Every new hire at Landers Window & Exterior Cleaning hears the same thing from the start, Audra Spencer says: “Listen, if you don’t like this in two weeks, we completely understand.”
She means it. Window cleaning, she says, “is not for everybody.” The reason is how the job is built. A Landers technician spends the day working alone, and nobody from the office stands behind him checking the glass.
“A lot of our work is independent. They work by themselves eight hours a day, and we’re not following them around,” Spencer says. So the hiring comes down to trust. She looks for “people who have a moral compass,” people who take pride in the work and like the job.
Her parents started the company in November 1990, and she runs it now. It has a home office in Ponca City and satellite operations in Oklahoma City and the Tulsa area. Spencer says it normally keeps about five technicians across them: two in Tulsa, a couple in Oklahoma City and one or two in Ponca City, depending on the season. A secretary the office calls the dispatcher answers the phones and sends the work out. Spencer handles most of the sales.
She admits the crew may not look like what a customer expects. “I kind of have an oddball crew,” she says. Some of them might strike a stranger as rough around the edges. “We look for character,” she says. Her father had a saying for it: “A man will work when he’s hungry.”
Pay is the other half of the arrangement. Spencer says Landers pays its people at a higher standard than most window cleaning companies, and she knows what she won’t do. “I am not willing to have employees making $11 an hour,” she says. She has watched what low pay does to a worker who can barely afford the gas to get to work. She draws a line around what she can control. “I can’t do anything about how they handle their money, but I can make that decision on how I pay them.” She tries to know what is going on in her technicians’ lives, she says, and when one is struggling, the company asks how it can help.
Her theory is that it carries over to the customer. “Because we treat them so well, they’re going to treat their customers well,” she says.
A technician no one is watching still has to be somewhere at a set time, so the schedule does some of the supervising. Each job gets a window, such as 8 to 10 or 1 to 3. The office stays in close touch to see that the window is met, and if a technician falls behind, the office calls the customer. Spencer says Landers tries to bid every job within 48 hours. “There is never a no show,” she says. Reschedules happen, because “tires go flat on Monday, it never fails,” but the customer hears about it. She traces that to her mom and dad, who held that your word is gold.
Some of the work tests that trust more than others. The company’s site describes high-rise jobs from five stories up to 52, done by technicians certified in swing stage, rope and rescue, aerial lifts and fall protection. On house calls, it says, crews cover their shoes before they step inside.
The technicians tend to pick a side. Some love the commercial routes and want nothing to do with houses, Spencer says, while others prefer homes and find commercial work boring. She belongs to the second group. Most days she is in the office, but when she does go out on a residential job she works it, and she talks. Some of those customers have been with Landers for years, and she asks how their families are doing.
Her father, who started the company with her mother, is still a part owner but makes no decisions. “It’s really me,” Spencer says. The arrangement began with a deadline. In 1990 her mother gave her father about a year to turn a profit. He did, so he never had to go get what her mother called “a real job.” By the company’s own account, the first paying work was a single $10 window cleaning job at Houser’s Hardware.