There is a lot to consider when moving a senior or upgrading a home. White Glove Solution is available to assist with various parts of the process.
Alonso Zamora from White Glove Solution returned to our Community Conversations segment.
Last time, we learned about the company and its partnership with Planning for Senior Life (PSL). In this episode, Zamora discussed the resources it brings in as well as some aspects that people may forget.
This is a video of the interview:
ST Billingsley: Thank you for joining us today on Community Conversations on What’s Up Prince William, and today we have Alonso Zamora with White Glove Solutions. Thank you very much for being with us today.
Alonso Zamora: Oh, thanks for having me here today. Thank you so much.
ST Billingsley: Tell us a little bit about your company.
Alonso Zamora: White Glove Solution is actually owned by my son who’s 23-years-old. Actually, he’s going to be 24 this Friday, so happy birthday to him. A little bit about the company. We specialize in a few things. We do senior moves. That’s our specialty. We make sure that our seniors, when they move, we mirror everything that’s from one room to the other room, so from medicine cabinets, things like that that we do.
ST Billingsley: You’re part of a bigger organization. Tell us just a little bit how that works.
Alonso Zamora: Absolutely. We are vetted and background checked and fingerprinted by Planning for Senior Life. Planning for Senior Life is a great organization. It’s like AARP, but more in detailed for contractors, lawyers, anybody that is looking to do senior industry work that they want to be background checked and fingerprinted and vetted, that’s what the organization is about, and it’s just a referral base that people hold you accountable for what we do.
ST Billingsley: So basically with this organization, you’re bringing many resources in to help the seniors, whether it’s a move or a scale-down or whatever might be going on with their needs at the time?
Alonso Zamora: Absolutely there is. There’s great things that sometimes we bring in people that specialize just in photographs, so we store photographs and digitize them, so that way they’re digitized and they want… they’ll last a pretty long time. So we have from that to estate attorneys to financial planners to real estate agents, things like that, that can help with the resources. Absolutely.
ST Billingsley: What kind of things does your company bring in? Are you restoring any part of the home or are you helping with the move? What is it that you do there?
Alonso Zamora: We have three divisions of the company in White Glove Solution. One of them is, we have cleaning and disinfecting. The other one is construction. We’re CAP certified. What does CAP mean? It’s Certification of Aging-in-Place, so if they’re going to age in place and they’re going to stay there, we put grab bars, we do bathrooms renovations, we might take their bathroom from upstairs, from the second floor, down to maybe where the kitchen is, so that way they can move a lot easier, and the caretaker can sleep upstairs. We try to make sure that people are going to be safe in their environment. That’s our key. The key is more important than anything, is the safety aspect of it. So elevators, chairs that they need, things like that.
ST Billingsley: Oh, okay.
Alonso Zamora: And the part that we really, really, really enjoy a lot is the moving aspect. We move people interstate. We move people across country. We move people from here to Florida, Florida and back. We move people from maybe the third floor to the second floor in an assisted living or independent care or memory care, things like that.
ST Billingsley: I gotcha. With COVID affecting everybody, how has that affected dealing with seniors and helping them get settled?
Alonso Zamora: With COVID, our business has been moved because we took certifications at the early beginning stages of this whole thing. We took certifications of COVID, how to get… We have our own protocol, so when we came in the forefront of protocols, we basically… some of the assisted living independent care communities, they weren’t ahead of that, so we were taking their temperature before they were taking our temperature, and then they started implementing a lot of the things that we took of it. We have our own certifications of COVID, we have our protocols and policies and procedures that we have shared now with communities, so we’re in the front lines, we’re kind of like the first responders as you can see, because we can spread COVID very easily from community to community and from moving people. We make sure that we stay safe and we keep our community safe. Everybody in our company, from our staff to our storage facilities, that we are storage and things, everybody has been vaccinated.
ST Billingsley: Gotcha. The other thing is, but you also love… As far as dealing with seniors for their change in life, what kind of certification should family members be looking for in a company?
Alonso Zamora: I think a lot of it, and it’s before even those certifications, we have to have common sense with our seniors, right? My father’s 97, he’ll be 98 in couple days also, a day after my son’s birthday. He’ll be 98, and one of the things is that he’s been my son’s mentor and he’s been my mentor, and then we have a lot of people who are older, who are our mentors. So one of the biggest things is, have compassion for them, right? It’s more. Psychologically, you have to really think about it. These seniors are very smart. They have a lot more knowledge than we do, so we work very closely with them and they teach us what they want in their life, and then what the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years that they’re going to be around, they got to tell us what they want. We take a lot of psychology classes. We have to have compassion, love for our seniors, and just care for them with dignity. That’s what they want. They want to be… last few days in life they want to make sure that they’re well taken care of.
ST Billingsley: Are there specific type certifications for dealing with seniors?
Alonso Zamora: Absolutely. There’s another certification called NASMM [inaudible 00:05:35], National Association of Senior Move Management. We take a lot of classes through them, a lot of classes to learn ethics. Sometimes we get a conflict with kids. They’re in a conflict, either brother and sister, they’re fighting over dad’s things. We pull them to the side and say, “Hey look, I know that we don’t work for you. We work for your dad or mom,” and that’s how we sometimes take charge and just have to make sure that our ethic is towards our seniors.
ST Billingsley: Very good. What are some things that people don’t think about when you’re talking about either like upgrading a home, moving a senior, those type of things? What are those things that your company takes care of that most people don’t even think about at first?
Alonso Zamora: Absolutely. Sometimes it’s their vehicle. Sometimes it’s their medicine cabinet, because we photograph their medicine cabinet. We photograph their refrigerator, so anything that’s in the refrigerator or anything that’s in their medicine cabinet or their closet… their closet is exactly the same way. We take a picture of it and it is exactly from point A to point B.
Alonso Zamora: A lot of the times people forget about their pets, about their dogs and cats and things like that. What they do is, we get there and they just shove a dog, a cat or their pet right in the bathroom, and then we need to use the bathroom and the dog is stressed out, so what we normally do is ask these questions before, “Do you have any pets? Do you have any dogs? Do you have any dogs or cats?” and things like that, and then we go ahead and take them to pet daycare for the day or something, so that way they’re well taken care of, they’re not stressed out wherever they usually go to.
Alonso Zamora: But we also, of course, we love pets, we do a lot of transportation of them too. We transport their cars, their pets, things like that, and we have our protocols and policies and procedures about pets and things like that to get them from point A to point B, so that way there’s no stress for anybody.
ST Billingsley: That’s great. That’s great. Well, we really appreciate you spending the time to come talk to us today about your company and the industry that’s going on, especially with the seniors. It seems like that area is getting bigger, of more people needing this kind of service.
Alonso Zamora: Absolutely. This is the baby boomer years, but I just want to thank you ST, for everything that you do for the community. So thank you so much.
ST Billingsley: Well, thank you very much. It’s a team effort here, so-
Alonso Zamora: Absolutely.
ST Billingsley: Thank you for joining us on Community Conversations for What’s Up Prince William.
