Before Renarldo Conley cleaned a single carpet, he was the one who opened his uncle’s shoeshine shop in Detroit and the one who closed it.
His uncle, Anthony Seay, owned The Legendary Reds Jazz Shoeshine on Oakland Avenue. The shop had been open for 50 years. Conley managed it for about seven. “I did all the opening and closing, paid all the bills, I ordered all the supplies,” he says. “That’s kind of where I got my first taste of running the business, actually.”
Today Conley owns Live Easy Carpet and Upholstery Cleaning in the Detroit area. He cleans carpet and upholstery in homes and commercial spaces, though most of the work is residential, and he runs the company largely himself. One employee works steady hours. Two more are on call; they have daytime jobs and pick up afternoon and evening appointments.
Managing the shoeshine shop put him in front of a lot of people. He met business owners there, he says, and a couple of the city’s mayors, and they passed along advice. “I just kind of took their advice and tried to make my own mark in the business industry.”
He does not claim a mentor. “I didn’t have a mentor. I need a mentor,” he says. What he had instead was reading. “I just read a lot of books about business and finance and things like that.”
The carpet company was not his first business. Conley ran an office cleaning company for seven years before it. When the pandemic shutdown closed the offices, nobody was doing much of anything, and he found it easy to change course. He had already planned to start a carpet cleaning business, he says. The shutdown gave him time to research it and find the machines. He did little work in the first year after it, he says, while he made the switch.
He tells anyone thinking about starting a business to work in that industry first, even as an employee, “just to learn the day to day of the industry and what you’re going to do when you start that type of business,” he says, “because things are going to be very similar.”
He thinks temperament made it easier for him to pick up. “Everybody is kind of built different,” he says. “I’m a little more hands-on anyway, so it was kind of easier for me to get the understanding better.”
The hands-on part shows in his days. Conley is usually cleaning from about 10 a.m. until about 5:30 p.m., and he and one other person typically handle the morning jobs. He does not go out to look at a job before he takes it. He gives a firm price over the phone instead, because working mostly on his own leaves no time for walk-throughs. To get to that number he asks about pet stains, large stains, the size of the room and the city. The customers who call him back, he says, tend to be people who like dealing with “the smaller guy,” especially for the communication and for getting things done on time.
His plans lean back toward the work he left. He wants to run office cleaning again alongside the carpet business, build up contracts in both and possibly sell the company down the line. He has been looking into government contracts as well.
“I want to get back into the office cleaning business,” he says.