Episode 201 - You Have a People Problem with Mary Miller
Janitorial services is a notoriously transitional job that experiences a 400% annual turnover on average. Yet in the midst of a challenging employment landscape, JANCOA has discovered what it takes to solve this people problem. For them, it all began with listening to their employees and then purchasing a 15-passenger van. CEO Mary Miller joins the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast to share her experiences and provide insights when it comes to retention and turnover. If you’re looking to solve a people problem, then this episode is for you.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Rusty Rueff: Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Today, we're going to dove deep into a company in Cincinnati, Ohio. The name of the company is Jam Cola. It's a janitorial service company that had a people problem, a 400% turnover people problem. The operative word here, though, is had because when owners Tony and Mary Miller started really listening to their employees and learning about their lives, they dramatically changed the way they manage their people. You see, knowing what really matters to employees and then partnering with them to help them realize their dreams changes everything. Mary Miller joins us today on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast to share her experiences and provide insight when it comes to retention and turnover. If you're looking to solve a people problem, then this episode is for you. Let's listen in.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast again. We are on the road, so to speak, and we are going to one of my favorite cities in America, Cincinnati. I love Cincinnati. I hadn't been to Cincinnati at all growing up. I went probably was into my early thirties that I first went to Cincinnati and I live just outside of San Francisco now. And Cincinnati is the town that reminds me maybe the most is San Francisco, the history and the hills. But there's some things that Cincinnati does better than San Francisco. And I'm a big San Francisco fan, but I'm a better and bigger barbecue fan and ice cream fan. And I've we had a guy our president had been with for a long time, was from Cincinnati and in even lived out of Cincinnati for a little while while he was working it at bandWith. And he would come over to the house and bring Montgomery Street ribs and.
Mary Miller: Bring and another wonderful family business.
Henry Kaestner: I love it. I love it. And then how about Raiders?
Mary Miller: Raiders ice cream?
Henry Kaestner: Yep. So great is also good. But then when we went and when we moved from North Carolina to California about six and a half years ago, we went on a family road trip. Actually, Kimberly flew out with a cat, but it was the three boys and I, and we decided to hit as many barbecue joints as we possibly could on a ride across country. And I thought we'd would go to Montgomery Street. But another barbecue place. Eli's got better.
Mary Miller: I was just going to ask you if you went to L.A. is so good.
Henry Kaestner: It's unbelievable. It's just meat and sauce. But there's something.
Mary Miller: Very different.
Henry Kaestner: And it's really good, right on the banks of the Ohio River and then losing it. If you're sick of my geography and my kind of MapQuest overview of Cincinnati, this land is second. But there's one other thing I need to mention is that one of my favorite experiences was as an endurance cyclist. There's a bike race out there. It's about 120 miles is called Godzilla. That goes up and down the banks of the Ohio River. And the steepness of those hills is unbelievable. I thought that Ohio is this, you know, flat. It most is surely is not but we're not.
Mary Miller: Talking any pig is one of the most popular marathons now in the country. And it's in Cincinnati. And the hills are killers.
Henry Kaestner: I bet they are. I bet they are. There's a fine big have anything to do with the ice is have anything to do with barbecue. Why is it called the fine pig pigs?
Mary Miller: A big part of our history, our German history with the pigs. And we used to have a lot of pigs that are out Cincinnati. So we're often called pork operators.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, I didn't know that. So you may have guessed that we have a guest on our show and his Mary Miller. Mary, typically we don't give this overview of where our guest hails from, but we are today. Thank you very much for your story. Thank you very much for being on the program.
Mary Miller: Oh, thank you. It's definitely a pleasure.
Henry Kaestner: So in the overview in the intro that you've heard from Rusty, we have a little bit of an overview of an idea, of course, of what Genco is. But before we get into the incredible work that God has done through you there, we like to start off every podcast with a bit of an autobiographical flyover of the personal interviewing, and just help us to understand what your background was like before Genco.
Mary Miller: Okay.
Henry Kaestner: Why is that funny?
Mary Miller: Well, well, because it's just I'm clear every day, you know, it's easy reading the Bible when you read about David and Moses and everything about how God uses people that are we can not have it all together. Tony and I both. We've just been celebrated our 30th anniversary. He started Giancola when he was 20, and I came along 27 years ago and together we took this mom and Pop should have registered as a nonprofit cause we were never making money or our team members were working pay day to pay day. And we were working payroll to payroll literally, and turn it into this amazing company that's helping people go after their dreams and use their gifts to be able to make life better for themselves and their family. And we've been very involved in our community in so many ways. That is, I would never have predicted, you know, half a lifetime ago, Henry, I had the worst year of my life. It started out with a bankruptcy, followed by my second divorce, followed by unemployment. And then I got an eviction notice on Christmas Eve. Wow. So I'm a single mom with three kids and not sure what to do next. And I just have always been a faithful person. I've always believed I grew up in church and I just poured my heart out to God, showed me what to do. I don't know. When I finally realized other people didn't have the answers for me, I wasn't reaching out to him to show me the path I was believing. Others knew better than. I knew of how I should live my life and the choices I should make. And so I decided to change that. The first thing I did, I needed a job, right? And I got a job. And I remember still calling my parents and letting them know that I got a job. And they were excited. And they said where they were expecting, you know, Cincinnati, P&G, G.E., you know, we've got these huge companies and home headquarters in Cincinnati, Kroger's. Now I'm in sales and I sold mobile homes, 100% commission. No stability, no knowledge, no experience. But God used that job and that opportunity and my willing to trust in him to lead me to more possibilities. I made more money during that first year than I had ever made in my life because I wasn't getting consistent support from ex-husbands. And I had these three kids, and the four of us like to eat and we needed clothes, right? So that's we were in survival mode. And during that process, I met Tony not realizing he would be husband number three. And I was in the sales job. He had this cleaning company and we were always working and we got together. We got married in 91 with this blended family and decided in 93 it was time for me to quit the sales job and put all my time and energy in this family business. And I neither one of us knew what we were doing right. I mean, we just didn't know what we didn't know. But we just kept moving forward. And we had strong faith. We were going to church and praying and was a big part of our lives. And we just kept moving forward. And we hired this consultant to help us to make Jan Koa something more than a survival company, more than just this mom and pop on the corner. We had 65 part time employees back then, but we knew it needed to be more because we knew one day we weren't getting any younger. Tony had just hit his forties. I was in my mid-thirties and the kids were growing up and one day they'd be wanting college. So we knew we needed to do something different. And what could we do with this business to make it more successful? So I dove in. I'm a fact finder. I start checking into our industry and conferences and found a consultant that was going to help fix everything.
Henry Kaestner: And Rusty mentioned this in the introduction, that there is a people problem. We're all familiar. All of us have an entrepreneur or a business owner type of background or have aspirations to us what the podcast is about. So we understand the challenges of turnover, but you had 400% turnover.
Mary Miller: Which is average for our industry. So I thought we were in a good spot because we were average with other cleaning companies. But I've never been one to want to be average. I've always wanted to, you know, be better than average or be in the top. Haven't made it many times, but I always wanted to be better. So that's what when this consultant fired us.
Henry Kaestner: The consultant fired you?
Mary Miller: Yeah. We hired him to make us better, and he fired us. Second day of a five day contract.
Henry Kaestner: He said it was a lost cause. What was that about it?
Mary Miller: He said that he could not do anything to help us with processes or efficiencies because we didn't have enough people. And if we don't fix our people problem, not that our people that we had were a problem. We just didn't have enough people. So the first night of this contract was him and Tony going out and checking a couple of the buildings that we were going to focus on first to create some processes and systems that make them more profitable or make them profitable, period. And they ended up vacuuming all night because we didn't have enough people to get the work done that needed to be done. He said it was probably the most expensive vacuum that we would ever have work for us. And I said, I hope so. So he left us. We went flew back home the second day and we had to figure out what were we going to do next. And, you know, failure wasn't an option. We had a blended family of five kids. We had team members that depended on us. We needed to figure out how to make this happen. And with that, we changed the questions. We changed our prayers, and we changed our focus. And our focus was there used to be a book called The Yellow Pages. You may be familiar with. Yeah.
Henry Kaestner: I know that. I look really, really, really young.
Mary Miller: But that book listed every janitorial company in Cincinnati. Yeah. So Tony actually went through and counted them. He said, okay, there's 104 cleaning companies. Why would people want to work for us? Of all the companies out there, why choose us? We had to look at our watch. We had to change our way. What could we do to attract people to want to work for Jan? And we spent that weekend after the consultant left because we didn't have as much work on the weekends back then. And we really dove into a bunch of books, books that we could find that used to be more than one bookstore in the city. And we just dove into it. How to find people, how to keep people, you know, all kinds of things about each other and people. And one of the things you said, okay, let's look at our top ten employees. What do they have in common so that maybe that'll help us find where to look for the rest and what the number one thing they had in common was the transportation issues. Hmm. So, okay.
Henry Kaestner: So the top ten had the transportation solved. The other one, I didn't.
Mary Miller: Know they had the top ten that we depended on the most had troubles with getting back and forth to work. They didn't have dependable transportation. Our night managers were spending their time driving people around from building to building and back home to be able to get the work done. So we thought, well, if we could fix the transportation issues, maybe we can attract more people like them. Yeah. And get the work done. So Monday morning we went out and bought the 15 passenger bed and that was the beginning of our shuttle. We're not a transportation company. It was a nightmare, but we did it for three years, tried to make it work. And our shortage, we were 38 full time people short at that time. Within three weeks, we were 15 people short. So it made a dramatic change in being able to get people because nobody else had transportation either. And it's still an issue. It's gotten better in our region with our public transit and stuff. I served on their board for six years. So, you know, when I see a problem, I'm trying to find ways to eliminate those obstacles to make things better.
Henry Kaestner: But you found that. So I want to go so I want to go back to before we go on to some of the other things you've done, I want to camp out on a 15 passenger van here for a second. And part of my we've got this partnership with Faith and Company. One of the key things we do, Mary, is we've got this FTE group we call Faith Driven Entrepreneur, a group where you get together with 12 of the 15 other Faith driven entrepreneurs and business owners and go through the marks of a Faith Driven Entrepreneur through different stories. And it's it's been a lot of fun. We had, I think, 770 entrepreneurs and business owners like yourself go through it. And the cohort that started on September, and we've had a lot of fun with that. And then of course people say, Well, what do we do next? And there are a whole bunch of different things to do next. But one of the things we're working on are seasons two and three. And so we've been watching all of these stories to include jurors, and it's really neat to hear Tony's story. And so you're able to solve a transportation problem with this van that we hear about in this movie that I think you and see featured in season two or season three of this after season two. So it should be in season two. Good. That's awesome. All right. So there's some advocacy there. But tell us, you know, you found out more about solving a problem. You learned about these people that are working with you. Right.
Mary Miller: We saw a different side, Henry. We brought the van to the office. Our general manager at the time was like, okay, who's going to drive this magic band? Drive the magic of Giancola? And I love what Tony said in the video. He said, I had the least amount of work to do, so I became the first driver. Well, within two days he was invisible. Nobody getting on that shuttle thought of him and realized this is the company owner. They just saw him as a person that was driving them, picking him up from home and taking him to their jobs. But Tony got to see where they lived. He got to hear the conversations of what their day was like and what they were looking forward to and what their obstacles were. And our people are full time. That was an early switch that we did full time employment with benefits, so they worked 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.. So Tony would take them to work by 530, get them by 6:00, and he'd be back home and then he'd go back out to take them home and get home about 330, 4:00. And he's got this really bad rule. If he can't sleep, I can't sleep. So he would wake me up.
Henry Kaestner: That's a bad rule.
Mary Miller: It's a bad rule. But we would talk. He would tell me about what he saw, about what he heard, and our hearts broke. You see, we fell into this trap, Henry. And I don't think we're alone. When we're in business, you think of what you need. It's kind of a spreadsheet mentality. But in our industry, you need mop buckets, microfiber rags, vacuum cleaners. You know, these different tools and people. And people just fall into that category of tools and equipment and chemicals that you need. We were not seeing the humanity. And God brought it to us in our face. This is who's doing the work for you. This is your product. You're a service company. If you don't take care of the people that are doing the work for you, how is that going to work for your business? How are you ever going to do my work if you don't take care of your people and all of a sudden the scales of justice look differently to us where we were balancing our customers never knew we were having issues with people. It was always clean. By 6 a.m. before anybody came to work, the buildings were clean. If we had to go out and do it ourselves, it would be done. But now all of a sudden the scales start changing and we start realizing we had to treat our team members, our interior customers with as much respect and dignity as we treated our customers. That paid us the ones we were paying and the ones that paid us. We had to treat them with the same respect, helped them overcome their obstacles, helped them increase their opportunities and find ways to improve the quality of their lives. And as we created these different programs, you know, he had a really catchy tune. The name went first was the Incredible Employee Retention Program.
Henry Kaestner: That's what you call it.
Mary Miller: That's how we got it at first sight. Sure. That it did. Anybody? It was horrible. But a friend of ours was like, you know, what you guys are doing is you're helping people achieve their dreams and pursue their dreams.
Henry Kaestner: Tell us, what does that mean? A little bit more. So you've got to know. And just to fast forward a bit, you've got 600 employees now, so you've had exposure to lots of.
Mary Miller: Skills and we were up to 650.
Henry Kaestner: Now, where are you really?
Mary Miller: So yeah, we were. And now we're just hovering around 500, okay? Because there's not as many people in buildings. Some buildings are still closed. So a lot of stuff that we couldn't do anything about.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, but that's a lot of stories, though. And when you talk about helping some of these employees live their dreams, are there any stories that come to mind? Just, you know, I think that you're going to find that we're going to release a video together in partnership with Faith and Company shortly. And in the video, of course, we meet some of these employees. But paint a picture, if you will, of some of the characters. Who are some of these people? Who are that people? They go to work from 6 p.m. to 230. A What are they dealing with in their lives? What have you learned?
Mary Miller: It's really across the board. It's like everything else in life. You could walk down the street. You don't know what's going on in people's lives when you meet them. There's Sue in Curtis. If you go to YouTube and type in Janko, a video comes up that Compassion International did years ago, and they talk about their help. We help many families buy homes, most of which were first generation homeowners, because, as Sue said in the video, she didn't think she was the type of person that could own a home. We changed the way they looked at possibilities. We had a young man from Africa coming in and wanting to get his driver's license, and after our original dream engineer took him out to try to teach me, he said, Now we need to find a professional to help. You know, we realize we can't help make their dreams happen, but we can connect them to programs that exist to help make them happen. But he comes in one day and he asked for me and he wanted me to see his driver's license that he just achieved. And he wanted a picture with us to send home to his family that still lived in Africa to let him know that he achieved his driver's license in the US, which was going to help him get a better paying job because of not having to stick to a bus line.
Henry Kaestner: Now, you said something in there that I think somebody might miss. Dream Engineer. What's a dream engineer?
Mary Miller: The Dream Engineer is somebody that helps people engineer their dreams, not just dream them and think of them, but be able to put them together and make them a reality. So nothing gets built. Not a roller coaster, not a building without an engineer being involved in the design and the creation of it. And that's what people need. They need an engineer to help do it, and then they can find a way to make it real.
Henry Kaestner: And you have dream engineers at Giancola? Yeah. That's their job.
Mary Miller: That was their job. Well, it's evolved since then. Since when? You have 65 employees, you can do things very differently than when you have 500. So now what's done now is everything in life evolves. Nothing can stay the same. Right. So it's evolved into a culture of caring, of change in the conversations at every level. And so we really work at it from Tony and I to the leadership, to the directors, to the managers, to the supervisors, where we're always doing things to encourage people to improve their quality of life. And what do you need to help move forward? And that's really our biggest obstacle right now isn't so much the COVID as an obstacle, because there's always these changing. We're master pivot tiers these days. But how do we evolve from helping people focus on their dreams to the future? How does that adapt to what the current needs are? Because the needs today are different than what they were three years, five years, ten years ago. So there's a lot more people that are in the today that it's hard to dream about a future when you have so much uncertainty in today.
Henry Kaestner: Hmm. Yeah. Tell me about how your faith and Tony's faith, which comes across really clearly in the video. And then you talked about, you know, at the outset of you guys starting to work together, that was a big part. Is it getting you through the tough times? How do your employees experience that or do they?
Mary Miller: We do talk openly about our faith. Yeah, but we do it in a in a way where we feel we're respectful of other people's faith practices. We have a few hundred people that are from Nepal and Bhutan. And so their faith practices is different than our Christian faith. So we support them on their high holy days when they take off work, you know, we take off Easter, Christmas, those holidays, they don't practice those, but they do have their own holidays. So they take those days off and everybody pitches in to help cover the jobs that need to be done so they can celebrate. So we really try to do it in a very respectful way that faith is important. And if we do it in that manner, I believe when people see how we live our life, it makes them curious. So like, I love to speak. I speak all over the world and I always find a way to weave my faith in the conversation. And the people that are believers will thank me for it and the seekers will ask me more and want to do it. So I think that faith doesn't have to be something that you have to be afraid of. It's just done in a respectful way that people have a choice of how they practice their faith and who they believe and what they believe in. But if we live the life as we're supposed to live, more people will want to know about that and will want to follow that.
Henry Kaestner: Indeed. Indeed, some number of our listeners have employees that are entry level, so have entry level and are an opportunity to be able to have maybe refugees and recent immigrants from Nepal and Bhutan among their ranks. You didn't stop at the shuttle or at the Dream Engineer. There are other initiatives that you've put in place to over 30 years that have been a big part of your culture. Share some of those different initiatives that you've done because maybe a listener from here and say, You know, I could do that.
Mary Miller: Well, it all starts with orientation. We talk about what are their dreams? We ask them, what is it they're working toward? Because we want them to be more than just this is a paycheck and living paycheck to paycheck. What is it that you need or want to have happen? A lot of our Nepalis are homeowners already. They really found a way to fit into the culture and make those things happen. But we really so much so we've had health insurance available for employees. Affordable real health insurance is the nineties because it's the right thing to do to help people, to help them improve their quality of life and not have to worry about that, but to invest in their future. We created a4a1k available just three years ago for all of our employees and we don't have a huge percentage participating, but in three years we've already got over $1,000,000 invested in that program and Giancola matches up to 4%. So we're very involved in helping them improve their quality of life.
Henry Kaestner: So there are some other things, though, that you also do to participate with your employee. I'm thinking that is a little bit of a leading question, but talk to you about some of the other initiatives you do, like your monthly employee dinner.
Mary Miller: And you had dinner, and we've had to make some adjustments on that, too.
Henry Kaestner: I bet you have.
Mary Miller: Yeah. With COVID, we can't have everybody in the same space, so we've had to break it down. And it's so crazy how God works. We moved into a new office six months before COVID hit, and in this new space, the way it's designed, we have human resources in an area and administration and operations on the other side. In between the two, we have a nice big training area where everybody gets orientation and we have ongoing trainings throughout the year as people need to learn more and new and different things. But we have this huge meeting room that we call our family room and the family room is set up so that everybody can meet in there. But we haven't been able to have all 50 people together since we've been here because of COVID. And so we have to break it down into smaller groups, but we're still meeting in the smaller groups every month. And that's a time to have education and promptings of what's going on, to celebrate the things that are going well in people's life and to be able to have a meal together, because that's when you get to know people. So even the people in the office staff are encouraged not to eat in their office. And the kitchen area is a prep area and everybody's encouraged to come in to the family room to have lunch so we can get to know each other better and create a community and connection.
Henry Kaestner: Tell us about what you are hearing from God recently. We like to close out and I have an offer that I'm going to make to you here at the end right after you answer this question. But tell us what you're hearing from God. And maybe it's not necessarily in something you read in the Bible this morning, but maybe it's this week or something. Recently, we believe that the Bible is alive and God speaks to us through it. And we are just really, really blessed whenever we talk to a business owner and they say, You know what? This is what I think God has been teaching me through his word recently. What would that be for you?
Mary Miller: I've got to share with you, Henry. About four years ago, I was invited to speak at our big church here in Cincinnati's Crossroads. And we've been going there, and I got to speak at Unpolished, then 2017. And I was invited to be part of a huddle group with Cathy Beecham, who ran operations for Crossroads back then. She was incredible, incredible spiritual mentor for me and many, many others in our community. And she had been executive vice president at US Bank. She was very involved in YWCA. I mean, she was just an amazing person. And in January of 2018, she said to me, What are you going to stop believing? Other people have the answers when all you have to do is listen to the whispers from God. And she challenged me to spend time in the morning before I exercise in the book and to study Scripture and listen to what God's saying to me. And I've been doing that 90% of the time every morning. And Cathy passed away two months later from lung cancer. She had just been diagnosed. And what I can tell you is the thread, especially during this year, my word is embrace. And every morning as I read the Scripture, God whispers, embrace my faithfulness and embrace my grace. And He's totally encouraging me every day to stay on track, that there's better coming still, and that this is just a moment to strengthen us, to help us catch our breath, because we're going to be quite busy in the future. And I don't know what that all means, but I just know more than ever, and my leadership team is my daughter, son in law and brother in law, and their faith is super strong as well. So, you know, it's a really important piece and I know that God's in the middle of it.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, indeed. Okay. Here's the offer. When you get a chance to get everybody back together again as all the COVID protocols are gone, and you call up Justin, our executive producer who's listening to this right now, and you say, I'm taking you up on your offer, which is that we want a bike riders ice cream for everybody. You bring 500 them together. We will make that happen. It'd be awesome to celebrate that you do such a great job of loving on people that need love and helping them achieve their dreams in homeownership and college and driver's licenses. And my love language is ice cream. And that's just a little way that we can say, gosh, you know, you doing an awesome job. It would be neat to be a small part of that. So remember that soon as you can.
Mary Miller: Do it, I will. I will. And I will share this podcast when it's released with rich grader who's a friend of mine.
Henry Kaestner: Oh. Oh, that's awesome.
Mary Miller: That's absolutely. We're kindred spirits. It was his grandfather's third wife that turned the business. The ice cream from a hobby to a business. And I'm Tony's third wife, and he always credits me for the growth of Ted Koa.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, that's great. Well, that is. It's so good. So my. My family's been in the dairy business, my case here, and I've got it actually on my wall that I'm looking at right now. We've got a patent on the milk. And so we'd been in the dairy business for 150 years. A German family talking about the Germans in Cincinnati and ice cream was back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. There is some amount of bartering, but yeah, you get paid in dairy products with, you know, you drop off milk cans in Cincinnati.
Mary Miller: It was with pigs. That's why the.
Henry Kaestner: Pork. Is that what it is? Yeah. So in Baltimore, it was it was it was ice cream. And so ice cream was a big deal. But I got an argument with this guy is talking about that for us in Cincinnati. And I said, you know, the best ice cream is the Halo Dairy and Lawrenceville and maybe even better. You know, another great vino, of course, is Haagen-Dazs. He said, no, no, no, no, no. The best ice cream in the world is great. Or something like now I've never even heard of it. And he sent me a six pack and dry ice and I've never been so happy to be so wrong. It was awesome. And so I've been a creator's fan ever since. This was not meant to be a grader's advertisement, but it became one. Mary, God bless you for all the work that you've done. Thank you for spending the time to share with our audience and.
Mary Miller: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity very much.
Henry Kaestner: Great being with you. We'll put the video in the show notes and I'll look forward to an opportunity to share this story with many more people.
Mary Miller: Excellent. Thank you so much.