Going where our hearts call us: A new vision for our company
The Student Maid (Made!) team during our meeting this week, excited to step boldly into our new future together
Have you ever felt your heart calling you? Tugging and pulling you toward something greater? Trying to tell you something you’re afraid to hear? Afraid of what it would mean if you listened to it? Afraid of how you might have to change if you listened?
As I type this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop, masked up, looking out the window at the beautiful blue sky, and wondering if what I’m typing is actually real. If this day is actually real. It doesn’t feel real because for so long, my heart has been tugging me toward something. Telling me I’m meant for something bigger. Telling me that our company is meant for more. Telling me that we could make a larger, more meaningful impact than we are making. Up until now, I haven’t had the courage to go there and explore the depths of these thoughts. Afraid of the answers I may find and what they might mean. Always telling myself “one day”... and now, “one day” is here. It’s today. And it feels surreal and scary.
Today, I can finally share with you where those thoughts led me when I had the courage to lean into them. Today, our new vision becomes real. And it’s this:
On May 9th—nearly 14 years since I cleaned my first house—Student Maid will become Student Made, a company dedicated solely to developing the next generation of leaders. What this means is that starting May 9th, we will no longer be a cleaning company. Instead, we will be focusing on the work that has long been central to who we are and the difference we want to make in this world.
In other words, we have decided to look straight into the eyes of our biggest fears, leave what is comfortable, leave what we aren’t passionate about, and step boldly toward this new vision for our future. And I’m telling you this before we have any idea of how we are going to pull it off.
I realize I have a lot of dots to connect for you, and I will. But first, I want to tell you about my decision to share this now instead of waiting until we’ve figured it all out:
It would have been much easier for this reinvention to happen behind-the-scenes so that we could make it look like the smoothest transition ever. But you know what? That isn’t real. Change is messy. Growth is uncomfortable. Transformation is beautiful, but it requires falling down a lot. We all have to reinvent and grow if we want to keep reaching for more—as people and as organizations—and we’ve decided to be public and authentic about our reinvention because it shouldn’t be something that we have to hide. We want to take you along this journey with us, and the first step is being brutally honest about how we got to this place where I’m writing this news to you. So here we go.
It’s no secret that I’m not passionate about cleaning. If someone had told me that putting an ad on Craigslist and cleaning one house when I was 19 would lead to being the owner of a cleaning business, I would have begged for any other destiny. That is not what I saw for myself. My plan was to move to New York and work on Wall Street. But as we know, one thing led to another, and I ended up turning down a future in finance for my cleaning business.
But it was never because of the cleaning. Ever. In the early days, I spent hours in bookstores learning how to lead. I was obsessed—completely, utterly obsessed—with learning how to become a leader and how to help others do the same. As the business grew, this only became a bigger part of my focus, so much so that it became the purpose of our company. Teaching our students critical skills that would help them thrive in their lives—how to move through fear of failure, how to become independent problem-solvers, how to build relationships, how to listen and lead with empathy, how to use their strengths, how to give and receive feedback, how to resolve conflict with compassion—became the priority, and we just so happened to dust and vacuum while doing it.
I’m not the only one who is here solely because of our greater purpose. Our leadership team turned down “dream jobs” years ago to stay here, and our students tell us all the time that while they don’t love cleaning, they love working with an organization that values them, invests in them, and helps them become better versions of themselves. Most of our clients aren’t even here for the cleaning—we certainly don’t do a perfect job every time. But they stay because they understand that a huge part of developing leaders means giving people opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them.
As the years went on, the difference between our passion for cleaning and our passion for leadership development only became more obvious. In meetings, I could feel the dramatic shift in energy any time the topic changed from leadership and culture to dusting and vacuuming.
We had always seen cleaning as a means to an end: It was how we reached students and had the biggest impact on their lives. But it had started to feel like a distraction from how we truly wanted to serve them and from what we were meant to do at a greater scale. And then 2020 came. Suddenly, we had no choice but to consider what our business would look like without cleaning.
In March of last year, we decided to temporarily close Student Maid to keep our team members and clients safe. It occurred to me that we had no idea if we were closing temporarily. What if our business couldn’t survive the pandemic? So I decided to say the scary thing out loud. I asked our leadership team: What if we could never clean another house?
My coach joined us for a part of the discussion to help us with the uncertainty of that time. One of the things he had us do was identify on a scale of 1-10 (10 being highest) how passionate we were about cleaning vs. how passionate we were about student leadership development. He asked each person to say their score out loud. We started with cleaning, and as we shared, I heard many 1’s (and even some 0’s), which was no surprise. But when we got to student leadership development? All 9’s and 10’s.
That discussion felt oddly freeing. We finally acknowledged out loud what we had always felt inside but had never really addressed. But even then, we still didn’t think we could leave cleaning for good (unless the pandemic gave us no choice). We brainstormed how we might be able to keep the cleaning business going while growing our impact in the student development space, and we landed on a plan that we felt really good about: We would ask an alumna of ours to lead the cleaning portion of our business starting in mid-2021 so that the rest of our team could focus on student development.
A couple months later, we began cleaning again, and the leadership development side of our business (where we help teams, leaders, and organizations all over the world) nearly tripled. Even though our cleaning revenues never got back to where they were pre-COVID (we are currently down 50%), because of the success of the other side, we were able to keep everyone paid and employed while we rode out the storm of 2020.
But something still wasn’t sitting right with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about that meeting where we verbally acknowledged our nonexistent passion for cleaning. Even with the plan of having an alumna take over, we would still be connected to cleaning and expected to support her. What kind of support team would we really be if we weren’t passionate about cleaning?
This plan wouldn’t really solve anything. I knew in my gut that the best solution was to leave cleaning behind, but I had no idea what that looked like or where to start. Have you ever wanted something so bad but you can’t quite figure out how to get from A to B? It was such a frustrating feeling.
My coach told me that if I was willing to sit with this challenge and keep thinking on it, the answer would come to me. I would wake up one morning, I’d see a path, and I’d know exactly what to do. So I trusted him. I decided to think, observe, and let things unfold.
It took nearly the rest of 2020 for me to have my big break, but my coach was right. I kept thinking on it. And thinking on it. And then, right before our last leadership team meeting of the year, it happened: The vision became so clear. I’ll tell it to you like I told it to our team:
Student Maid will become Student MADE! A complete reinvention. We will no longer be a cleaning company. We will be a virtual education program where students all over the world can learn what our own students have had the chance to learn as Student Maid cleaners. Our classes will be taught live, will be student-led, and our alumni will be class instructors. Students leading students. Parents will be able to enroll their children, students will be able to enroll themselves, and we will partner with schools, corporations, and individuals who care about the future of leadership to obtain sponsorships for students in underserved communities. Our goal will be to enroll 2,021 students in 2021.
So that’s it! There it is! My big ah-ha. The vision for Student Made is 100% in line with what we are most passionate about, and it will help us reach thousands of students—something we could only accomplish with our current business model if we opened dozens and dozens of Student Maid locations.
When I shared this vision with the leadership team, I saw a mix of excitement and relief on their faces. I also saw fear. Change is unknown, and we’re all—me included—scared of what going after Student Made will mean. We agreed to give ourselves time to think it over during the holiday break, and when we came back last week, we felt even more compelled to go after our new vision. It was real. And now we had to share it.
First, I told the alumna whom we had asked to come on board later this year. I didn’t want to let her down, but I was honest. I told her that it didn’t feel right to ask her to lead a part of the business that we aren’t passionate about. After hearing the new vision, she reminded me that she is also more passionate about student leadership development, and we agreed that this is the right choice for everyone.
This past Monday, we told our students. That was hard. And it was also beautiful. The immediate reaction was shock and excitement. Shock because it was big news… a complete reinvention. Excitement because we are going fully toward what we love most. We gave each person the chance to speak. No one disagreed with the new direction, but everyone agreed that it’s hard and it’s uncomfortable and it’s uncertain. We acknowledged that we are sitting in this uncertain place together, and that while we can have the best plan in the world, we can’t predict exactly what things will look like on May 9th. We know that each student will have the opportunity to join the program and come with us in that sense, but we aren’t sure if we will be able to give every person a job at Student Made. We talked openly about this fear and all the other fears we have when it comes to the unknown. But the one thing we do know is that no matter what, we will take care of our people, just like we always have.
And then, we told our clients. We thanked them for all they did to help us get here. We were transparent, and we told them exactly why we are making the shift. We told them we are committed to making sure they can continue to have cleaning services after May 9th, whether that means transferring their services to another company or including them in another plan that we haven’t come up with yet. No matter what, we will take care of them, too.
And now, we are telling you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for helping us see that we are more than a cleaning company. It’s your cheering us on that has helped us see what we are meant to do and your love that has made us feel safe to express this openly.
I know that we have a lot ahead of us. I know that we will be falling down a lot over the next few months. I know it will be hard. And also, I know it is right. I know that when we get there, it will be so worth it. I know it will. There is nothing more important than investing in those who will one day lead our world.
As I told our team, there will be two words that guide us every day, and especially on the uncertain ones: Courage and Compassion. Courage to follow our hearts. Compassion for our people, our clients, and ourselves while we do that.
Whew. There we go. It felt good to write this. I feel lighter. I feel free. Now that it’s out there, we can’t take it back. It’s real. And you better believe I’m taking you on this journey with us. Every week, right here, you’re going to know exactly what we’re doing and learning. Even more than that, I hope you join us for our weekly LIVE show because it’s about to get turned up a notch. Every Wednesday at 11 a.m. ET (and yes, that means today!), I’ll be on with my team for real talk about our reinvention, and as we go boldly after our dreams, we’re going to challenge you to go boldly after yours. (All you have to do is register once—using this link—and you’ll get the Zoom URL to join us every week.)
For now, I’ll leave you with this: What do you want? What do you really, really want? Have you given yourself permission to explore it? Have you let yourself listen to what your heart is telling you?
Hope you’re ready for one heck of a 2021.
Hugs through the screen,
