In the 1950s, a young entrepreneur named Frank Oddo struggled to find reliable cleaners in the evenings at his family’s grocery store in Kansas City. Week after week, the disappointment was growing. Until 1961, when he decided to open his own local janitorial business.
For 40 years, Frank ran a successful cleaning company with a staff of in-house employees who performed the basics. But word got out about Frank’s cleaning business. His phone never stopped ringing. He was receiving requests to provide more services.
Frank became a jack-of-all trades. Management was spending their time recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and counseling minimum wage employees, instead of managing client relationships.
By 1999, a new door opened. Frank’s son, Jeff Oddo, took over as president. Two years later, Jeff would transform his father’s B2B model into a management franchise that would rock the mediocre cleaning service industry.
Jeff’s new franchise business model allowed his family’s company to:
- Grow more than 165 million dollars in its most recent fiscal year
- Focus on the sales and management areas, while client retention continued to increase
- Partner with professional and well-known independent contractors in the area
