How a Harvard Professor Convinced Me to Become a Full Time Janitor

I started a list of all the people that either had started their careers or had worked as janitors in the past and it is a very impressive list. World leaders, politicians and familiar entertainers all once worked in our industry. I wanted to be one of them, someone just doing cleaning work temporarily until I launched into a career of money, glory, and success.

My first cleaning job was in college where I started by sweeping and mopping the street in front of several of Miami’s most prestigious hotels. I had to work my way up to be assigned to the inside, mop the lobbies, and vacuum those fabulous waterfront nightclubs.

I had a dreadful time in college because it was there that I fell in love with learning and confused that with college attendance. I changed majors after a couple of years but in the meantime picked up a wife, a mortgage, and car payments. I got it straightened out by understanding college was to make a living and learning was a solitary activity one undertakes for a lifetime and had nothing at all to do with so called institutions of higher learning.


With a new university major in Engineering, I purchased two office cleaning contracts and started my own little business just to get me through school. It was a perfect situation for me working only three hours a night, five days per week. Yes, we used to make good money at this and I was able to pay all my bills.

In preparation for a yet undeclared minor in International Business, my reading led me to an article that was the equivalent of a 2 X 4 smashing my skull. A Zen like moment of enlightenment, inspiration as the mystics of the past experienced, and a possibility I could skip calculus.

An article titled A Production-Line Approach to Service by Theodore Levitt of Harvard Business School got me to thinking about my little cleaning business and the application of engineering principals to the service industry. What if services like cleaning were performed and delivered with the precision of an assembly line? Levitt’s article opened up a completely new way of thinking about what I was doing for those three hours every night.

Those closest to me are used to my pointing out that there are no accidents. Therefore, I do not believe it was an accident that I received information from a fellow student during a casual conversation that the restaurant where he worked, hated their cleaning service. I fumbled through a meeting with the restaurant manager, guessed what a janitorial proposal might look like, and settled on a price that was well over what a graduate Engineer made upon graduation.

My first night cleaning that restaurant was the last night I did my reading for class and like Bill Gates, I dropped out of college. That first night was 21 man-hours to complete the cleaning. I looked at every single task to be performed, the steps taken to perform each task and a way to do each one faster. In two weeks, I had the job down to seven hours per night. At seven hours, money poured out of that account.

That was 35 years ago and if it had not been for Theodore Levitt, I would have never become a full time janitor. I wish I could thank him now but maybe he is pleased just the same.