Cleaning Up

That first job was hustling empty bottles to the basement of a North Minneapolis Country Boy store and carrying up refills for the soda case. There he met Monroe Hordoff, the store’s owner and the person Mingo considers to be his first mentor. Soon after he was hired, Mingo was made a cashier. At age 16, he was the store’s night manager. Hordoff, Mingo recalls gratefully, “gave me an opportunity. And he trusted me with a lot of his money—and his store.”

Then at age 17, Mingo got a tip from his friend (and later wife) Patsy Riddle, who was working for a company called Marsden Building Maintenance, which she talked up as a company that treated its employees well. Mingo hid his age—the company required its hires to be at least 18 years old—and got a job with Marsden on the cleaning crew at the Hennepin County Government Center. Two years later, Mingo had worked his way up to district manager. That’s when he met the company’s owner and founder, Skip Marsden. 

“I got called into Skip’s office,” Mingo recalls. “He introduced himself and he handed me a check for $500, a bonus check.” That first handshake with the company’s founder set the stage for the remainder of Mingo’s career. “Skip did not know I was only 19 when his son promoted me,” he confesses. “If he had known, I’m sure he would not have given me that position.”

As a 19-year-old district manager, Mingo was in charge of $4 million of what was then a $23 million business. “Skip trusted me with a lot of his business, which was hard for him. He’s a very hands-on manager.” Skip Marsden became Mingo’s second mentor. “I told him, ‘I want to run the company someday,’” Mingo recalls. At 24, Marsden made him a vice president of operations. “He handled every assignment I gave him,” Skip Marsden recalls. “I could take it to the bank.”

Marsden not only saw in Mingo a reliable employee—he saw a lot of himself. He also had come from a poor family and had dropped out of high school in the ninth grade.

“Guy has the same initiative as my father,” says Mary Marsden, vice president of communications for Marsden Holding. “They grew up at different times, but they are cut from the same mold. When they are around people, they absorb information. They both grew up in tough neighborhoods, where they had to fight for everything.”

That toughness manifested itself early in Skip Marsden’s career. With a wife at home, an eighth-grade education, experience cleaning a church, and a two-year hitch in the Merchant Marine, Marsden opened his building services business in June 1952. Odd jobs kept him in business that summer. Then he landed his first big customer, International Harvester.

It didn’t happen right away. Marsden went to his first meeting at the farm-implement manufacturer’s St. Paul plant, on University Avenue near Highway 280, dressed in jeans. “I didn’t have a suit,” he says. International Harvester thought his price was too high, and they gave the account to somebody else.

When its first choice didn’t work out, International Harvester got back in touch with Marsden, but again told him his price was too high. Marsden held firm and told his potential client that he had based his estimate on what it would take to provide the quality job the company wanted. He landed the account, and kept it for 46 years, even after the plant was converted into an office complex. (Marsden Holding’s current headquarters are just a stone’s throw away on University Avenue.)

Keeping clients is certainly essential for the health of a company. But for a service business, an equally pressing issue is: How do you keep employees?

Hire Power

For most workers, janitorial jobs are looked upon as short-term, stopgap work. When Mingo started with Marsden, he looked at it as a part-time job to earn some extra cash. “It’s not the type of job you come into hoping to make a lot of money,” he notes. “It’s looked at as the job at the bottom of the food chain.” Mingo says that average industry turnover for full-time custodians is close to 100 percent, and for part-time custodians, turnover is about 300 percent on an annual basis.

“In service, you sell a promise, and that’s what’s challenging,” Mingo says. If a janitor fails to show up or doesn’t do a good job, the company falls short of providing the service it has promised. Plus, there are the costs of continually having to find and hire new staff.

But Marsden Building Maintenance says that it has managed to cut turnover of full-time employees to around 30 percent; for part-timers, it has brought that number down to about 100 percent. How has Marsden accomplished this? Benefits help: Even part-timers receive paid holiday, bereavement, and vacation time (after being with the company for three years). But Mingo himself personifies the bigger part of the answer: Give all employees, no matter how humble their first job in the company, the chance to move up the ladder.