Meet Our Crew

Like many small businesses, Crystal Clean is a family owned and operated undertaking.  Bill and Jo McDonald have been married 33 years this spring and have five children.  Prior to starting in the window washing business, Bill had worked for almost 30 years in a traditional American corporate middle management setting.  While the job provided a regular paycheck and put food on the table, the time requirements in the later years were growing well beyond traditional boundaries, eating into what at one time was universally recognized as personal and family time.  Business travel became a weekly event, 12 hour days a common expectation.  Cell phones, pagers and laptops guaranteed that he was available and on-line "24/7."  

The lyrics to the old Harry Chapin song, "Cat's In The Cradle" became increasingly uncomfortable.

Bill wanted to spend more time with his kids, to pass on his personal values, to be a living example of servant hood in action and to help the kids each pursue their own life-dreams. But how?  There seem to be no good way to do this and still pay the bills for a family of six.

The old adage about the darkest hour being just before the dawn was certainly true in this instance.  As a happy serendipity Bill's employer offered an early retirement in the fall of 2000.  Almost afraid to get his hopes up, he applied and, to his great amazement and excitement, was accepted.  The McDonalds were free to pursue the dream of doing something together!

That something needed to be simple enough for everybody to be involved, yet rewarding enough to keep everyone's interest.  Start-up costs needed to be minimal to insure a quick positive cash flow.  Ideally the work would be service-oriented as a means of reinforcing a long-held family concept that a human's greatest joy comes when serving others. The workload would need to be flexible enough to accommodating the dynamic schedules of a large family (recitals, baseball games, plays, college activities, etc.) while at the same time providing the highest level of customer service and satisfaction.  In other words, a healthy blend of service, rest and family.

The McDonald clan spent several months reviewing possibilities and seeking suggestions from friends and relatives.  With the worst-bear-market-since-the-Great-Depression raging, opportunities were limited.  The downward business cycle didn't exactly present the optimum set of variables for starting a new business venture.  It looked as if maybe the timing just wasn't right. 

But then another one of those serendipitous events popped up.  Responding to a mass-mailing the McDonalds sent to family and friends seeking ideas and inputs, a long-time chum from St. Louis, Bill McKenzie, mentioned that his son had always done window washing in the summers while home from college and always had as much business as he could handle.  Maybe, McKenzie suggested, window cleaning would be just the ticket the McDonald's were looking for!  But regardless of the specific vocational path they ultimately chose, he strongly encouraged some sort of family-owned venture.  In his informed opinion (a family business owner for years), interacting as a family one-on-one with real customers was the way humans were meant to work.  Instead of an impersonal name on a computer screen, customers of small businesses become real people, with fascinating stories of their own. Providing a valued service to real people is satisfying in ways that are hard to describe but feels like The Way It Was Intended To Be.

Hmmmm.  Window washing?  Certainly the idea met the basic requirements the McDonalds were seeking: Family owned, simple to start, easy to understand and service oriented.  Only one tiny problem--they didn't know the first thing about professionally washing windows!  But after all, they reasoned, the process of cleaning glass isn't really nuclear physics and with a little research and lots of practice on the family's own windows, surely this minor barrier could be overcome!  

After much prayer and excited chatter around the supper table, they decided to give it a try. A simple business plan was drafted and Crystal Clean was born!  Bill and the boys invested in the necessary tools (mops, squeegees, towels, buckets and ladders), and read all they could about the art of washing windows, even picking up Hints from Heloise!  They learned that, like any profession, there is substantially more to cleaning windows quickly and efficiently than first meets the eye. Flyers, cards and websites were designed and published and they were off on a new adventure!  The rest, as they say is history!

The experience has been all they hoped it would be.  Bill found that cleaning glass is very satisfying in a way that playing corporate politics never was.  Will and Micha regularly accompany their dad on jobs and Jo has even pitched in on a couple of big jobs the boys couldn't have managed without her.  While Allison and Lindi have never actually become intimately acquainted with the business end of a squeegee, they do their part in passing out flyers and answering phones.

Bill sums it up this way: "After working 28 years in a demanding corporate job where I was increasingly pulled away from time at home, Crystal Clean has given me a way to pass along my values to the kids, including the joy of honest work and the satisfaction of a job-well done.”