I have a sometime fascination with that age group of youth who have entered the workforce just after middle-aged us, just before our kids will 🙂 Hence this book – the story of how a Finance, Mass Communications and Entrepreneurship undergrad eschewed banking…. to start a successful cleaning company.
pic from amazon.com
In 2009, University of Florida student Kristen Hadeed wanted a pair of designer jeans. When she called her parents for the money, they told her to get a job. She wasn’t surprised – Hadeed Sr, an attorney with a talent for numbers, was the kind of parent who, when his nonetheless precious daughter begged him for help with Calculus homework, told her to get to class early the next day with relevant highlighted portions of her textbook.
As they say in showbiz, one thing led to another (she wanted those jeans!) and in her junior year she had 60 fellow students for their first big job – cleaning the filthy vacated dorm rooms of fellow students. “An incredibly tough job …when some of those tenants were frat guys who lived there for years without ever so much as lifting a toilet brush.”
This is Hadeed (pic from Invibed.com)
..and some Action pics –
pic from creativeclickmedia.com
pic from gainesville.com
Those look pretty cleaned up, it really is as gross a job as you think it is. Dead-hamster-in-freezer gross. (Well I suppose I lost my dead animal cherry in upper primary after coming across an abandoned litter of puppies dumped in a rain gutter. You could see which were already dead because of where the giant blowflies were. I couldn’t bear the thought of the live ones following suit so I ran home and got rubber gloves and a bag. I remember praying and praying the little corpse would not burst open and rain down fly maggots and thank God it didn’t. Still, I never went into veterinary science because I thought my maggot-tolerance was too low and my stomach for animal mistreatment not high enough. It would disgust and amaze me decades later to meet young veterinary professionals who don’t even seem to like animals.)
Anyway. Back to the seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of college kids doing cleaning jobs to be able to afford text books… and branded items 😀 As a general benchmark, the average profit margin of a cleaning company is just 15%. Average client turnover 55%. Average employee turnover rate a whopping 75%.
How did Kristen do it? And WHY?
45 out of 60 of her initial team for their first large job quit on their first day – but her company had signed a contract, so she had to get them back – which she did, with lotsa pizza….. and by agreeing to do the toughest jobs for them. That mouldy refrigerator in 208. That ceiling fan in 106 so covered in black dust it rained dirt down on you if you so much as breathed near it. (I. Know. More, at the end.)
She credits her parents, particularly her dad’s brand of tough love, with her ability to tough it out. Whenever Hadeed Sr. had a choice between handing Calculus answers to his daughter on a platter to preserve a sterling grade <pats self on back for awesome parenting because kid got an A>, or risking that grade so she would solidify her learning of Calculus in the teacher’s class, he…. “risked the grade”
Respect. It can be very, very difficult to see the forest for the trees, the life lesson for the immediate grade. But at her successful company, whether she got an A or a B in Calculus is less important than the strength of character required to motivate fellow undergraduates in an unglamorous, low-paid, gruelling job. (We can see that now, and when it’s not our kid but can you imagine what a feat it is for those involved to pull it off?)
What I’m perpetually trying to figure is the fine line between raising someone who can say, create a successful company in a most unlikely industry, motivating the most unlikely of candidates…. and someone who cannot be in the same room as Calculus. 😀
One day early on, Kristen and agricultural, education and communications student Cacee took a job cleaning a “home” that had bunnies, cats, turtles, ducks (yes really) and the poop that comes with, littering a living room that positively reeked. In the kitchen nearby, fruit flies blanketed countertops. The two students decided to leave. When they passed a human baby crawling around in the filth, they called Child Protection Services. Then they called the client back to give them a heads-up that they had reported it.
My favourite story however is this one, because it involves the collective strength of character of some 27 individuals: At 2 am one night, Kristen is awoken by an employee because his account has been credited – not for the several hundred USD he earned – but with several thousand. An entry mistake by an otherwise very bright intern who was using their software for the first time had resulted in 27 students being overpaid by about USD 40,000. Reversing the entries would take several days, during which a bunch of college students who were relative strangers (she posted ads to fill large jobs) and who needed spending money badly enough to have taken low-paid cleaning jobs had thousands of extra dollars sitting in their accounts.
How many of the 27 students do you think touched the money, either ending up owing Student Maid or closing out their accounts, thereby disappearing, never to be heard from again?
None. Every penny was recovered. Insufferable idealist that I am, I believe that everyone (and I mean everyone) has the capacity for good……. or evil. Integrity and selflessness begets integrity and selflessness. The flip side…………..run. Run, before you find yourself lowering your own bar Because ‘Everyone’ Else Does It. Run!
(pic from hobbylark.com). Much beloved selfless Gandalf’s last words when, thinking he has achieved the impossible and vanquished Balrog into the abyss, he allows his attention to lapse for a moment –
And is dragged in by the tiny tip of the demon’s whip. “Fly, you fools.” (pic from Youtube)
What a powerful analogy (and one for the Obsessive Compulsive!) to not let up, to see your endurance race right to the end – pic from deviantart.com
Now, The Noble Reason For Honesty is certainly something an idealist loves to hear. However, there is also a very practical reason, one I believe those college kids understood as well:
“The 27” are going to graduate and go off into the world as professionals in their chosen field. Someday, somewhere, you never know who you might meet – who might have hired you to clean their block of 100 dorm rooms. Someday you graduate and find the same person sitting on the opposite side of an interview table where you’re applying for an architectural apprenticeship or F&B junior managerial position at Trump Hotel or….. Were a couple extra pairs of designer jeans worth more than that?
Someday some of these kids gonna be able to afford all the designer jeans they want – and they know it. That, indirectly, is a major selling point of Student Maid.
One day, Kristen’s dad found out about her Student Maid business and freaked out because she had not formally incorporated it to protect against liability exposure. So he speaker-phoned her mum and lectured her all the way home before sending her an email with a link to register everything properly and also check for trademark infringement. (Well… it’s not Calculus? :D)
She… doesn’t check for trademark infringement because she is utterly sure no one else has thought of this, receives a lawyer’s letter for trademark infringement not too long after that, happens to read it in class (anyone remember she is still a college student), runs out in tears and calls her dad, sobbing. So you’d think Daddy bails her, right?
Nope. All he says is “I told you to check.” (Ok, maybe a little Calculus. And she writes in the book that she then hangs up on him 😀 She would ultimately change her company name to avoid the infringement. No one died.)
One hour after she changes her company name, she arrives at a conference room expecting to sign a client. She finds about 50 other people, predominantly competitors and much older than herself, hoping to sign clients. (She misread a document from several months ago re the meeting.)
“My dad knew if I was to be successful, he had to push me to take responsibility…”
In contrast, some of her employees’ parents called her office to ask for a raise on behalf of their college-aged kids (I know, right?) Others wanted extra vacation days, or called in sick days for their kids. One mum described filling out job applications and writing phone interview scripts, and how much she now regretted it…
Some fellow students rang Hadeed’s cell continuously… and asked things like what to do about a bottle of cleaning liquid (or a bucket of cleaning supplies or their partner) they’d left at a client’s house. (Can you imagine what that looks like if you did that after graduation at your first “real” job someday? But I’m sure we can all remember interns from our own working life who were like deer in headlights when they first arrived..)
One job involved cleaning over a hundred apartment units…… that upon arrival the 70 of them who took the job together discovered were all locked up. They were eventually handed one key ring with over a hundred keys on it and told they would be charged USD 50 per key, if they lost any. They designated one girl, Monique, to hold onto the keys and go up and down locking and unlocking the units.
“Students were becoming empowered to make their own decisions without (my partners) or me…”
Monique eventually turned down a job at a prestigious design firm for a career with Student Maid. She would say it was the lack of trust at the other firm that influenced her decision the most.
“We expect (students) will solve their own challenges when they arise, but it doesn’t mean we don’t support them.”
Kristen wrote 60 pages’ worth of work manual. Student Maid developed software to manage cleaning appointments, cutting 14 hours’ booking turnarounds to 10 minutes.
From horrific cleaning assignments, the core student employees who made up Student Maid with their reputation for reliability started getting hired to walk dogs, house-sit, put up Christmas decorations, tutor kids (this is my personal favourite – we used to hire high school kids to play with toddler Rockstar while I was working long hours, until those few teens left for college. One boy turned out to have a parent who was my colleague in the bank. He then told me his son was saving up to go backpacking in Vietnam with his friends. Nowadays there is (last I checked sometime back) a Facebook group my friend at a top tier international school added me, that hires teens to sit for younger kids – the teens’ parents are also kept informed of their kids’ whereabouts.)
For all that though, there were still bad apples at Student Maid. ‘Jennifer’ (not her real name) padded her time sheets, then encouraged other kids to do the same. Kristen writes candidly how she lost one student’s respect for her as a leader, after that student awkwardly but bravely came forward…. only to have Kristen do nothing about it. (When cornered, ‘Jennifer’ often insinuated she might find some excuse to sue.
“…our most dedicated, determined, high-spirited, and trustworthy… team leaders’ biggest challenge – greater than roach-filled refrigerators and inch-thick dust – was managing the people assigned to them. …people sleeping, texting, fighting, goofing off, making popcorn… watching movies on their phones. Every now and then they’d walk in and find no one at all.”
S-o… remember that question from the beginning of the post? Why do it?
There ya go. It’s a huge learning opportunity in real life situations for the undergrads..
