Wilmington resident Gene Santovenia built a career out of helping companies expand their reach throughout the world, working for the likes of Blockbuster and Burger King during a 30-year stint in corporate real estate and franchising.

By this fall, Santovenia and his wife, Elaine, plan to open a franchise of a company that’s new to the Wilmington area.

The local office of The Cleaning Authority, a professional home cleaning service with 190 locations in the U.S. and Canada, will be at 3908 Market St., in Jones Plaza. Chuck Lydon and Lee Weddle of Coldwell Banker Commercial Sun Coast Partners represented the landlord in the lease transaction, Santovenia said.  

He said the Wilmington area “is undergoing explosive residential growth. It’s a city that has a lot of professional and middle class consumers along with retirees, all our core market customers.”

Santovenia and his wife became full-time residents of Wilmington in 2007, after spending winters here before that.

“I was looking for a business to either acquire in Wilmington or start up,” said Santovenia, who is treasurer of the franchise while his wife is president. “I looked at an existing franchise for The Cleaning Authority that was for sale in an adjacent state. The more I did more due diligence on it, the more I liked the business model.”

He said he believes people need services like The Cleaning Authority, founded in 1989, now more than ever.

“It’s a service that’s a good value when you consider some of your other expenditures in everyday life and the fact that time is very valuable to us. I saw it as a business that has a lot of need and a lot of demand,” he said. "We add quality of life for people in the sense that we free them up because most consumers don't want to spend their Saturdays cleaning a house for four or five hours."

Initially, the Santovenias will hire six to 10 cleaners, aiming to employ 20 to 40 within a year, Gene Santovenia said.

In previous positions, Santovenia served as vice president of international development for Blockbuster, managed international growth and franchising during a 15-year stint with Burger King and served as vice president of real estate for Arby's and similar companies, he said.

"I'm very familiar with franchising, and that's one of the things that attracted me to this concept," Santovenia said.

When looking at possible franchises, The Cleaning Authority relies less on locale than on the leadership and business skills of a franchisee, said Iric Wexler, the company's vice president of franchise development. That franchisee has to know how to leverage the infrastructure and implement the systems of The Cleaning Authority, Wexler said, as well as build a business and lead a good team.

"Finding that right person is critical because we’re looking very deliberately for a certain business owner, someone who can do all those things," he said. "Not everybody is a leader; not everybody is a good manager of people, and that’s what’s really, really important for our franchisees."

Wexler said a fact that ties into the need for franchisees to be ambitious is that the company's locations tend to serve large territories. He said the Wilmington franchise's territory is expected to extend as far north as Snead's Ferry and almost to the South Carolina line in southern Brunswick County.