Cleaning Up

Guy Mingo’s office is spotless.

Not a paper is out of place.

This isn’t surprising. Mingo is CEO of Marsden Holding, LLC, a $160 million company headquartered in St. Paul that owns Marsden Building Maintenance, American Security, and five out-of-state building maintenance companies. Marsden makes sure that businesses in eight states—including roughly 30 percent of the office space in the Twin Cities—are clean and presentable each day. Mingo himself is impeccably groomed in a dark suit and starched white shirt with monogrammed cuffs. One could mistake him for a man who has made his way through life at a leisurely pace, thanks to the successful family business that he has inherited.

Mingo has been running hard since dropping out of Minneapolis North High School at age 16 to escape his underprivileged upbringing. He worked hard enough to impress his way into a management position at a local convenience store while still a teenager, and then worked his way from a janitorial job at Marsden to become CEO in August 2002. Though Mingo is not a member of the Marsden family, he could be considered one of the company founder’s heirs. Like Mingo, Skip Marsden was a poor kid who made up for his background with smarts, toughness, and hard work.

Mingo’s still sprinting as he tries to make Marsden a national leader in commercial-building maintenance. It won’t be easy. But he’s used to things not coming easily.

"We think we can become a strong national service company within a 10-year window," Mingo says. Last fall, his company bought four building maintenance firms and added 1,225 employees.

Kindred Spirits

Marsden Building Maintenance provides cleaning and specialty services, including window washing for skyscrapers, and is responsible for cleaning 85 million square feet of office space every night for roughly 700 companies, including local giants Target, Toro, Wells Fargo, Imation, and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. Founded in 1952, Marsden Building Maintenance consistently ranks either number one or number two (alternating with San Francisco–based ABM Industries) in revenues among the metro area’s largest building services companies.

Marsden Holding’s other locally based business, American Security, which it acquired in 1976, is the largest independently owned, full-service security agency in the Midwest. It provides security, investigative, armored car, and cash management services to about 100 businesses in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and Colorado, including locally based U.S. Bank and TCF Banks—in all, 40 percent of businesses in the Twin Cities metro area. Besides cleaning and uniformed security, Marsden companies also provide services such as document destruction and background checks of potential hires. All told, Marsden Holding employs around 6,000 people.

Overseeing a business of Marsden’s size was a dream Mingo harbored since his early 20s. He grew up poor near the intersection of West Broadway and Washington in North Minneapolis. “It was a part of town that wasn’t well off,” recalls Mingo, who has partly Native American ancestry. His parents divorced when he was 10, and Mingo’s mother raised him and his five siblings with the help of welfare. He chafed against the restrictions of his childhood: “I didn’t like not having choices.” Determined to better his situation, Mingo applied for his first job at age 15. “It was my way to change things,” he says.