Twenty years, and still the same phone number

Rita Chaves Milhomem was born in Governador Valadares, in Minas Gerais, a Brazilian city people leave. You grow up there hearing about cousins who have settled in Boston, in Lisbon, in Brussels.

She arrived in Belgium in the late 1990s, with no Dutch, rough French and the idea that it would be for two years.

She spent her first years doing exactly the job she organises today. Houses in Uccle, in Ixelles, endless Brussels staircases, keys handed over to you and people who do not say hello.

She also met the opposite: the lady in Watermael who left a coffee on the table, the one on Avenue Brugmann who ended up asking her to look after her daughter's house as well.

It was that second lady who started Milhomem Group. In November 2006, Rita stopped working for agencies and set up her own. She had three clients, a notebook, and a phone that was used for nothing else.

Twenty years later, there are more than a hundred of them. Rita has never moved the head office out of Uccle and she still picks up the phone herself.

What she kept from those early days comes down to one rule, and the whole company revolves around it: “I do not send anyone to a client if I would not let her into my own home.”

And a second one, which she repeats to every new recruit: “We are not cleaning a house. We are coming into someone's home. That is not the same job.”

We do not take on a client we cannot serve properly. When we have no one available in your commune, we tell you, and we do not put you on a six-month waiting list hoping you will forget.