Night Owl Janitorial’s Boise franchise interviews a lot of people and hires very few of them. “We interview anywhere between 50 to 60 people a month, and we might hire five or six of those people,” says Stetson Crane, who owns it.
The ratio makes more sense once you know when the work happens. The crews clean commercial buildings at night, and clients rarely see them. “A lot of times people never see us,” Crane says, “because we’re there after they close and we’re gone before they open.” With no client on hand to point out a mistake, the company’s expectations have to be clear before a new hire starts working a building.
Crane says the cleaning itself is a small part of what the company does. The harder parts are communication and finding the right people. “We spend a lot of our time and effort just interviewing,” he says. He doesn’t claim the screening makes the company flawless. “We’re never ever going to be 100% perfect,” he says.
Training starts after the hire. Crane says a new employee spends at least five days working alongside the company through the entire shift, learning the task schedule for a specific building. The training ends when the new hire has shown, in his words, “with 100% certainty” that he or she knows the building. That is a far cry from the single hour-long walk-through he says is common in the trade. “Cleaning isn’t rocket science,” he says, “but cleaning well is a little bit of a science for sure.”
The company also films an overview of each client’s building and makes training videos for the crew assigned to it, its website notes, on top of the in-person days.
Those first five days cover something less obvious, too. One of Crane’s favorite books is Extreme Ownership by Leif Babin and Jocko Willink, and he works its ideas into how the company is managed. New employees hear about it during training, along with the company’s values, what it expects of them and the freedoms it gives them in return.
Crane did not come up through cleaning. His parents owned a grocery store, and he says he grew up in it. “I had a full-time job by the time I was 10 in the summers, working with my dad,” he says, “and so I watched him manage people and train people.” Before starting his own businesses he sold door to door for a while, and he says it taught him a lot about communication.
He has owned the Boise franchise for about a decade. Night Owl began in Pocatello about 35 years ago, started by Tony and Heather Rodgers, who Crane says were high school kids at the time. Crane had run a few other businesses and had learned to sell. After talking with Tony, he decided a Night Owl franchise was the right move, and Tony has been a mentor since. Crane is the sole owner of his franchise. He has helped other Night Owl franchises open in the area and helps manage one that covers Caldwell, Nampa and Ontario.
One of his accounts is the Idaho State Veterans Home, which he describes as the largest assisted living facility in Idaho. When COVID arrived, he says, the rules there were extremely strict. The crew had to change its procedures for isolating residents who had the virus and for keeping it from spreading through the home. “It was hard in the way of learning as much as we possibly could about COVID as fast as we could,” he says. Other clients asked for more. Some went from three cleaning days a week to five, and others added disinfecting. The extra work was hard on the team, and finding people got harder.
The accounts vary widely. Crane says the Morrison Center expects very detailed work, while a mechanic shop may want only its bathrooms cleaned and its trash taken out. Each task list is built around what the customer asks for, and each account gets its own account manager and a monthly walk-through.
When something goes wrong in one of those buildings, the call goes to the owner. “They are able to call and text me directly,” Crane says, “and I’m the one fixing things.”
The crews may come and go unseen, but he does not. “I’m in every single building that we do.”