Mike Merrick ran Fish Window Cleaning for 20 years before he franchised it
The St. Louis company Merrick started in 1978 grew to more than 270 locations by selling people a window-cleaning business rather than a window-cleaning job.
Chesterfield, MO
When Bob Johnson was shopping for a franchise to buy, the founder of the company he eventually chose gave him a blunt piece of advice.
“When I first met Mike, he told me that if I wanted to become a window cleaner, to go out and buy a mop and squeegee, but if I wanted to own my own business, then his franchise could be the right fit,” Johnson told CNBC in 2016.
Johnson bought in. By 2016 he had been running Fish Window Cleaning in Lincoln, Nebraska, for 12 years and had 15 employees. About 80 percent of his business came from commercial contracts. He liked that mix, he said, because Nebraska weather keeps most homeowners to two window washings a year. What first won him over was how quickly he understood the model. “The numbers made sense to me, and I could see how you could get to, and run, a profitable business,” he told CNBC.
The Mike in that story is Mike Merrick, who founded Fish Window Cleaning in St. Louis in January 1978. The line he drew for Johnson, between doing the work and owning the business, sits close to the idea the company was built on. Merrick spent 20 years running his own operation before he turned it into a system other people could buy. By 2025 Fish had more than 270 locations nationwide, the St. Louis Business Journal reported, and it had just moved into a new headquarters designed in large part for teaching that system. The Merrick family owns the company.
By the company’s account, Fish started as a local business and grew because customers wanted reliable, professional window cleaning. Merrick came to believe other markets needed the same service. He used his two decades of experience to build a franchise system, and the first Fish franchise opened in Tampa, Florida, in 1998.
Growth after that came gradually. The company counted more than 250 locations in 2014, and CNBC put the number of franchisees at 250 in 2016. At the end of 2018, according to the company’s franchise disclosure document as summarized by Franchise Chatter, 259 franchised outlets had been open the full year, run by 225 operators, some of whom owned more than one. In 2022 the company reported more than 275 locations and more than 200,000 commercial and residential customers.
Merrick stayed at the top through most of that stretch. A 2022 company press release still described him as CEO. After the 2019 franchisee convention in St. Louis, he talked about what the gathering meant to him. “It’s great to see our franchisees from all over the country come together to learn, grow and connect,” Merrick said in remarks quoted by Franchise Chatter that year. “They work hard day-in and day-out to grow our brand and serve our customers.”
The work itself is deliberately low to the ground. CNBC described Fish as focused on residential and low-rise commercial customers, with little overhead. In 2016 the franchise fee included initial training and equipment, among it the water-fed extension poles that let technicians reach second- and third-story windows without leaving the ground. Johnson said the company kept him current on safety issues for his technicians and on changes in cleaning supplies and vendors.
Keeping people off ladders is a point the company presses hard. In 2020 it ran a ladder-safety campaign, citing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures that put ladder falls at 500,000 a year. “We take ladder safety very, very seriously,” Randy Cross, then the company’s president, said in a Fish press release that year. He added that the company has strict safety training and follows OSHA rules. The 2019 convention included OSHA training sessions alongside the awards ceremony and round-table discussions.
Cross came up through the franchise ranks. He was working a corporate job in 2002 when a franchise consultant named Mark Pasma introduced him to Fish, and leaving that job made him nervous. He became a franchisee and was named Franchisee of the Year in 2005. In 2019, running the Grand Rapids, Michigan, franchise, he was one of three winners of the company’s Top Producers award, which goes to the franchisees with the biggest sales for the year. By early 2020 he was president of the company.
He was not the only franchisee to move into the corporate office. Jon Mittleman, a Fish franchisee in Atlanta, joined the company’s franchise development team in 2016.
Many of the owners honored at Fish’s conventions have been couples and families. Michael and Kathy Johns opened their Fish office in Concord, New Hampshire, in 2012, serving Concord and nearby towns including Bow, Hooksett, Manchester and Goffstown. In 2014 they received the Quick Start Award at the convention in St. Louis, which recognized them as one of the fastest-growing new franchisees in their first four months of operation. In a 2014 post on Patch, Michael Johns thanked their customers for the chance to run the business in New Hampshire, “our home, amongst family and friends.”
At the 2019 convention, John and Laurie Reinagel of New Orleans were named Franchisees of the Year. Owners had to have been open at least five years to qualify, and the selection weighed growth of at least 300 new accounts along with customer service. Kevin Brown and Nick Brown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, won two awards that year. Rookie of the Year, given for performance in a franchisee’s first 12 months, went to Cole Robinson of Tampa, the city where the first Fish franchise had opened 21 years earlier.
Johnson, the Nebraska owner, had a plain view of what any of it takes. “You have to take your time and make certain that you are the right fit for the franchise and that the franchisor is the right fit for you,” he told CNBC. “No one is going to make you successful. Success comes from hard work and determination.”
In 2025 the company moved into a new headquarters at 217 Chesterfield Towne Centre in Chesterfield, Missouri, and put its longtime headquarters building up for sale, the St. Louis Business Journal reported. The new building covers 12,500 square feet. Matt Merrick and Nate Merrick sat on the company’s board of directors when it opened.
Training is central to the building. Fish holds 11 weeklong training sessions a year for new franchisees and for staff moving into management. The headquarters has a training room for technical, business and marketing instruction, plus a model office set up like a typical Fish location, where trainees practice hands-on. Sessions cover safety measures, product demonstrations and window cleaning technique. Whatever Merrick told Bob Johnson about mops and squeegees, new owners still learn how to clean a window.