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Not many bankers would leave their comfortable high-paying position to clean toilets. But that’s exactly what John Diesselkamp did.
The decision turns out to be the best in his life. Disselkamp now runs a $10 million cleaning company. But in the months since he left his banking job, he seemed to be killing himself in his career.
From wash to wash
At 35, Diesselkamp decided he “didn’t want to sit in front of a calculator” for the rest of his life, so he quit his job at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, and moved in with his mother.
“I was basically homeless, with probably $20,000 in credit card debt and no retirement savings,” he told me on the Fail Your Way to Success podcast.
But Diesselkamp wasn’t just unloading—he was developing a plan inspired by a former bank client who had opened a successful cleaning business. Disselkamp realizes that he must first understand the business from the ground up, so he takes a job as a janitor, earning $600 a month.
Related: This college student started a side hustle so he didn’t have to bartend until 4 a.m. Now he earns $7,000 a month — and puts it to good use.
A fish out of water
“At first I didn’t know anything,” he recalls. “Once the owner of a building asked me what we should use to clean the floor and I had to take a picture, send it to a friend of mine in the industry and ask him.”
But the humbling experience made him see his true talents. He was very good at lending a helping hand when needed.
“When I realized that my ability to clean wasn’t going to get us very far, I saw that the real business I was in was in the people business,” he says. “And that interested me from the beginning.”
From cleaning one toilet to many
The long journey from working as a janitor to hiring janitors started with one cold call.
“I looked up one of the better-known local property management companies and called a guy whose name I found on their website,” he says. “I got his voicemail, left him a message and he didn’t call me back. I called him again about four days later, left a message and he didn’t call me back. I did it again a week later and he didn’t call back. And then three weeks later, he calls and says, “Hey, John, it’s Greg. Sorry it took so long to get back to you.”Two months later, Diesselkamp’s company had a gig cleaning the eight -story building of 200,000 square meters.
Today, his company, First Class Commercial Cleaning, has 330 employees servicing approximately 5 million square feet per night.
The power of teamwork
Connecting people is what made Disselkamp successful, and it’s what helped it thrive.
“Our success doesn’t depend on me – I’m just one of 330 other people,” he says. “I am truly blessed to have a team of great human beings who work extremely hard and genuinely care about serving others, from our leadership and management team to our front-line supervisors and cleaners.”
It does ordinary things extraordinarily well
Another secret to Disselkamp’s success is his realization that the key to growing a simple business is to take care of yourself—both your team members and your customers.
“We have a saying that we tell our managers: Before you ask someone to go get the mop, ask them how their family is,” says Diesselkamp.
Of course, it’s not as simple as a cursory query. Anyone who can go from pulling in $600 a month to making $10 million a year has mastered the art of making employees feel like a part of something.
As Diesselkamp says, “Fortune 500 companies can put a ping-pong table in the break room or have everyone sit outside for lunch and think that’s going to change the culture, when really the culture is all about one-on-one relationships and building trust and genuine care for your people.”
Still, it wasn’t just a smooth, straight trip to the top. “I’ve had a lot of days where I’ve gone to my wife and said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,'” he says. “But you have to have some courage, because to succeed, you have to fall and get up again.”
This story originally appeared on Fail Your Way to Success Podcast
