Straight Talk – an ISSA Podcast

What does it take to become one of the youngest IICRC-approved instructors in history—and what does that milestone mean beyond the title?

Ask any AI tool to recommend a carpet cleaner, a house cleaning service or a commercial cleaning company, and it will hand back a short list in seconds. The newer development is that customers are starting to tell AI to contact those companies, explain the job, get a price and see when a crew can come out.

Are you getting enough value from the calls your carpet cleaning business already receives? In this episode of Straight Talk!, Jeff Cross welcomes John Clendenning to explore the Carpet Cleaning Benchmark Survey and the gaps it reports between typical companies and top operators.  ap

Hiring used to begin with a handshake, or at least a phone call. Today, plenty of job seekers send in an application and get a rejection without ever speaking to a person at the company, assuming a response comes at all.

Restorers know the routine. The estimate goes in, a reviewer trims it back (sometimes way back) and the conversation about what the job cost either drifts sideways or ends right there. For years, the Restoration Industry Association (RIA) has pushed back on the idea that a number generated by estimating software is the final word on price. Much of that work now sits with the Independent Pricing Ta...

Ask a cleaning business owner about staffing and the complaints arrive fast. Good people are impossible to find. Young workers won't stick around. Turnover is the cost of doing business. Wells Ye has heard every version of those lines, and he doesn't buy any of them. Ye is the founder of EmployJoy.ai, an AI-powered hiring platform built for residential and commercial cleaning companies....

A new CEO gets the title on day one. Earning the trust of the people doing the work takes longer, and Craig Honig went looking for it on foot.

Every career has a beginning—the first opportunity, someone who offers encouragement or an experience that reveals what’s possible. As emerging leaders find their footing, those early moments can help shape the contribution they make.

A great interview doesn’t always produce a great hire. A sales candidate can bring energy, confidence and an impressive track record, yet still struggle to land the cleaning contracts a company needs. For building service contractors (BSCs), finding the right salesperson starts with understanding customers and how they buy. Jeff Carmon, manager of member services for Elite BSC, has spent years hel...

Most people get through college without thinking twice about the cleaning industry. Austen O’Reilly was one of them. “I didn’t even know that this world existed,” O’Reilly said. “I mean, there are school janitors. That’s what I would have thought of. But beyond that, I had no idea what any of this was.”

Customer inboxes are filling with AI-generated messages and pitches nobody requested. For a cleaning or restoration company willing to send something genuinely useful, that clutter opens a door. John Clendenning, founder of Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, disagrees with owners who call email outdated. He also doesn't want it carrying the whole load.

Long before Luisa Huguett oversaw janitorial contracts at one of the busiest airport terminals in the country, she was a kid in Colombia whose father went to work each day for a waste management and janitorial company. She didn't think much of it at the time. “My work in the cleaning industry actually started early on when I was a kid,” Huguett said. “I started there without knowing that that...

Stan Doobin never planned on a career in cleaning. In the early 1980s he was finishing his MBA, already held his CPA license and was about to get married. Wall Street was the plan. “I was looking to become an investment banker on Wall Street. That was always my career choice,” Doobin said. His father saw it differently. After a career running horse racetracks, the elder Doobin was getting ready to...

Roxana Aviles was 20 years old, a young mother and a manager at McDonald’s when Holly Moore offered her a job cleaning houses. Maids and Moore was barely more than an idea at the time. “I saw total potential in her,” Moore recalled. “It was just me and her. And we were struggling, wearing all the hats.”

Behind every successful residential cleaning company are people who make a difference—whether they’re supporting the team behind the scenes or delivering exceptional service in customers’ homes.

A technician sits in a customer's driveway, resetting a password so he can close out a job. The software was supposed to save him time. Right now, it's costing him. That scene is more common than most cleaning and restoration owners would like to admit. Technology can schedule crews, document damage, follow up with customers and speed up invoicing. It can also bury a simple task under lo...

Generational differences in the workplace are nothing new, but sometimes the biggest communication gaps show up in the smallest moments.

Commercial accounts can bring a carpet cleaning company steady revenue and long-term growth. They can also expose every weak spot in how that company is organized.

Research only earns its keep in this industry when it changes something on the next job. That idea sits at the center of the CIRI Science Symposium, held September 28-29 at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas.  The two-day event drew 115 people and put speakers from institutions including Yale University, the University of Toronto, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Institute of Stand...

Plenty of industry careers start with a training program or an entry-level sales territory. Steve Swigart’s first real memory of the ISSA Show starts with an errand. Swigart, chairman of the board of Spartan Chemical Company in Maumee, Ohio, is the recipient of the 2026 ISSA Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award. The honor goes to an individual whom the ISSA board of directors considers deserving of...

Jeff Stone has never really worked outside the cleaning industry. He grew up around his family's soap business in Detroit, and he has represented ProTeam since the company opened its doors 39 years ago.  This year, ISSA recognizes that career with its 2026 Manufacturer Representatives' Distinguished Service Award, an honor reserved for individuals who support manufacturer representatives...

Restoration contractors do more than dry out basements and rebuild fire-damaged rooms. They also have to document what they find, justify the work they perform and communicate with insurers without crossing legal lines. For Scott Huml, owner of TACMIT (Tactical Mitigation Services) in Southern California, one rule guides all of it: the client is the policyholder, not the carrier.

Building a successful cleaning company is one accomplishment. Keeping it growing year after year is another. Helping other people build their own futures along the way is what the ISSA VEO Visionario Award was created to recognize. Nancy Galván, founder and CEO of Unica Enterprises in Dallas, and Veronica Vidal, founder and CEO of Custom Cleaning and Management Services (CCMS) in Florida, were amo...

Independent restoration companies make up a large share of the industry, and many of them operate without the corporate support, shared systems or national network a franchise brand provides. For the Restoration Industry Association (RIA), that gap is the reason its work for independents has become a priority. Earlier this year the association launched its Voice of the Independent Task Force, an a...

Eric Marceleño started working for his wife’s janitorial company in February 2016. He didn’t wait until morning to get started. “The night that I was hired, we got immediately to work, stayed up to about two or three in the morning, contacting contracting officers by email, text and just trying to market the company, get our name out in front of all the contracting officers, federal contracting of...