We believe that our future leaders can help us build a more human world. Join us.

Compassion

How to prioritize self-care and better serve others

Impact

How to lean into unique strengths and use them to make a difference

I never intended to start a cleaning business. But at 19 years old that’s exactly where I found myself: as the founder and CEO of Student Maid: a company that offered flexible part-time jobs to college students in Gainesville Florida.

When I started the business in 2007, I had very little cleaning experience—and even less experience with leadership. An incident early on when 45 people walked out on me at the same time inspired my obsession with learning everything I could about becoming a better leader. 

I began to share what I learned with Student Maid team members, and I quickly realized that our company could do more than give people after-school jobs: It could help them learn how to become leaders. So help them we did: We created leadership development workshops and taught our team members everything from how to give feedback effectively to how to listen deeply and respond with empathy to how to discover and use their unique strengths. 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. The impact was clear: We proudly watched as Student Maid alumni went on to start their own businesses, land dream jobs, and become leaders, many of them citing Student Maid as the reason they had the confidence and skills to take on these roles.

My team and I always knew that the passion that fueled Student Maid came not from a love of cleaning but from the opportunity we had to reach and develop these rising leaders. 

We realized that in order to have the kind of impact we wanted to have on the world, we needed to expand our reach beyond the students of Gainesville. And when we really searched our hearts, we recognized that we did not want to do that by opening more Student Maid locations in other cities; we wanted to leave cleaning and create a new arm of our existing leadership development business that was focused solely on the rising generation of leaders. That’s how Student Made came to be.

The Student Made initiative has allowed us to fulfill our longtime dream of having a wide-reaching impact on the next generation of leaders while continuing to help organizations all over the world embrace authentic, human leadership. Today, through Student Made’s programs, we teach students the same skills that we taught Student Maid team members. Thanks to the generosity of those who care about the future of leadership, we offer our programs to students all over the world at no cost to them.

To learn more about the Student Maid journey, read my story here or check out my book!