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.

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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 Task Force, a volunteer group under RIA’s Advocacy and Government Affairs (AGA) Committee.

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. He ran a house cleaning business in Evanston, Illinois, before launching the platform and is the author of Revolutionize Service Industry Hiring: Discover the Secrets to Exceptional Success. On the question of whether the industry's transient reputation is simply the way things are, his answer is direct.

“Is this under our control, the owners, the CEOs, the company managers? I think my answer is resoundingly yes, it is under our control,” Ye said. “Then the question is, are we doing a great job to execute our control? That's two separate questions.”

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 helping contractors build business development processes that hold up over the long haul. His view on sales hiring is direct: Define the job before going out to find someone to fill it.

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 was the path that my life was going to take me to.”

Today Huguett is facilities manager, North America, for OTB. She is a member of the ISSA Emerging Leaders Class of 2026 and the recipient of ISSA’s Community Impact Leader of the Year Award. The honor is new this year. It is open only to members of the Emerging Leaders class and recognizes someone making a meaningful difference through volunteerism and service inside their organization and out in the community. The 2026 class itself includes 30 professionals under the age of 40, selected from nearly 100 nominations.

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 retire, and he had a small janitorial business on the side with about 80 employees. He talked his son into joining it.

That was 1984. More than four decades later, Doobin is owner and CEO of Harvard Maintenance, which describes itself as the largest family-owned provider of commercial janitorial services in the United States. He is also the 2026 recipient of the ISSA Jack D. Ramaley Industry Distinguished Service Award.

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 logins, apps and extra steps.

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 Standards and Technology in the same room with the professionals who clean, dry and restore buildings for a living.

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 recognition for substantial contributions to the industry and/or to the association over a significant period. In Swigart’s case, that period stretches back more than half a century to a hotel suite in Chicago.