Where to Begin?
There’s so much I want to tell you so that you understand why I believe what I believe, but how do I fit it all on one page?! I guess we should start at the beginning…
I was lucky enough to grow up in a home where my ideas mattered and where I was encouraged to dream.
Once, when I was barely old enough to walk, we got a new refrigerator. My parents took the big, empty box it came in, plopped it on our living room floor, and dragged out markers and crayons and all kinds of crafty stuff. They told my younger sister, Lauren, and me that the box could be anything we imagined and let us have at it. They left it there for us to play with for weeks.
My parents always encouraged our curiosity and creativity.
And while they weren’t entrepreneurs themselves, they say they always knew I was destined to be one.
Aside from the fact that I asked for a cash register for my 6th birthday (if that’s not a sign, what is?), it seemed like every weekend I had a different business idea: making and selling fake nails, a babysitting service, a café. And no matter how silly I’m sure some of those ideas were, my parents always empowered me to try to bring them to fruition.
But perhaps the most important thing my parents did for me was teach me it’s okay to fail. Our dinner conversations consisted of everyone going around the table sharing what hadn’t gone well that day, what we learned from those things, and what we would do differently should we ever have to face them again.
My parents taught me to be human. Not perfect.
They taught me that failure is a gift, and that if I could learn to accept it, that gift was the opportunity to grow. They taught me to be resilient. And this, I believe, is what prepared me to be an entrepreneur who relentlessly pushed through when life inevitably pushed back.
In 2007, I was a sophomore at the University of Florida. My plan was to move to New York after graduation and work on Wall Street, but that all changed the day I fell in love with a $99 pair of jeans at the mall.
I desperately wanted them, but I couldn’t afford them, so that's when my good ol’ entrepreneurial spirit kicked in. I put an ad on Craigslist to clean someone’s house just to buy the jeans, and a woman with a 4,000-square-foot home hired me soon after. I showed up to her house with a toilet brush, a bottle of glass cleaner, a sponge, and absolutely no professional cleaning experience. As you might imagine, it was a disaster, but I must have done something right: I got paid enough to buy my coveted denim in one go. I thought that would be it, but really, it was just the beginning.
The woman who hired me needed ongoing help, so I started cleaning her house every week. Then she told her friends about me, who told their friends about me, and next thing I knew I was cleaning nonstop. But the real turning point happened the summer before my senior year, when I got a contract to clean hundreds of empty college apartments.
I hired 60 students to help me with the work, and Student Maid was born.
I found myself in an industry with built-in challenges: Cleaning businesses have an average turnover rate of 75%, and profit margins usually hover around just 15%. I added another challenge when I decided to focus on hiring people who were students, like I was. Oh, and did I mention I had no leadership experience?
Spoiler alert: Forty-five of the 60 people I hired to clean apartments walked out on me at the same time. (Ouch.) But I’m glad they did: That moment inspired my obsession with learning everything I could about becoming a better leader.
What followed that first messy summer of cleaning college apartments was 14 years of never-ending lessons. I learned about taxes, business plans, inventory, payroll, customer service, training, hiring, marketing, networking . . .
. . . but most of all I learned about people.
It turns out that that 75% turnover rate comes down a lot when you focus on the environment you’re creating for people to work in. Every time I read a book about leadership or learned something useful from a networking session, I would go back to my Student Maid team and share with them what I learned. I figured that they might want to learn this stuff too as they prepared to start their careers. Doing this helped me realize that our company could do more than give people after-school jobs: It could help them learn how to become leaders, too.
As the years went on, Student Maid began to offer leadership development and hands-on business experience to our team members. We taught them about feedback and how to have tough conversations; how to listen deeply and respond with empathy; how to discover and use their unique strengths; and so much more.
Student Maid became known as a place where people felt accepted for who they are, where they were encouraged to fail and embrace their imperfections, and where they were empowered to reach their potential.
And it was working: We were beating the industry averages by a landslide.
Word about our company’s unique business model spread, and people started asking me to share how I built my business and our culture. At first, I was speaking to my classmates in the business school at UF, but within a few years, I was speaking to organizations and leaders all around the world. I began to see the possibilities of what stories like mine could teach people, and so, in 2012, I started a second business: a leadership development company with the primary focus of helping people become more human leaders and build people-first cultures. I didn’t trade one business for the other, though: Even as the leadership development business grew and kept me away more often from Student Maid HQ, I remained very involved as the company’s CEO.
Any time I shared my story, what seemed to amaze people the most was that I had managed to create this kind of culture at a cleaning company, of all things. They wanted to know how a cleaning business could have an empowering, people-first culture—and how they could create similar environments for their people.
That’s when I began to understand just how unusual our company really was.
To me, the way we trusted, empowered, and supported our people was common sense: That’s how I would want to be treated by a leader, so that’s how I made sure our people felt. But I learned that that’s not how the world works. According to Gallup, almost half of the working world is disengaged. They don’t feel like what they do matters. They don’t believe that their company or their leaders care about them. Combine that with the fact that we spend a third of our lives at work, and what do you have? A world full of people who are spending a huge portion of their everyday lives feeling like they don’t matter.
When I started Student Maid, I didn’t know any of that. What I had done was create an environment that looked a lot like the home where I grew up: a place where it was OK to be a human who gets things wrong sometimes. And what I’ve found over the years is that there are very few workplaces in the world that believe it’s important to let humans be, well, human at work.
I want to change that.
Running a cleaning business taught me more about leadership and what it means to have compassion for others than I ever thought possible.
But I always knew that it wasn’t my destiny to be a cleaning business CEO.
I had grown to love my work in the leadership development space, and I knew in my heart that speaking and teaching—not cleaning—was where I truly thrived.
In early 2021, I announced to the world that my team and I would transition away from the cleaning industry and step fully into the leadership development space. I was terrified to make this change because up to this point, so much of my identity had been wrapped up in being the leader of a cleaning business. I wasn’t sure who I would be without Student Maid. But, at the same time, I was absolutely certain that moving on was the right choice.
I don’t regret a single moment of my Student Maid journey. I truly believe that my team and I wouldn’t be here now, sharing our story with the world, if it weren’t for the lessons that Student Maid taught us. I’m so grateful.
Today, our work centers on helping leaders and organizations all over the world embrace and implement the concepts of human leadership in their workplaces.
And we haven’t forgotten about students: My team and I created a new arm of our leadership development business called Student Made, which is dedicated to teaching the concepts of human leadership to the rising generation of leaders. With Student Made, we have the chance to teach students across the globe what we used to teach our Student Maid team members every day and impact more lives than we ever thought possible.
My dream is that every person, no matter their industry, rank, or title, feels supported, empowered, and valued at work. Every day, the work we do gets us a little closer to realizing that dream—and we couldn’t do it without your support.
I’m so happy to have you here.
You know the story of how I started my business, but there's a lot more to me than that! Learn about my personal values, how I met my husband, my love languages, and more.
