Darryl Haskins owns a janitorial service but has business experience well beyond keeping rooms spick-and-span.
Darryl Haskins owns a janitorial service but has business experience well beyond keeping rooms spick-and-span.
He is a certified public accountant, licensed as a stock broker, commercial real estate broker with a master’s of business administration from the University of Washington.
Haskins says he understands what his clients want, because he once oversaw managers of commercial properties.
By insisting on perfection, the 53-year-old Haskins says Clearwater Cleaning Co. can compete with more than 1,000 competitors, some of which employ illegal immigrants and many of which pay workers less than he does.
Over the last three decades, Haskins has learned a lot about managing real estate, running a business and pursuing a career. He says a pay-for-performance system he helped create for a consulting client would work well in today’s tough economy.
Question: While you worked as a consultant for Arthur Andersen, did you have any interesting projects?
Answer: In the early 1980s when interest rates were high, we created the first pay-for-performance system in the logging industry on the Olympic Peninsula (of Washington).
Question: How did pay-for-performance work?
Answer: The logging industry was at a crossroads. It was very expensive to pay loggers the wages they traditionally were earning.
So the loggers were put into groups called pods, and each pod received compensation based on their productivity. It was a mechanism to keep them employed as opposed to having to hire loggers and to pay them the union-negotiated wages. Essentially, there would be a profit and loss statement for all the activities of that pod.
Question: Did that system work well?
Answer: It did until the economy turned and there was less demand for product. The environmentalists came in with respect to protecting the spotted owl and letting old growth timber grow.
Question: Do you think the pod system would work today for some businesses?
Answer: Absolutely.
Question: You said you worked for a large real estate developer and property manager. Which one?
Answer: I worked for Security Properties. It was the third- or fourth-largest manager of apartment units (in the United States). I was a portfolio manager responsible for properties in the Midwestern part of the United States. I represented the owners who were individual investors who bought into real estate partnerships. There were 60-to-1 (tax) write-offs in many cases for real estate partnerships.
I would direct property managers with respect to deferred maintenance, tenant improvements, and I would also interact with the owners with respect to capital investments, capital distributions, buy or sale of the property. It was about 10,000 units worth several hundred million.
Question: What next?
Answer: I went on to Safeco Properties, a real estate subsidiary of Safeco, in 1986. I helped them get financing for regional malls and other properties mostly from money-center banks. The long-term loans were with large insurance companies.
Over time, I became head of finance, head of asset management, head of real estate, head of acquisitions and dispositions. Came in probably as No. 500 (of 1,000) in the company and left as No. 2 as vice president of finance.
Question: Then came real estate, right?
Answer: Yes. I went out on my own as a commercial real estate broker and consultant in Seattle. I consulted with managers at Boeing Employees Credit Union who needed to know if they were getting the best, most sound advice with regard to buying, selling and leasing decisions (from commissioned real estate brokers). It was typically real estate assets that they used in their business.
In 2006, I came to Las Vegas to buy a small commercial janitorial company.
Question: What’s the secret of success in the janitorial service business?
Answer: This is one of those businesses where if you made the customer 90 percent or 95 percent happy, that didn’t count for anything. But if you could make the customer 100 percent happy, then you would have more demand than you could deal with for your services.
Question: How do you make building owners totally happy?
Answer: Consistency. Anybody can come in and clean an office and do a spectacular job for the first six weeks if they work hard enough. The trick is to maintain that consistency with that level of detailed cleaning indefinitely.
Question: How do you instill that in your employees?
Answer: We train our employees, and we pay them more than their industry counterparts so that they know that if they can’t maintain the standard that’s expected there’s probably somebody waiting to take their place.
Question: Which clients have you served?
Answer: I’ve done floors for Harrah’s Entertainment. I work also for Core Construction, Summa Entertainment Network, a fertility clinic, Nevada Ballet Theater.
Question: You advertise Clearwater Cleaning as Nevada’s Green Cleaning Service. What does that mean?
Answer: A lot of our customers are interested in using chemicals that are safe to employees and customers. I think it’s a matter of time before most reputable companies have some green service component to their business.
Contact John G. Edwards at jedwards @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0420.

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