Austen O’Reilly Is Selling Relationships First

Are you getting enough value from the calls your carpet cleaning business already receives? In this episode of Straight Talk!, Jeff Cross welcomes John Clendenning to explore the Carpet Cleaning Benchmark Survey and the gaps it reports between typical companies and top operators. ap

Hiring used to begin with a handshake, or at least a phone call. Today, plenty of job seekers send in an application and get a rejection without ever speaking to a person at the company, assuming a response comes at all.

Ask a cleaning business owner about staffing and the complaints arrive fast. Good people are impossible to find. Young workers won't stick around. Turnover is the cost of doing business. Wells Ye has heard every version of those lines, and he doesn't buy any of them.Ye is the founder of EmployJoy.ai, an AI-powered hiring platform built for residential and commercial cleaning companies. He ran a house cleaning business in Evanston, Illinois, before launching the platform and is the author of Revolutionize Service Industry Hiring: Discover the Secrets to Exceptional Success. On the question of whether the industry's transient reputation is simply the way things are, his answer is direct.“Is this under our control, the owners, the CEOs, the company managers? I think my answer is resoundingly yes, it is under our control,” Ye said. “Then the question is, are we doing a great job to execute our control? That's two separate questions.”

Restorers know the routine. The estimate goes in, a reviewer trims it back (sometimes way back) and the conversation about what the job cost either drifts sideways or ends right there.For years, the Restoration Industry Association (RIA) has pushed back on the idea that a number generated by estimating software is the final word on price. Much of that work now sits with the Independent Pricing Task Force, a volunteer group under RIA’s Advocacy and Government Affairs (AGA) Committee. 

A new CEO gets the title on day one. Earning the trust of the people doing the work takes longer, and Craig Honig went looking for it on foot.

Every career has a beginning—the first opportunity, someone who offers encouragement or an experience that reveals what’s possible. As emerging leaders find their footing, those early moments can help shape the contribution they make.

A great interview doesn’t always produce a great hire. A sales candidate can bring energy, confidence and an impressive track record, yet still struggle to land the cleaning contracts a company needs.For building service contractors (BSCs), finding the right salesperson starts with understanding customers and how they buy. Jeff Carmon, manager of member services for Elite BSC, has spent years helping contractors build business development processes that hold up over the long haul. His view on sales hiring is direct: Define the job before going out to find someone to fill it.

Most people get through college without thinking twice about the cleaning industry. Austen O’Reilly was one of them.“I didn’t even know that this world existed,” O’Reilly said. “I mean, there are school janitors. That’s what I would have thought of. But beyond that, I had no idea what any of this was.”

Customer inboxes are filling with AI-generated messages and pitches nobody requested. For a cleaning or restoration company willing to send something genuinely useful, that clutter opens a door.John Clendenning, founder of Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, disagrees with owners who call email outdated. He also doesn't want it carrying the whole load.

Long before Luisa Huguett oversaw janitorial contracts at one of the busiest airport terminals in the country, she was a kid in Colombia whose father went to work each day for a waste management and janitorial company. She didn't think much of it at the time.“My work in the cleaning industry actually started early on when I was a kid,” Huguett said. “I started there without knowing that that was the path that my life was going to take me to.”Today Huguett is facilities manager, North America, for OTB. She is a member of the ISSA Emerging Leaders Class of 2026 and the recipient of ISSA’s Community Impact Leader of the Year Award. The honor is new this year. It is open only to members of the Emerging Leaders class and recognizes someone making a meaningful difference through volunteerism and service inside their organization and out in the community. The 2026 class itself includes 30 professionals under the age of 40, selected from nearly 100 nominations.