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Raising the bar

Howard Manly
Raising the bar

Anthony Samuels has quietly taken his Done Right Building Services company to lofty new heights

Tony Irving photo

A year after he left his job as a computer-assisted draftsman with Raytheon, Anthony Samuels was having second thoughts.

By then, he had started his own building maintenance company and committed his savings and credit to keep the struggling business up and running. But something had to change. He realized that managing day-to-day operations drained most of his time. As a result, he was unable to attract new business to add to the one contract he had with BankBoston to provide building services at a few of its branches.

Done Right needed help. But first Samuels had to make an admission. It came after he met one of his business advisers from the Small Business Administration.  “He said to me, ‘If you’re out doing the work, you’re not running your company right,’ ” Samuels recalled in the venerable Black Enterprise. “I was upset at first, but I eventually realized that what he said was true.”

Done Right hasn’t looked back since. Samuels  quickly recruited the appropriate staff and arranged for supervision of the work and on-site operations. The results were almost immediate.  

By 1996, his annual sales almost tripled. Ten years later, those numbers were up to $4.3 million. Though the recent recession slowed business down last year, Done Right has still averaged about 15 percent annual growth in revenues over the last five years. More importantly, he has about 130 employees in facilities located throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and New York.

Samuels attributes his success to a time-honored principle. “The bottom line,” Samuels said, “is that we provide quality to all of our customers. We try to deliver above and beyond what the client expects in our services.”

Over the years, Samuels has been able to secure nearly a dozen federal, state and city government contracts and quietly built a client base throughout New England that included the Jewelers Building in downtown Boston and the Massachusetts Port Authority.    

It hasn’t been easy.

Samuels got his first big chance to deliver when he started working with Boston City Hall.

It was at least a start — and a chance to show off his services. Over the years, Done Right has been able to build a successful relationship with City Hall, one that has expanded to include providing building services for the Boston Redevelopment Authority as well as the Strand Theater in Upham’s Corner.

Another early contract that allowed Done Right to grow was with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to clean and maintain more than 300,000 square feet of office space at the authority’s Deere Island facility.

Those opportunities, he said, allowed Done Right to demonstrate that it did quality work.

What has made Samuels particularly proud is his company’s ability to expand while maintaining good relationships with existing clients. Just last year, for instance, Done Right was able to renew its contract with City Hall for another three years. And Samuels continues to attract new business at a time when other companies are closing their doors.

“Even though last year was tough, the company was still able to continue to be successful,” he said.

Along the way, Samuels has attracted several powerful allies. One such adviser was Milton Benjamin, the chief executive officer of the Initiative for a New Economy (INE), a Boston-based group dedicated to improving the state of minority-owned businesses.

At the time, Samuels wanted to take his business to the next level — and Benjamin agreed.

“We saw that Done Right had high potential,” Benjamin recalled. “He had decent contracts already in place, and we wanted to help him build his infrastructure in order to grow in the future.”

But it meant helping Samuels secure more financing — and bigger clients. But before Samuels was ready to take the next step, INE examined all of Done Right’s books, reviewed its accounting and record-keeping procedures, analyzed its technological capacities and assessed its human resources.

Samuels had only one word for INE’s vetting process: thorough.

It was worth it, as was the help of Ron Walker, the president and founding partner of Next Street, a merchant bank started to serve high-performing inner-city businesses across the country. Before long, Done Right had landed a contract with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. And a five-year deal with Liberty Mutual.  

Indeed, Done Right has come a long way. But Samuels is still not satisfied. He says he wants to take his company to an even higher level —  and still guarantee quality.

“It’s kind of surprising,” he said. “If you run a good business, at the end of the day, all that matters is quality of service.”