“It’s just how I was raised,” says Ron Crump. “I like working. I could sit in the office. I choose not to. I prefer to be out in the field with my people.”
The office would be familiar ground. Crump first worked in the cleaning industry for a short stretch in 1998, came back in 2004 and has been in it since. He started at the bottom and worked his way up: supervisor, manager, area manager, district manager and then the regional level. In 2019 he started his own company, NR Janitorial.
The company, based in St. Peters, Missouri, does mostly commercial cleaning, from offices to day and night porter service, and takes on some homes as well. Floors get their own line in the company’s description of itself. It strips and waxes them, and it polishes concrete and terrazzo. It also lists COVID-19 disinfecting among its services, and Crump says the pandemic turned out to be his busiest stretch.
Customers notice who shows up. One business owner, writing about the floors in his production facility and retail space, credited Ron by name and said the work beat what he had expected. He plans to bring the company to his house, too.
That closeness shapes how Crump talks about the people he cleans for. “We treat customers more like their family than as just a number,” he says. A customer with a need can reach the company and usually hears back within three hours at most. “Communication is a big key,” he says.
He is quick to hand the credit for the customers who stay to his employees rather than himself. His rule for working with them is short: “If you work with your people, your people work with you.” He traces it to the way he grew up. He was raised to lead by example and to treat people the way he would want to be treated.
That is also why he keeps his place on the crew. His people travel as far as Fairview Heights in Illinois and to Washington, Troy and Farmington on the Missouri side, and Crump still goes out to some of those jobs himself. “Certain jobs I like to do personally,” he says.