Remember when everyone always asked you just what you wanted to be when you grew up? I was the kid that always answered that I wanted to be the boss.
- I loved the idea of being my own boss and not having to work for someone else.
That ambition stayed with me. While I was at university, I had a small office cleaning business. I got a group of my friends together and we worked as an office cleaning company for 4 hours a night. There weren’t that many clients and most of them I knew or had been referred to. It was mostly light janitorial work. I did carpet cleaning, emptied the trash and tidied up. It was a great feeling to be my own boss. The money was nice to have in my pocket as well. This was a great learning curve for being my own boss. Ironically, when I graduated college, I opened my own commercial cleaning service. It was quite a bit more than my maid service for hire thing I had before. It was a really commercial cleaning and janitorial service and was a super way to start my own thing right out of college. I was able to raise some funds in order to buy equipment like floor stripping and waxing machines. Having done this a bit before helped when I began bringing on staff. I knew it took people with an attention to detail to make a commercial cleaning company take off. It has been nearly 15 years and I have a very successful business venture.