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Enriching The Lives Of Your Employees With Mary Miller
My guest is Mary Miller, the CEO of JANCOA Janitorial Services. It’s a company that does cleaning services for office buildings and industrial sites, and is a good case study for love in business, more than you could ever imagine. The culture that they went out to create at JANCOA is so remarkable that it became the foundation for Matthew Kelly’s famous and wonderful book called The Dream Manager. This is not an easy industry. In the janitorial industry, employee turnover averages 380% to 400% a year. The Millers reduced that with their amazing JANCOA culture to under 100% and grew the company from 65 employees to more than 550. They discovered that the key to employee retention rested on how effective the company was in improving the quality of life for its people. Think about that, a company that’s devoted to enhancing the experience of being a human being for their employees. That’s the essence of what makes JANCOA an incredible company and what makes our conversation with Mary Miller so extraordinary. I know you’re going to love my conversation with Mary Miller, CEO of JANCOA Janitorial Services, Inc.—
Mary, tell me a little bit about your story and the story of JANCOA. I was not on anybody’s list of being most likely to succeed at anything. My path has been the less traditional path to where I’m at now. It was never intentional until later in life. I was in survival mode myself for a long time. When I turned 30 was the year that everything fell apart for me. From going through my second divorce, being single with three kids, the job was eliminated, bankrupt, and evicted. Everything was bad. I had to start by getting a new job and I ended up in a 100% sales position selling mobile homes. Before that, my previous sales history was Mary Kay cosmetics as wicker at home parties. I was in the corporate world before that and they downsized and eliminated the division. During that time, the owner of that company introduced me to a program that helped me take a look at my life and what I wanted. It was called Life Success. Through that program, I met my husband, Tony Miller. We knew each other. We got married two years later after we had met. We were both on a path of wanting more than what we had and that what we had wasn’t the right path for either of us. We’re both on our third marriage. We got married in ‘91. I started working with him. I left my sales position in ‘93 and joined him. We decided that all our energy should be with the family business and that’s JANCOA, which he started when he was nineteen years old. He was a student at the University of Cincinnati. His professor casually mentioned that outsourcing was going to be big in the future and mentioned janitorial services. Tony, being a very astute student, notice how dirty the bars were. He started cleaning the bars around campus to pay his bar tab. When his father died two years later, he left university and made JANCOA a real company to support his mom and three siblings at the time. We met twenty years later. I’m generation 1.5 and he’s generation 1. Working together we decided we needed to make JANCOA a valuable business like most entrepreneurs, “Let me start this business and build it to something that somebody might be willing to pay for it and buy it.” That was going to be our retirement fund. What do we have to do to be the kind of company people would want to work for? Click To Tweet We needed to take this little cleaning company that had 65 part-time employees doing $2 million to make it valuable that somebody would want to buy someday. Along the way, we hired a consultant who was going to solve all our problems, give us all the answers, and help us make our company values. When I met him at one of our industry conferences, it was for a five-day contract. He came in and on the second day, he fired us. He said, “I can’t help you. You’ve got a people problem. It’s not that your people are your problem, but you never have enough people.” He said, “Mary, did Tony tell you that we were both out vacuuming all night when we were supposed to be reviewing your systems in how you were doing things? I was pushing a vacuum and that’s not what you hired me for. You call me back someday when you get your people problem figured out.” That was in ‘94, ‘95. After I put my tongue back in my mouth, Tony and I talked. We had to make it through the rest of that week. We didn’t have many weekends works at the time. That weekend, we bought every book we could find on how to find people and how to keep people. It was a crazy maker. We did one of those studies in comparing our best people. What did they have in common? The number one issue was transportation. Tony being a thorough entrepreneur went out Monday morning and bought a fifteen-passenger van. He had it painted on the side, “JANCOA Employee Shuttle.” He brought it to the office and announced that we’re going to start picking people up from their home, taking them to work, and take them home afterward. Within the first hour, our general manager at the time asked who was going to drive the magic bus. We don’t have enough people to clean, let alone drive a shuttle to pick people up. Tony became our first shuttle driver and within two days he was invisible. Steve, if you ever drove public transportation, does anybody notice the driver of the vehicle? He became invisible but he also started seeing where our people lived. He started hearing them talking about what their obstacles were and the lack of opportunity that they saw in their life. Our people were full-time employees. That’s something we had already changed back then, which is different for our industry. They work pretty much from 6:00 PM to 2:30 AM. He would get back after taking people home and he’s got this rule, “If I can’t sleep, you can’t sleep.” He would wake me up and we talked for hours about what he saw, what he heard, and what he couldn’t understand. We started looking for other programs that we could do to help improve their quality of life. Something shifted in us and it became less about what can we do to make JANCOA profitable for us, for our quality of life, to how can we help improve their quality of life. We’ve got a real responsibility as owners of this company that if we are hiring people, we can do the best we can to make their lives better. If I’m hearing this right, you started listening to what your employees needed. Transportation is a basic and simple need that came out. It wasn’t something they told us. It’s like when Steve Jobs held up the iPhone and said, “Nobody said this is what they want.” We started seeing the real dangers and problems that they were having. We were asking ourselves, what could we do to make their lives better?
Enriching Your Employees: We’ve got a real responsibility as owners of companies that if we are hiring people, we can do the best we can to make their lives better.

Enriching Your Employees: The Dream Manager: Achieve Results Beyond Your Dreams by Helping Your Employees Fulfill Theirs

Enriching Your Employees: If you don’t have people that are willingly working for you because they wanted to help you achieve your goals, it undermines the energy, culture, and everything about that business.
Important Links:
- JANCOA Janitorial Services
- Mary Miller
- Compassion International
- The Dream Manager
- Rediscover Catholicism
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Netsurit
- Changing Direction
About Mary Miller

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