Mary Miller keeps Jancoa a game changer

Mary Miller, CEO, Jancoa Janitorial Services Inc.

Mary Miller oversees a company that is responsible for cleaning 10 million square feet of office space in the Cincinnati area every night. To get that much business, you have to not only do a great job, but you have to differentiate your business from your competition. That is exactly what the CEO of Jancoa Janitorial Services Inc., a 320-employee commercial cleaning company that services large office buildings, is doing.
“Our business is better today than it was three years ago,” Miller says. “Back in the mid-’90s when employment was really low and we were short 38 full-time people, we knew we had to be more creative and ask different questions. You can’t just look at things and say, ‘This used to work yesterday.’ Nothing stays the same forever.”
It was this kind of thinking that led Miller and her team to create new programs that would differentiate Jancoa from its competitors.
Smart Business spoke to Miller about how to make innovation a part of your business.
Visualize the end in your mind.
Everybody has the ability to think of things they really want and to visualize how to see the future. At the same time, life brings opposition into our lives with walls to negotiate. The difference is taking the time to ponder the issue and devise ways to break through, climb over, go around or dig under — but to work through that opposition is when transformation takes place. It’s having the faith that knowing tomorrow absolutely can be better than today and being willing to do what it takes.
The more people ask the question, ‘What do I know that can create value for a company or for an individual?’ — that’s what really gets that motivation going and success starts happening. Too many people are sitting and waiting for people to give something to them and for things just to happen instead of going after it.
You have to begin with the end in mind. What is it you really want? If we were meeting a year from now or three years from now, what has to happen to be really happy? When you begin with the end in mind, look backward, ask those types of questions and you look at the dangers that you’re dealing with and different obstacles that are getting in your way, you start asking, ‘What would it look like if that wasn’t an obstacle or if we were to overcome that and moved on?’
Triumph over obstacles.
We look at obstacles or complaints that come in from customers or requests or suggestions that customers have to see what we can do to prevent that problem from happening again or what we can do to make it better to increase our productivity. You start breaking them down and looking at the results that you really want to have. What does that look like when you achieve that goal? You have to make a list of all the obstacles that are preventing that from happening and take those obstacles one by one and start putting things into place to overcome them.
Most of my people on my team have better answers on how to prevail over things or how to tweak our systems than I do, but so many employees think the owners or the bosses have all the answers. As management or a leader of a company it’s so important to ask questions and to shut up and listen to what your people have to say and to listen to what concerns they have because when you hear what’s really happening out there, there are a lot of possibilities for making things better and that’s when you change things from your competition.
Have a clear plan.
The challenge that comes is that it’s so easy to be seduced into possibilities that can lead you into areas that can get you into trouble. It’s so important to stop and have a plan. Every quarter we take the time to plan out what we want to have happen over the next 90 days. We also take a look at the previous 90 days and reflect on what we want replicated and what we never want to happen again. That’s a really important piece is to be able to take time to stop and have perspective and plan out what you want to have happen.
You also have to build a team of people that you trust are working within their talents and their skills that really creates an energy source of working together to achieve the results that you want to have.
HOW TO REACH: Jancoa Janitorial Services Inc., (513) 351-7200 or www.jancoa.com