minutes away. At this point I had no choice but to interpret it as threatening behaviour. I then had to cancel the service entirely last minute, which I really did not want to do to someone. Tony lost my business, and I had had a dreadful experience. Of course wanting the last word Tony wrote an SMS saying how rude I was to cancel.

He might’ve been having a bad day, but the way he treated and spoke to me I will never recommend him. I advised him to provide clear payment terms on the invoice and be a bit more reasonable and dealing with customers who are organising a stressful move.

Tony came to our house to complete a quote for carpet cleaning & end of lease clean, which we thought was great as we could get an accurate idea of pricing. We booked 2 weeks in advance to make sure we had someone available and he was going to clean the day before our final inspection. The morning he was booked my father had gone by the house to pick up a few things and tony was standing around not doing anything, he mentioned that he was waiting for people to come and help him and that he was running behind. An hour after that I received a text message saying the job was too big and he couldn’t do it and that he had left. This left us in a very difficult position to organise a replacement last minute. Thanks to Sam at Genie Carpet cleaning for doing such a great job the very next morning (highly recommend). Without a cleaner my mum and I both had to take the afternoon off work to do what we were going to pay Tony to do (given he was meant to be a professional). If tony had underquoted or wasn’t able to be properly staffed for this job, I feel there was a lot better way of dealing with this then leaving us stuck in that position. Moving is stressful enough without poor service on top of it, given he is a small business owner I would never think someone would risk it.