From $20K in Debt to a $10 Million Business with John Disselkamp

How many people do you know who, while working in banking, thought, “You know, I’d rather be a janitor”?

Well, I know one and he’s my guest in this episode.

John Disselkamp found that suit he had to wear just a bit too tight so left it to literally push a broom.

That broom turned into a $10 million a year company with over 300 employees.

So how did he do it and what were his failures along the way? More importantly, what constitutes a failure — is it working in a job that doesn’t fulfill you or making money? And how can you have both?

We got into all that and more in this episode.

BEST QUOTES:

“I started with just me cleaning for 600 bucks a month. And now we have roughly 330 team members and do a little over 10 million a year.”

“I quickly realized my ability to clean wasn’t going to get us very far and that the real business I’m in is in the people business.”

“Some of the best businesses are just doing common things uncommonly right.”

“Fortune 5000 companies may put a ping pong table in the break room or sit outside for lunch and think that’s going to change culture when really culture comes down to one-on-one relationships and building trust and genuinely giving a shit about your people.”

TIME STAMPS:

00:05:41 Career change leads to success

00:06:36 Success can be unfulfilling

00:14:38 Importance of sticking to strengths

00:21:42 Perseverance leads to success

00:27:37 Persevere and don’t give up

00:28:01 Entrepreneurship requires resilience and determination

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ANNA: Okay. So you have one of the more interesting origin stories I’ve heard you’re working in. First of all, thank you for being here.

JOHN: Thank you for having me.

ANNA: So you are working, you’re like a suit, and you decide you know what, I’d be much happier as a janitor. Explain that, please.

JOHN: Everybody asks that question. Yeah, so it’s a… A little bit longer story, but I was in the banking world for about 12 years. So out of college, I worked for, I’m in Louisville, Kentucky, by the way, and with the University of Kentucky, got a business degree, came home, worked for about a year for an accounting firm, healthcare consulting company. Realized I didn’t want to sit in front of a calculator the rest of my life and do taxes. Wanted to interact with people a little more, got a job at at a regional bank based here was on the commercial side of things in the banking world to work with businesses like, like, like mine and did that for almost 12 years.

At first, in my 20s, I was hustling and working a lot and. Worked my way up to the bank and I kind of liked that a little bit in the beginning because that was hustling. They’re willing to, the bank I worked for was willing to reward people that were willing to work hard. I’m single and so working a lot of hours and everything. So, so that said, but towards the maybe second half of my career in banking, I just…I wasn’t happy.

I was, I was struggling quite a bit with, uh stuff that I’ve struggled with since I was a child with anxiety and some pretty severe depression and went through a whole 15-year period of dealing with that: in and out of doctors and therapists and all that stuff. Looking back now I think I was trying to put a square peg in a round hole and just kept trying to do that saying I shouldn’t be doing this or that or whatever when in reality, it just wasn’t my thing, right?

I always tell people that suit felt a little tight, so to speak, and so I decided to, uh, , still single and I was 35 years old and I decided to make a change. And I, uh, kind of had a little early midlife crisis, if you will. And I moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, uh, lived by the beach for about five months. Didn’t know a soul down there. And it was a pretty low point in my life, but towards the end of it, that didn’t work much while I was down there. I met my now wife at a bar in Fort Lauderdale, and she’s a Florida girl from Florida. And she was down there visiting friends. She’s from the Tampa Bay area. And so ended up being a blessing.

I moved back home, moved in with my mom at 35 years old because my house was being rented out. Cause I rented my house out to a family for a year, but I came back five months later. So I was basically homeless. I was with my mom, no money to my name, probably $20,000 in credit card debt, no retirement or anything. And, uh, and I was FaceTiming with some random girl in Florida and it was either, go work for another bank or do this clean thing. I’ve been thinking about doing, I had a customer when I was with the bank that was a Janet’s world company. And that kind of made me. Start thinking about it and what I, what I liked about the business and what I tell people is that if you do what you say, you’re going to do, you work hard, you treat people. Well, you’re halfway good at building relationships. You can succeed in this business. And if you care about your people and put them first, you can, you can have some success. And I found that to be true, , next month will be 8 years since I started and found that to be true 8 years later. And so it started with just me getting a two day a week, uh, account that I was cleaning myself and pulled my dad and he helped, uh, for 600 bucks a month.

And I didn’t have any overhead cause I was living with my mom. So I could afford to take the leap without having to do a day job and start this thing at night. So I just kind of went all in and I like to say one toilet at a time, one customer at a time, kind of grew it over the last, uh, know, eight years or so. And now we have roughly 330 W2 employees, team members, and serve about 5 million square feet per night, mostly larger commercial facilities and medical. So long, long answer, huh? Uh, we’re, we’re about, we’re about 10 million, a little bit over 10 million right now.

ANNA: Not bad from $600 a month.

JOHN: I never thought it would come to this. I got a really, I got a really good team and really good people.

ANNA: Okay, I want to unpack one part. So you’re working in banking, you’re miserable. You go to Fort Lauderdale for four months. How do you get the $20,000 in debt and all of that and renting out your house to make money from this kind of like relatively like sort of successful life that you had? How did that happen?

JOHN: How did I get rid of the debt?

ANNA: No, how’d you get into the debt when it was like kind of you were like an upstanding dude, you’re like, boring.

JOHN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just I was struggling in life personally and I just wasn’t a great saver. And I partied on the weekends and probably spent too much money and, I wasn’t like crazy spending like on really big things. It was just little things here and there. And of course, living in Florida for five months when you’re not really working can bleed some money there, too. So it’s a combination of those things. Yeah.

ANNA: And looking at it through the lens of success and failure, would you say in the outside world you had achieved success? It was just kind of not working internally.

JOHN: Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head.

ANNA: And then, and so then what would you say? So, so it’s kind of an interesting idea. So you’re successful, but it’s also a failure because it’s not fulfilling you. You’re feeling the suits too tight. UAnd then you come back, you’re back, you’re in mom’s house, your dad’s working for you $600 a month. What’s the next, how do you get from there to where you are today? What happened next?

JOHN: A lot of hard work and a lot of really, really good people that are, that are smarter than me. And, uh, but I did that one for a little bit and, uh, eventually got the five day a week contract for that, for that office building, doing the common areas of it. And it went from 600 to 1400 bucks a month. And probably three, four months there, there was a building around the corner from there, uh, that I got, there was a five night a week contract for, $1,300 a month or whatever it was and started cleaning that.

Then I would go in and I would clean and figure out how long it took to clean so then I could hire somebody to tell me how long it takes and I knew where everything was in the building so they couldn’t get anything over on me either. Then I got a couple of good breaks with some jobs out in the suburbs of Louisville, some Class A office buildings. A couple big ones in particular that really kind of got me going and got my got my start with some larger buildings.

And then it’s been just kind of a snowball effect from there and just been building relationships in the city. I’ve been involved with the facility manager association, the building owners association. Those type of things I relied a lot on other people in the industry that have been successful before me and got their advice and.

In the beginning, I didn’t know what a mop was, so I’d call him. I didn’t know what kind of floor, like…one time the owner of the building, he’s like, What should we use on this floor? Like, what do you think is the best chemical for it? And I was like, probably water, probably just water. , I didn’t know. And I went back and called the guy. I was like, took a picture. I was like, what do I do with this floor? So, I had no idea what I was doing. But, , and then I quickly realized my ability to clean wasn’t going to get us very far. realize that the real business I’m in is in the people business, very people heavy, right? For a $10 million business, 330 team members is a lot, right? So how good of a leader of people I was going to be was going to be the biggest thing that would affect whether we were going to build something or not.

ANNA: Well, because that was sort of my question. So when you get this idea, I’d rather be, for lack of a better way of saying it, pushing them off. It wasn’t that cleaning excited you? It was anything but this tight suit kind of?

JOHN: Yeah. And I always felt like I had a entrepreneurial personality, itch, whatever you want to call it. I always talked to my buddies at the bank, , I’d love to love to start a business one day, , wasn’t very creative, obviously picked it. It wasn’t a novel idea, cleaning, but it’s just, it’s something that I like that the simplicity of the business and that I’ve always loved the saying, Some of the best businesses are doing common things uncommonly well, right. And I felt like when, if it comes down to how good of relationships and communication and service, and being a leader, I felt like I had some, some strengths there.

ANNA: So it almost didn’t matter what the business was?

JOHN: No, not necessarily. No, but I’ve grown to love the business and love the industry and love the people in the industry. And I’ve become very close with other owners and across the country and involved in associations and spoken at different events and stuff. And so I’ve grown to love it. But yeah, you’re right. It wasn’t. It wasn’t like I was dying to do a cleaning company. It just ended up being the thing that kind of matched, , my strengths, I guess.

ANNA: It wasn’t your passion for which cleanser to use on the floor.

JOHN: Absolutely not. No, I mean, my mom was making fun of me because I wasn’t necessarily the cleanest guy.

ANNA: We talked about this when we talked before…I live in Los Angeles where everybody is uh glamorous and broke and so I didn’t know…my mentor started off as a carpet cleaner And now he’s got the biggest mastermind in the world. Joe Polish?

JOHN: I know of Joe, I don’t know Joe, but I know of him, yeah.

ANNA: He’s the best. And then I told you I had a client who has a cleaning franchise and I didn’t know until I met Joe and he introduced me to his community that, yeah, it’s doing the common things uncommonly well. Those are the people that are hiring the glamorous broke people. I just, in Los Angeles, just, you live in a bubble. So how did you learn? Well, okay, what have your failures been, would you say, between when you start this business, it is where it is today, it’s very easy to look and go, “Oh, I’m sure that it was just this upward trajectory,” but business is never like that. So what have some of your failures been along the way?

JOHN: Yeah. Prior to starting the company, I guess you could say I was failing it depending on how you look at it. Right. I was struggling, but I guess failing in certain, certain areas of my life. I’ve had many, many days where I’ve gone to my wife and said, I don’t want to do this anymore…especially in the beginning when it was late nights and all that.

I think as far as since I’ve started the business, some mistakes or failures that I’ve had have been, hiring good people and then maybe having to let them go because I didn’t have the time to put into them and invest in them. I needed some people that could work on their own and not need a lot of handholding and stuff like that. So, those were some tough things. During COVID, the whole, everybody in the world wanted their offices disinfected and you get in…we have guys in their Ghostbuster suits and electrostatic sprayers and it was kind of like the wild, wild west. And I’ve been pretty good…I kind of believe you try to stick to what you’re good at and not…people get shiny object syndrome, especially entrepreneurs like me. And, and I’ve done pretty good of kind of keeping that at bay, but during COVID, I started doing some marketing in other cities online to try to sell disinfecting jobs and I had people in those cities that would do the work and it ended up being somewhat of a failure and we probably broke even altogether on disinfection services and I was and got my eye off the ball a little bit I think that was kind of a micro failure within the whole thing.

ANNA: So it’s sort of like stay in your lane don’t go don’t because you’re just in your state?

JOHN: Yeah, so we’re in, uh, we’re in Louisville, which is about a million people and then Lexington, which is about an hour down the road in Kentucky. We do have some aspirations to grow a little bit regionally. But right now we’re in just a little bit currently.

ANNA: And so you thought, well, this is, it sure seems like it would be a good idea, the disinfect, let’s go disinfect. And so you kind of got sales reps or whatever in other places.

JOHN: And it was just kind of- Well, it was companies in other places, like friends of mine that had cleaning companies. So I’d try to get the job and then subcontract it out to them or whatever. But then I realized that we had to do a bunch of vole and probably would have had to get in the call center business. And that just wasn’t our thing, getting a bunch of people to answer calls and try to sell stuff. And that’s just got away from what really what our strengths are. Yeah.

ANNA: Yeah. Because your referral pretty much, it sounds like one company is really happy and then they say, oh, you got to call, got to call John’s company or whoever they talk about it. And that’s really how it works.

JOHN: Yeah. It’s referrals. It’s just hustling. It’s cold calls. It’s chasing certain business. My first big customer came from a cold call. And then ended up being, it’s one of our top three or four customers now. And it was my first like big, eight story, 200,000 square foot building. And now we do a few other really, really nice buildings for them. So some of it was just picking up the phone and calling some of our biggest customers. That’s where it came from.

ANNA: That’s interesting. Steve Jobs, there’s this video of Steve Jobs talking about how he called up Bob Hewlett of Hewlett Packard. And when he was a kid, it was like, hey, can I come work for you? And he said the benefits of a cold call are really, really under, success is those people who are willing, I’m not willing to do a cold call. So I am standing in opposition to my advice but tell me about that. So you were like, I want this business or how, how did you, you picked up the phone? Yeah.

JOHN: So I knew there, I knew there and just being in the banking world, I kind of knew who the players were in the commercial real estate world. Right. , and, uh, the local company, it’s one of the more prominent. locally based virtual real estate, property management companies. And I didn’t actually know anybody there. And so I looked up on their website and went under meet our team and found out the guy, Greg, that was over property management. And then I called the main nber there, asked for him, got his voicemail, left him a message. He didn’t call back, called him about four days later, left a message. He didn’t call back. Did it again a week later, didn’t call back. And then like three weeks later, I was sitting on the couch with my wife on a Friday afternoon and calls. Hey, John, it’s Greg. Sorry I’m taking so long to get back with you. Yeah, I’m happy to meet, blah, blah, blah. We met. And then I went home to tell my wife, “Maybe two years before we get something.” And then like two months later, they had issues with their cleaning company at their largest building and which was way bigger than anything I’ve done before. And I said, yeah, we’ll do it. And then, we had to start in 30 days and figured it out. And I hired, onboarded, filled out paperwork and everything, IDs, everything for like 12 cleaners to start. It was a pretty big building the first day. And I was going to manage it. I had no idea what I was doing. Four people showed up out of the 12. And so I was there until probably 2, 3 in the morning for the first two weeks, every night, checking every garbage can in the whole building. We figured it out and then they gave us some more business from there. And then once we had those, we can use that as kind of a portfolio builder to say, hey, we clean these buildings. And that’s kind of, he’s been a good resource and referral source for us too.

ANNA: And what have you learned, since you said it’s not, it’s not your skill for cleaning that you can attribute your success to, what have you learned about leadership and people and all of that, that you think has been so important for your business?

JOHN: I don’t think it’s anything, uh, sexy or anything like that. I think, uh, it comes down to culture, but what does culture mean? Well, , I think a lot of, uh, And not, not everybody, but a lot of, , Fortune 500 companies, for example, , they, the executives, uh, , may put a ping pong table in the break room or sit outside for lunch and think that’s going to change culture when really culture comes down to one-on-one relationships and building trust, , and, and genuinely, , genuinely giving a shit about your people, right? Not faking it, because people know if you’re being genuine or not. So you have to really care about people and really build a relationship with them does not mean just learning about them. It means telling them about you so they feel like they know you as well. And I think it comes down to the simple things. It’s having those one-on-one conversations, getting to know them. , what motivates you, what’s important to you, why are you doing a part-time cleaning job on the side? Are you trying to meet certain goals? But I think it comes down to just putting your people first and not looking at them as a way to make a profit or a line item on a profit loss statement. And to also not get jaded when you have some bad ones and then not treat the next person who walks in the door like, oh, they’re all the same. And that can happen a lot in our industry with high turnover and stuff. So it’s just actually just giving, , excuse the language, just giving a shit about your people. And generally, we have a saying we tell our managers, , before you ask them to go pick up a mop, ask them how their family’s doing, . So it’s relationships. And I think business with customers is all about relationships too.

ANNA: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m kind of reminded of that anecdote about the first time JFK went to NASA, he saw a janitor. Trying to get a guy on the moon. Yeah. What are you doing? We’re going to get a guy on the moon.

Now, I’m in the book business, write a book about your journey from suit to sweeping a room to running this business. What would be the message you would want to put out there?

JOHN: Perseverance…just personally. And I still struggle, mightily at times, with depression and other things. So I would say it comes down to perseverance and persistence. And O would say a lot of people probably are in a job that they don’t like, or they’re stuck in it because they’re really, really good at it. It’s not something that they really enjoy. So therefore, they think they should do that. And they’re scared to take a chance and take a leap and do something different or start their own business. So for anybody that’s thought about starting their own business or feel like they have that entrepreneurial personality, I think the message is, sometimes you just got to jump in and where they say, jump off a cliff and build a plane on the way down. And sometimes you have to do that if you want to. Kind of change your life and then you’re going to hit bps in the road and you just got to keep…I don’t I don’t really have a great answer because I still struggle and having three kids and that are two year old twins and a four year old. It’s been challenging the last couple of years between sleep and energy and all that. But I’ve been very, very fortunate to build a great team with great people that have my back. And but yeah.

ANNA: To just delve a little bit into the depression, because I bet you anybody listening can relate to that. What are your coping skills when it comes up? What do you do?

JOHN: Yeah, I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer that or not. I don’t know. I know the things to do, but sometimes when you’re in it, it’s easier said than done. I’m somebody that needs my sleep. And for me, sleep is probably the most important thing. If that goes well, the other dominoes kind of fall into place. If I don’t get the proper sleep, I actually will take a nap here at the office or whatever and try to, if I need to. So I got like a mini couch in here. So for me, it’s, it’s, I know what to do, but I don’t always do it. So I don’t know if I’m the best example, but, , but I guess one thing I do is just keep, keep moving forward and not give up hope that there’s a, , that I can feel better. It will feel better. And not every day is bad, of course, but , , but yeah, I mean, I know the things to do. I just don’t always do them.

ANNA: My cat really felt that that was worth jumping up on the table for. Are your tips for bouncing back from failure similar to your tips from bouncing back from depression?

JOHN: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

ANNA: Just persevere and do the things. Well, what are the things that you’re supposed to do that you’re saying you don’t always do them?

JOHN: Uh, like self-care stuff, like eat healthy, exercise…talk to yourself like you would a friend, right? Those type of things. Uh, so those type of things, right? So those things don’t come naturally to me. I live in the Midwest where there’s maybe one healthy food place in the entire city. And there’s 8 billion McDonald’s and everything else. And so it’s, uh, I’m not making excuses. It’s just that’s part of the environment here. Right. That’s where California and other places do better than us — where it’s more commonplace there. Very close to our house, a bank closed and I’m like, all right, man, I hope they open a core life or a place they can provide healthy eating or whatever other than just at home and uh and they put it on a Taco Bell.

ANNA: I will tell you the one meal I was in Louisville for one night and we went out to dinner charming little place and I was with a friend who’s a vegan and so we had to get the one vegan thing on the menu was vegan pizza it was bread with red sauce on it I’m just like well wait a second here has no one ever ordered vegan here before , that was my meal.

Now, is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to add for anybody who feels like they are failing or they want inspiration for bouncing back from failure?

JOHN: I would say, especially for people that are starting their business for this could apply to life too. But like, I guess one thing I’ve done is like, I had some really, really hard nights and, uh, where I wanted to quit early on, where it’s somebody called out and it was two in the morning and I had to go out and clean or do whatever and fortunately we have people that do that now and I don’t have to buy them clean obviously at night, but I think it’s, you have to have some grit and you have to have a little bit of toughness when it, when it comes to, not giving up too easy, because anything in life, especially when it comes to business, to succeed, you kind of have to keep falling down and getting back up, keep falling down and getting back up, and not quitting when it seems like the easiest thing to do. Because run your own business and own your own business and all that, it’s tougher than maybe some people think. And if I look at other successful business owners or entrepreneurs, most of them have a little that that look that grit in them that when you’re down they’re still like got some more in them.

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