Dirty Work

How CEOs Translate Mess Into Profit

By Christianna McCausland

How does a CEO reach $100 million in annual revenue? With a scrub brush and a dirty toilet.

Chad MacDonald was 19 years old when he started cleaning carpets to make money the summer after his freshman year of college. Through word of mouth, he landed a job at a national Mexican restaurant franchise in anticipation of a visit by the president of the restaurant chain. At midnight, the regular janitorial crew were no-shows. In a panic, restaurant managers asked MacDonald to tackle the task.

"I didn't eat Mexican food for probably two years," he recalls. "The lines and drains were all backed up. It was crazy."

While MacDonald was not impressed by what he saw behind the kitchen and bathroom's closed doors, management was bowled over by his cleaning skills - so much so that they asked his company to take its model of cleanliness to all the chain's restaurants on the East Coast. MacDonald never made it back to college. Instead he grew that facilities management company to 1,000 direct employees serving large national chains like T.G.I. Friday's and Bennigan's as well as retails outlets such as Kmart. In 1985, he sold the business to BBM, which eventually became ISS (Integrated Site Solutions), the world's largest facility company.

It all began because MacDonald and his carpet cleaning crew were willing to do what others didn't dare - scrub toilets, unclog nasty drains, haul bags of leftover scraps and mop floors until they shined.

CEOs who are willing to get their hands dirty, or supervise those who do, embrace a reality that might cause the more faint of heart to hold their noses and walk away: customers will pay the most for the jobs they want to do least. From homicide/suicide clean up companies to morticians, entrepreneurs ready to deal with the untouchable can enjoy a market that's slim on competition and rife with profit potential.

After his non-compete ended with ISS in 1986, MacDonald began his second company, Service Management. With 55,000 sites under management, including Wal-Marts, Kmarts, T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, that company was recognized as an Inc. fastest-growing company several years in a row and went public in 1998, becoming Building One Services Corp.  

When MacDonald landed a contract to clean the facilities in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympic Summer Games, he was stuck with a very dirty task.

"The Georgia peanut farmers donated huge vats of peanuts to lure the international crowd into becoming peanut fans," he recalls. Twice a day, Coca-Cola Stadium would empty and MacDonald's crews arrived to clean. "It was like doing two Super Bowls a day," he continues. "These peanuts created such an enormous mess we had to literally flood the stadium twice a day with fire hoses. We had hundreds of people flooding the stadium to the bottom and then we had challenges with the shells clogging the sewage lines."

Yet all that mess added up. Building One Services Corp. became a $2 billion publicly traded company that MacDonald sold in 2001.

Sullied Reputations?

In his paper, "Normalizing Dirty Work: Managerial Tactics for Countering Occupational Taint," Mark Clark, a professor of management at American University's Kogod School of Business, interviewed managers engaged in some of the most physically, socially and morally dirty work - morticians, janitors, exterminators, correctional officers, bouncers, strippers - to determine the challenges they face above and beyond the normal demands of management, such as how they cope with the social stigmatization of their work and how they retain employees in stigmatized professions. In the paper, the authors note: Society tends to equate cleanliness with goodness and dirtiness with badness, so that dirt is stigmatized as dangerous, something to be cast out and avoided. Individuals who perform dirty work come to be seen, literally, as "dirty workers." In the eyes of the public, they are what they do.

"Dirty work is interesting because there are several sides to it," says Clark. "You have the organizational focus which is: should you risk putting a venture together that has some of the inherent problems of what could be called a ‘stigmatized' organization? In terms of customers and potential employees, as well as financers and investors, none of them would necessarily want to be associated with that. People like to talk about things that enhance their own identity, things that have positive impact on others, rather than talking about those difficult things we'd rather push aside."

According the Clark's research, there are many ways managers normalize dirty work to create better working environments for themselves, their employees and the public that uses their services (even if they wish they didn't). For example, when speaking to funeral directors and morticians, the managers didn't emphasize the hands-on work with dead people.

"Almost to a person, these people said they were caregivers performing a service for a family," said Clark. "They never talked about that they essential dealt with human waste and dead bodies."

A Lucrative Mess

The irony of dirty work is that where there is the greatest stigma, there is also the greatest opportunity. "Who wants to be identified as the Port-A-John King?" quips Clark. "And yet, what a lucrative business opportunity. People tend to pay the most for the things they least want to do."

One thing no one wants to do is scrub the 100-plus toilets in a large office building. MacDonald is now on his third business, a fully integrated facilities management company called ServiceForce USA. Based in Dulles, VA, it handles everything from cleaning toilets and sweeping floors to eradicating skunks (an actual problem that plagued a bus terminal under MacDonald's care).

"We do a lot of dirty work," he says. "A pretty fair estimate would be that we clean more than 100,000 toilets."

All that dirty work adds up in dollars. Combined with his two other business entities - Nissco and ServiceForce Management - MacDonald employs 1,500 direct employees and 10,000 subcontractors and pulls in $100 million in revenue. When other companies were girding their loins for the current recession, MacDonald was hiring. "Toilets always get dirty. Buildings always need to be heated and cooled and lit - we provide a vital service people need," he says.

While Jacob and Susan D'Aniello may not provide a service people need, they certainly do what few others want to do. As co-founders and owners of the professional poop scooper business, DoodyCalls, headquartered in Fairfax and Charlottesville, VA, the D'Aniellos found a gold mine in removing pet land mines.

"As long as the dogs do their business, we do ours," says Jacob D'Aniello.

The D'Aniellos left their previous careers, he as a technology consultant, she as a nurse, to become entrepreneurs. Though they were attracted to the idea of being their own bosses, they didn't set out to make a career out of scooping poo. They wanted a simple business doing something that couldn't be outsourced. Not ones to waste time winning clients away from the competition, they wanted a business in which the market was not saturated. Having spent years in cubicles and hospitals, they wanted the freedom to get outside. And they needed a business with a low price point and variable cost structure from a management perspective, but with a source of reoccurring revenue.

"We wanted to do something other people wouldn't do because we thought it would deter competition and increase the value of the service to those receiving it," says Jacob D'Aniello. As dog owners who know that waste removal is the least desirable part of pet ownership, DoodyCalls made sense on every level. The business has few fixed costs, making it nimble enough to survive downturns, yet it can grow quickly in upturns. As the dogs never stop relieving themselves, the need for the service never goes away, creating the consistent revenue the D'Aniellos wanted.

Of course, people laughed when they heard what the D'Aniellos were planning, but that just rang like a cash register in their ears.

"When you have a new idea, if people don't chuckle at it, it's probably not all that unique and someone's taken the profit potential already," Jacob D'Aniello explains.

Down and dirty

That's not to say the D'Aniellos and others like them don't face challenges getting a dirty business off the ground. The D'Aniellos started DoodyCalls with little bank assistance. Through hard work and persistence, the D'Aniellos built the DoodyCalls brand and began franchising the concept in 2004. DoodyCalls operates in over 40 national territories, and with projected revenue of $4 million for 2009, it's the D'Aniellos chance to laugh.

Employee recruitment and retention can be tough. For dirty work CEOs, it is important to create an ideology around which employees can rally. By reframing the work (exterminators don't just kill bugs, for example, they are educated entomologists) or refocusing it (morticians don't work with the dead but rather coordinate support to a family in a time of need), managers can better retain employees and more effectively communicate the service to a public that might otherwise be grossed out by the product or service. Just as Chad MacDonald emphasizes the hygienic importance of proper cleaning, especially in light of the recent swine flu panic, DoodyCalls emphasizes that the company creates cleaner, safer communities.

Still, employee recruitment can be a challenge, as can impressing the quality of personnel on homeowners. Who would want to take a job cleaning toilets or poop after all?

"People thought when we came to their houses that the level of the technicians wouldn't be acceptable because they were people willing to deal with pet waste," says Susan D'Aniello. "But that's absolutely not true. They are people who love animals and like being outside, and it's incredibly sanitary work, certainly more so than being a nurse!"

Jason Heimberg bought a DoodyCalls franchise in Howard County, MD, about a year ago. When the law school graduate and screenplay writer moved to Maryland after a career in Hollywood, he was looking for a business opportunity that was more stable than writing. "[DoodyCalls] looked funny and weird, which are things I like," he says. "I tell people I dealt with more crap in Hollywood than I do in this job."

Heimberg admits that picking up poop is not glamorous, but being his own boss, being outside, and being able to play with the dogs he encounters on his route outweighs the stigma, as does the money-making potential of the franchise.

The D'Aniellos find that the benefits of dirty work far out weigh the disadvantages. The biggest benefit is the lack of competition. Look at a company like Crime Scene Clean-Up. Founded in 1993 by Louise Burkhardt, it was the first company of its kind, willing to professionally manage the clean up of homicides, suicides and accidents. Begun in Maryland, that company is now national. In one year alone, it cleaned up 50 tons of biohazardous and medical waste.

Homicide clean up is a necessity and hardly something a family member wants to handle. Similarly, someone must clean up behind the dogs, and it sure as heck is a lot nicer if someone else does it. DoodyCalls is an affordable luxury, making the business relatively recession proof. The company can clean up behind one dog for $16, about the same price as a pizza, a small price to pay for a dirty job most people are happy to pass on to the D'Aniellos. Perhaps that accounts for DoodyCalls' over 20 percent growth in 2008.

Professor Clark's research notes that a company that can hire quality people, motivate them, get them nice uniforms and normalize the work that "society necessitates but then sanctimoniously disavows," can quickly outpace the competition and receive greater compensation doing that which no one else wants to do.

Put more simply, says Jacob D'Aniello, "Until everyone wakes up in a city one day and decides that they really enjoy picking up poop, there's going to be a market for this."  CEO