Diane Jermyn
Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Feb. 10, 2012
Cleaning up the Magic Kingdom is a big part of Canadian entrepreneur John Radford’s business this year.
His company, Construction Cleaners Group, is doing the cleaning during construction of Walt Disney World’s huge Fantasyland expansion under way in Orlando, Fla. The company’s workers are busy vacuuming the caves and below the tracks of the new Little Mermaid computerized ride; power-washing stone bridges along streetscapes; and shining the Dumbo the Flying Elephant virtual-reality pavilion to get it ready for opening. The clean-up is taking place round the clock until construction is finished and Walt Disney Co. brings in its own cleaning staff.
It’s all part of what Mr. Radford, the founder and chief executive officer, describes as the specialized cleaning his company offers, as a janitorial service catering to the construction industry.
It does what’s called an “architectural clean” for general contractors – from shining windows inside and out to vacuuming rugs to waxing floors to meet the satisfaction of the architect once a project is complete. Each job is a one-shot deal so the company usually has several on the go at once.
Construction Cleaners has come a long way from its start, back in the late 1970s, when the Toronto Board of Trade took a chance on a 19-year-old Mr. Radford by giving him a grant for $2,000 to go into the cleaning business. He bought equipment, put a small down payment on an old truck, and hired a student staffer.
Today, the company, with headquarters in both Toronto and West Palm Beach, Fla., and seven regional U.S. offices, has about 20 full-time employees and annual revenues of $2.5-million — additional staff are hired as needed. About 95 per cent of business is in the United States, working for construction companies with projects ranging from Universal Studios to federal prisons and the U.S. military.
The 54-year-old Mr. Radford focuses on sales, splitting his time between Canada and the United States. He shares how he cracked the U.S. market and why he’s now looking back to Canada for work.
Q: Why construction cleaning?
A: I grew up in the construction business as a young boy in Windsor. My dad was vice-president of Eastern Construction so I remember jumping in the trucks as a kid. The company moved to Toronto when I was 14 and did a lot of big projects like Roy Thomson Hall and Sun Life. By the time I was in university [at the University of Western Ontario] I’d help my dad in the summers doing things like window cleaning and blacktopping. One of the first jobs I ever did for him was when they were renovating Union Station. That was my start in doing commercial construction projects.
Q: Once you had the seed money from the Toronto Board of Trade, how did you get your own clients?
A: I started knocking on the doors of construction trailers and offering my services. My first job was Hazelton Lanes in Yorkville. They were doing construction and wanted the stores cleaned up because they had clients from Paris coming in. I liked that they paid cash – cash is king when you’re small. There are good margins on those upscale businesses, so they paid us what we wanted. They just wanted a perfect store.
Q: When did you take your business to the United States?
A: During the recession in the late eighties when interest rates were high. The Toronto market was extremely competitive, with people literally working for cost, so I couldn’t continue in business doing that. I applied for a visa to work and live in the U.S. – that was when free trade was brought in – and was lucky enough to get one. The idea was to take the business you had in Canada and start a similar company in the U.S.
Q: How did you break into the U.S market?
A: It was much more difficult to research than it would be today because we didn’t have the internet to do searches. I read engineering magazines that would tell me what projects were starting and the year they were finishing. I’d catalogue all those and hit them. If there was a $10- or $20-million job, I’d watch them until I knew they were finishing, phone them up and say, ‘Would you like a price?’ Nine times out of 10, they’d say, ‘We’d love a price.’
I really keyed in on doing construction work only and on some of the big players in Canada like EllisDon that were expanding in the U.S. as well. I ran on their coattails for jobs we did in Toronto, and said, ‘Well, we can do your jobs in the U.S.’, so it was a natural fit.
Before leaving Canada, I also decided to explore some different, smaller mid-sized markets like Wichita, Kan., that were far less competitive but still had a lot of great projects going on, like courthouses and arenas. One of the first jobs we did was a big hockey arena in Albany N.Y., for one of the major hockey teams.
We used to clean $100-million prisons in the middle of coal-mining towns. Nobody’s there to bid on this stuff so we would get huge $100,000 cleanups and bring our managers in. They’d stay at the local hotels and we’d hire the hotel’s cleaning people. Or we’d put ads in the local newspapers and use different employment agencies.
Q: Are prisons big business for you?
A: We do a lot of prisons. We had five prisons going in Pennsylvania at one time. They’re like a self-contained village – half a million square feet – with huge kitchens, medical and dental facilities and basketball courts. There’s a lot of cleaning involved. We’re starting on a $200-million federal prison in West Virginia and just finished one a month ago in Alabama. Those big federal prisons are cookie-cutter – all the same architect – so if you clean one, you can clean 10 across the country and price them out the same.
Q: How did you set up the company?
A: I used the model from big general contractors in the U.S.… for setting up. I’d get my key people and take them to the site. If it was a big enough job, they’d stay there a few weeks and I’d hire locally. As long as I had my supervising managers to be able to handle those local jobs, I could do it.
The uniqueness of our business is that we run it on a national basis so we can cover every state or province. It’s all with the same stencil. The key is to have your own personnel managers in charge, people who know what they are doing. You can always hire cleaners. It’s the managers who are so important.