Cleaning Up

“Ninety-five percent of our management personnel has come up through the ranks,” Mingo says. Seventy percent, he adds, have been with the company for 10 years or longer.

The company’s “Career Pathways Manual” offers a roadmap showing how an employee can move from cleaner to executive. After a general cleaner has been employed for 90 consecutive calendar days and maintained a good attendance record and demonstrated basic skills, he or she can begin preparing for the next career level within the company by following the steps in the manual. This includes completing specific training requirements and demonstrating mastery of various skill sets. Each step up the career ladder is defined, from general cleaner to director of operations. 

Besides retention, the other big employee challenge that a company like Marsden faces is ethnic diversity. A great many of its employees are immigrants with an imperfect grasp of English. So Marsden teaches its janitorial orientation sessions in five languages: English, Arabic, Oromo (one of the chief languages in Ethiopia), Somali, and Spanish.

“When I started the HR program in 1972, 2 percent of our workers were minorities and 5 percent were women,” Mary Marsden says. “Today, 55 percent are minorities and about 55 percent are women.” By 1990, the company ranked first in overall employment of minorities among the top 50 private-sector employers in the Twin Cities metro area. “Diversity has been key in helping our company grow,” she says. “We have a lot of bilingual managers.”

The company invests 2 percent of annual gross revenues in training programs, not only its language programs, but also management, life skills, and communication programs.

Big Steps

In August 2002, Skip Marsden, then 74, sold his businesses to Encore One, a trust established by the Rauenhorst family (family patriarch Gerald Rauenhorst founded Minnetonka construction giant Opus Corporation) that in-vests in and purchases other family businesses. At the time of the sale, Marsden Building Maintenance, American Security, and Clean Power (a Milwaukee-based building-maintenance company that Marsden Holding purchased in 2000) had combined revenues of $130 million. Guy Mingo was president of the building services unit.

“When the company was acquired, the new ownership asked me to pick someone to run the overall company,” Skip Marsden recalls. “I named Guy. He technically reported to me for 25 years. Now I report to him. I almost look at him as one of my kids.” Mingo was then 42. Marsden moved himself over to head the company’s acquisitions efforts.

Thanks to its purchase by Encore, Marsden Holding is well positioned to expand. “We think we can become a strong national service company within a 10-year window,” Mingo says. “The ownership change has left us largely alone to run the business. And it left us with a lot of acquisition capital—$30 million in annualized revenue.”

Mingo looks to build that national presence through a mix of acquisitions and strong organic growth in Marsden’s current strongholds as well as in new markets. And he believes the company’s expansion will be supported by the growth of its clients. As those businesses become more regional, national, and even international in their operations, they’re looking for service providers that offer bundled services—janitorial, uniformed security, armored car services, and Marsden’s other capabilities—for all of their facilities, wherever those facilities might be located.

When it was purchased, Marsden Holding had operations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado. Last fall, it bought four building maintenance firms—some competitors, others in new markets—in California, Nebraska, Arizona, and Ohio, a $30 million shopping spree that added 1,225 employees to the payroll.

“We’re still a fairly young management team, and we can take the business to a size that Skip couldn’t even have imagined,” Mingo says. His five-year plan is to bring the company from its current $160 million in annualized revenue to about $250 million, for an average annual growth rate of about 10 percent.

Mingo’s goals are ambitious. But like his spotless office, that should come as no surprise.