338 - Cleaning Up the Competition: How to Lead a Family Business Without Losing Your Mind! with Anago Cleaning Systems' Adam Povlitz

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Adam Pawlitz, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and president of a company called Anago Cleaning, which is a large franchise operation based out of Florida. And you basically rose through the ranks and been pres— been president for a number of years now. It was a thankless job, I think.

Although sometimes, yeah, sometimes rewarding.

Anyways, I'm really curious about just hearing about your backstory, how you got into the business. And you started out as a franchise director and eventually Here you are. How'd that all happen?

Yeah. So first, yeah, Doug, thank you for having me. The, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting story. I, I, I, it's actually my father founded the business back in 1989, but I didn't join until 2009. I had no desire to be anything to do with the family business, the quote unquote family business. I, my background's actually corporate finance. I was with IBM in the early 2000s and during the '08, '09 the big recession we went through, IBM did a round of layoffs. I was not laid off. I was one of the analysts who was actually, I was given a whole massive series of spreadsheets with employee numbers and comp packages. And here I was, 20-something-year-old kid, and I was determining the fates of who got the golden parachutes, whose parachutes were not quite so golden, and which parachutes had the holes in them. Yeah, exactly right. And when, I don't know, I don't know how to word it other than it just leaves a sinking feeling in your stomach when you have to do that. And you go, man, I could easily be 20 years from now into my career. And then they give my employee number to some 20-year-old kid to decide my fate. And I go, no, that's not going to work for me. And I was down, I was actually visiting my dad for the holidays that year. And I said, he goes, man, I got this Anago thing, you know, the tiger by the tail, you got to come check it out. And it was about 6 months later that I moved back to, from New York to Florida and joined Anago and he goes, congratulations, you've left your highfalutin finance job and your first job at Anago, you're going to be a telemarketer by day and a franchisee's assistant at night cleaning a daycare. Yeah.

Learn at the bottom, huh?

Oh yeah. This was, talk about the 55-gallon drum garbage bags filled with dirty diapers. That was, oh God, that was my life for a little while. But I did, I quite, so quite literally rose from the ranks from the very bottom of cleaning crappy diaper pails to I moved into the client sales and then I moved into, did some franchise sales, some customer service. This was all at our South Florida franchise location. And then ultimately I moved to the corporate office and I'm still probably late 20s at this point. And, and so it's like, what the heck do I know? And here I am talking to franchise owners who've been with us for a decade or longer and, and trying to tell, trying to coach them how to run their business. And so you have to, and I had to very quickly adopt like a servant leadership approach, which was how can we help you grow your business? I'm here to share what I know, but you probably know more than me. And so how can I, how can I help you grow your business? What can we be doing at the corporate office to help you grow? And then moved up through the, moved up through the ranks slowly but surely, ultimately kind of went through the operational track. And then in 2015 was promoted to the president role. And I think it was, I was basically running the show, but they didn't officially have a CEO role. And then they gave that to me in 2018. And so I've been doing it ever since.

What, so what's it like from corporate IBM coming into a family business that your father founded and managed and it was his baby for a long time?

Yeah, a lot of dynamics there, right?

I have it.

So I have on the business side, I will say that it was very much something where when you see IBM, it was, is Big Blue, right? It was, you see a Fortune 100 company and how it's run and how how, you know, how precise everything is. And it's, it's impressive. I would say taking, honestly, taking a lot of what I saw there on the financial side and then applying it at a small business was extremely valuable because it's okay, we're going to need reporting like this as fast as, as soon as they let me at the numbers, I was like, okay, this is how I want the numbers to see. I was, I was the financial analyst at IBM. I know how I wasn't the person on the, I was 2 people down from the quarterly earnings call. So I wasn't the guy on the call., but two, two levels down, I was the one preparing all the numbers for the guy who did all the earnings calls. So it's like, I know what I needed to see. So there was definitely a value there. And then on the flip side, you come into a business. My sister was also involved in the business. There's just the whole family dynamic that's in play. Everyone said it was funny because we were very quick to learn and determine what our roles were going to be in the business. Everyone was like, you should watch Succession or Billions. And no, no, no, it wasn't. It was never anything like that, but definitely an interesting dynamic. I think we were good at compartmentalizing, right? And just saying, we went to, and my dad passed in 2023. Until he passed, we at least probably initially once a month, probably slowed down to maybe a couple times a month. The three of us went to lunch every Thursday, almost every Thursday. And it was okay, we're a family here and we're going to just talk about what's going on in life. And we can all chat about family things and kids and whatever at, at the holidays. And then, but then when we're at business and we're at the office, we're at, we're in business mode. And so we were very good at flipping the proverbial switch and being able to isolate and say, okay, here's who I am here. And here's who I am there.

Is your sister still in the business?

Yeah, to this day.

Wow. And you guys get along?

Yeah, it's still, there's still definitely a little bit. She's the only one who can like call me on my BS in front of everyone where I'm like, come on, man. I'm still the CEO. I'm, and now my, she's my older sister. Everyone thinks because I'm the, the senior ranking one that I'm the older one. So she always lies about my age and my stones.

And the reason I'm laughing is because, because as a professional mediator and peacemaker, I've done a lot of family business conflicts and it's, it sounds like you guys have really navigated the pitfalls of family business really well compared to some stories I could tell.

Oh yeah.

Let's think of the Murdochs, for example, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's, and I think we, we both went in with very clear, and working with my dad while he was running things of, okay, who's, you know, we, we saw who was excelling at what and ultimately took our own individual tracks. Whereas you can, you know what one of the differentiators is that I will say is I've seen family businesses where it's the expectation for you to get into the family business versus your own desire. And my dad was very good at making sure, are you sure you want to do this versus no, this is what everybody does. Of course, you're my kid. You get into the family business. It was like, are you sure you want to do this? Because if you're not all in, better for you to go build your own career elsewhere rather than do something and have you dragged in kicking and screaming. You don't want to be, and then just presenting the entire thing. You don't want it to be, oh, he's the founder's son. And so he's the silver, silver spooner and It just, the optics are all wrong. And so it was like, look, this is what it's gonna look like. Are you sure you want it? And I'm not twisting your arm. And that's why I think it would worked out so well.

Good. So you've been doing this for 15 years. What is it that gets you excited about going to work every day?

The one thing I'm, I've realized is I love the fact that there's definitely no such thing as two days that are the same. We're, we're still 30. Gosh, 36-year-old business, still completely family owned, no, no private equity, no institutional money or anything like that. And truly am my own boss. And by that, it ultimately means all of my franchisees and clients are really my boss. But it's from a standpoint of being able to just completely dictate your own schedule and everything like that. That, that's very helpful because I'm very much at IBM. They called it work-life integration. And this was early 2000s when they were pitching work-life balance. And I remember going, no, like this just work-life integration means you don't have balance. And now as a very much like self-inflicted workaholic, that's just my life. It's just the work-life integration and striking everything. So it's exciting that I can, I can still, I still have a little bit of time and I really have to enforce it, but I have a little bit of time that I deliberately set aside to just dream a little bit to just say, okay, what's something different we can do? Maybe I'm going to, I'm going to check out this conference on AI and see what's going on with that and see what we can do to bring that to our business. Let me go to this franchise conference. And see what, I don't know, Papa John's or McDonald's are doing and see if I can't get an idea from one of the big boys and integrate that. And so just being able to constantly dream and not be beholden to, oh, we gotta hit our quarterly numbers or anything like that. I think that's the exciting thing for me. It's just being able to stay in the creative.

Yeah, absolutely. I neglected to ask you, just, I did a little bit of research on you. Tell us, tell everybody that's listening. What Anago does, and it's a franchise operation and it's in janitorial and industrial cleaning. But so elaborate on that for us a little bit. Sure.

I would imagine most of your listeners are familiar with just franchising in general, like kind of high level, right? Everyone knows who, like McDonald's or whatever. Most franchises that you're going to be familiar with are going to be a two-tier franchise. So the corporate office of McDonald's and then the folks who own the restaurants, right? Anago is like you said, it's commercial cleaning. And, but our model is a 3-tier model, which is pretty unique and common for commercial cleaning franchising, but not common across franchising. And so what we do is the easiest way to think about it is we have, I'll map it out and then I'll explain it. Maybe that'll be easier to give me, give me a 60-second window here. Okay. I can do it. So we, at the corporate office, we sell what we call a master franchise. That's someone who owns a, an exclusive territory. So like large metro area, Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Antonio, you name it. And then within that territory, they act like they're the franchisor locally. So they then are selling unit franchises in that territory. And these are people looking to get into the janitorial business, very low cost, low barriers to entry. And then simultaneously they're selling the cleaning contracts, all B2B, and supporting those unit franchisees with the cleaning contracts. Pause, right? A little wonky. Let me flip it upside down. It'll make more sense. Most commercial cleaning is done at night. And so what ends up happening is when you— when I say commercial cleaning, your listener, if you're listening right now, you're probably— the mental image that you have is the guy with a mop and a bucket or a vacuum or whatever. And that would be the unit franchisee and his team. So these are the people that are going out at night, keeping the building clean, learning the chemicals and the equipment. But the question is, where did he get that contract from? And if you think about commercial cleaning, it actually becomes a very 24/7 thing. Someone's got to clean the contracts at night, but then someone's got to go get the contracts during the day. So what our model does is it actually separates the daytime and the nighttime aspects of the commercial cleaning industry and says 24/7 is too crazy for anybody to do. So what if we have this unit franchise that focuses on the evening aspects the cleaning, the chemicals, the managing their team. And then we have a master franchise and they're the white collar of the blue collar industry. All their focus is on selling new cleaning contracts in the territory, getting them billed, doing the collections, all the back office stuff for the unit franchisee. And so it's like you can delineate it as like daytime, nighttime, white collar, blue collar. But our model separates the two so that people can focus on one core aspect of the business rather than everything.

So another way to think about it is that the service people are the ones working at night, and those are the sub-franchisees of the master, the master franchisee that is doing all the contracting, doing all the back office work, and then they delegate the work out to their sub-franchisees.

Exactly.

And the sub-franchisees get paid on some basis of, I guess, on productivity and assignments and that sort of thing. Okay. And then what you do at the corporate level, is you're probably, you're supporting the whole operation.

Exactly. So the unit franchise is focusing on the customer, right? The master franchise is focusing on the growth. And then we're focusing on industry trends, direction. When the COVIDs of the world come up, we're, we're figuring out how to make sure everyone gets their PPP money, giving everything kind of vision, direction, and strategy. Wow.

That's amazing. That's a complex business.

Yeah, you're telling me.

How many, if you don't mind me asking, how many master franchisees do you have?

We have 48 master franchisees supporting over 1,800 unit franchisees.

Wow. And how many total employees? I know they're not employees, but how many total people are employed under the umbrella?

Roughly? Somewhere in the neighborhood of probably 7,000 to 10,000. We don't track all of that, but across everything, the average franchisee will have an employee to 3 employees. And then it ranges. We have some that, you know, it, because it's low cost, right? Low barrier. It has turned into something where it's, especially nowadays, people are looking for the side hustle with the Ubers of the world. And so it's turned into quite the side hustle. So there's people that do it and go, hey, I just want to make an extra $3,000 a month. Can I do this unit franchise thing? And the answer is yes. And then I have another franchisee that just come to mind. She's out of the Philadelphia area. She started with her and her husband. They were, they all they wanted initially was like, I think $4,000 a month. And now they're doing, they have a million dollar business.

Wow. You could do whatever.

You can grow it as big as you want, or you can stay, hey, I just want some side cash, looking to make my down payment on a house, and this is all I want. And, you know, whatever, whatever works.

So Adam, what is it about you that's made all this so successful? Aside from being a pretty bright guy, that's a given.

So I will say it's— I can't— where I contribute is that I'm very adaptable. I'm always trying to make the wheel rounder. I'm always looking at things and going, how can we sharpen the pencil? I was, I would say it probably until 2000, like maybe coming out of COVID like 20, end of 2020 or beginning of 2021. I, I don't want to call it afraid, but I didn't, I wasn't comfortable in hiring for positions that I knew I didn't know about. Like, how do I hire an IT director? How do I hire some of these roles that are more complicated. And without giving you the whole backstory, because there's— it's a story again, I'm happy to if you want. But I— long story short, I was speaking actually with the pastor at my church, and, and, and he was— they're growing, they were growing like crazy. I think they were like the number 8 fastest growing church in the country at the time. And he— they were always adding staff. And I go, man, you guys are crushing it. How is it that you're able to bring on these people that, you know, are always— they always come in and they always do, they always contribute and do a great job right out of the gate? What's your secret? And I go, now granted, I understand your mission is a little different from mine, but still a big business. Yeah. Big business, right? I go, you're, you're saving souls. I'm cleaning toilets. So we're different. But what's your secret? And he told me about a book. It's called Who by Jeff Smart. I don't get any money off of it. No plugs. But shame on me. I put it in my Amazon cart and I looked away for 6 months, but then I finally read it and I was like, oh my goodness. I, you ever read a book? And you go, oh my goodness, I've been doing this wrong my whole life. I read that book and it changed how I hire. And I realized I need to be better at bringing on— I think since then I've hired about a dozen different people, all in mid to senior level, including C-suite positions. And I realized a lot of what I need to do is hire people that are smarter than me and get out of the way.

That's right. I hear that over and over and over again, probably. I probably, yeah, on this show, that is probably the number one idea that successful CEOs have. Hire the best people you can find that know stuff that you don't know and let them do their job. Yeah.

Oh yeah. My, my other pro tip on that same angle, and this is how to do it, but this was my secret, right? Everyone who's a business owner or founder, You have stuff that you come in every day and it jazzes you up and you get excited about it. And then you have all that, the other stuff that you really, I'll say stuff to keep it G-rated here, but you have all the other stuff that you don't want to do. And, but you do it because maybe you're the best at it, right? You've tried having someone else handle it and it's just not quite to the level that you want to do it at. I got two great pieces of advice. One, if someone can do it about 70% as good as you can, let them do it and just spend your time cleaning it up and training them and correcting them. And then second, this was, this is what I actually ended up doing. And I'll, and my COO, who I hired, knows this so I can say it publicly. I quite literally wrote a things I don't want to do anymore list. And then I went to my marketing department and I said, hey, I just jotted, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to deal with that. And I go, can I, can you guys now rewrite this to make it sound like a job description. Now you can probably do that on like ChatGPT. I go, put this into a traditional COO thing. We'll make it sound more like what we do. And then I go, and then here's all the stuff I just don't want to do anymore. And my COO, he, he read the job ad and he applied. And when I said, here are the things, some of the things you're going to be doing, he loved it. And he and I are great. We work incredibly well together because he likes the things I don't like doing.

There you go. Yeah.

And so that was like a, that was a simple way to get started of going, okay, all right, I need to make the move of getting this, some of the stuff off my plate and letting go and start by letting go of the stuff you don't want to do.

And being able to delegate, that gets me to the core of the show, which is about listening. I saw on your LinkedIn profile that one of, one of your most important values is connecting with people. How do you become a good listener?

I will say I'm not one naturally. It is something, it's a learned behavior. You have to practice it.

It is.

Absolutely. One of the best pieces of advice I got was actually from, I don't know if you've heard of Jordan Peterson, the author/podcaster, you know, what is he, psychiatrist and what, et cetera. I read his 12 Rules for Life book and then he had another 12 rules and I don't remember frankly which book it was in of the two, but one of the things he said, he goes, when you meet somebody new and you're hearing them out, a lot of times your first instinct is to just start thinking about your reply and you're not really listening to them. And so it's like, really listen and listen like this person is the most interesting person who most likely knows something you don't. And when you think of it like that from that standpoint, and whether it's something like factual or historical or technical that they know that you don't, or maybe it's just their perspective on the world and how they think about things. You can learn something. And if you look at it like that, all of a sudden you learn to zip it and try to listen more instead of going, okay, now I'm going to say this next instead of now I'm going to say that next. Now it's more like, let me hear every word that's coming out of this person's mouth and really try to absorb where they're coming from, how they're feeling before, and take a nice pregnant pause before I respond. Sometimes I have to go, hey idiot, do that and take a breath, admittedly. But that was the great advice I got.

Yeah, I think that is a foundational aspect of listening. Listen for value. What can I learn from this person? Why is this person showing up in my life right now? What am I supposed to learn from them? There's another kind of listening that I teach, which has nothing to do with the listener. It has to do with the speaker. And that is learning how to listen another person into existence so that they feel heard and validated. And I'm sure you've seen your share of conflicts. Fights and arguments. And the fastest way to stop any kind of difficult conversation or fight or argument or dispute is to listen to and validate the emotional experience of the speaker. And when you do that, they instantly calm down and the fight goes out. It's amazing to watch. I've been teaching this for 20 years, and I've, you know, I, like you, I have lots of stories. But it, that's another type of listening that I think is really powerful. The other thing that I'm just, I'm now I'm just talking because I'm curious. I just submitted my 5th book to Simon Schuster. So the manuscript, they're going through the first, the manuscript right now, and hopefully they'll accept it. But it's on leadership empathy. And I just wanted to get your take on that concept of being able to listen to people at a really deep level and respond to them at more at an emotional level than to command and control and whether or not that kind of idea resonates with you.

Yes. Interesting. A funny backstory here. I'm big into AI stuff and I did, I found this prompt online and it was literally called the Brutal Self-Awareness Challenge. And you put this prompt.

Yeah. And you might want to do that. Oh yeah.

And you put this prompt into ChatGPT. Or Gemini or whatever you're using. And then it prompts you with a series of questions and it works like personality profiling. You have to be very blunt and very honest and open with it, which is kind of weird because it's a computer, but, and then it responds and tells you, it tells you some very interesting things about your personality where I'm reading through this thing and I'm laughing, I'm cracking up going, man, that got me.

Nailed it.

And one of the things that it said that, that really hit home I know I'm tough. I know I'm hard driving. One of the things it said is it basically said something to the effect of you are your worst critic. And one of the things that, that I, Adam, I struggle with is when I'm having to give a critique of an employee. It said because you are such a harsh critic to yourself, you're not trying to come down on them. What you're doing is you ended up giving them a little insight into how you talk to yourself. And I just sat on that and I remember going, wow. And I go, I, it changed how I interact with any of my team when I have to correct them. I realized that with myself, I'm someone who I'm just hardwired where every day I'm trying to get 1% better, whether it's I'm gonna read something, I'm gonna learn something, I'm gonna try to sharpen the sword a little bit. That's just how I'm, that's just how I'm hardwired. And so when I see something, a failing of my own, I'm very quick to, okay, I gotta adapt, I gotta adjust it. How do we fix it? And I realized that if you, but I know me and I know how I know me and I can handle me, but not everyone. I don't know everyone and I don't know how they handle things and I don't know what was going on in their lives. And so it gave me pause to go, wait a minute, I need to really understand this person, their wants, their needs, their hopes, their dreams before I can truly critique them and have it be something that they respond to emotionally and not just because I'm their boss.

So I got a pro tip for you. Have you ever heard of coaching for improvement?

I've heard of it. I don't know much about it.

Really? It's really easy. What the first mindset is, I'm not looking for perfection. I'm only looking for incremental improvement.. And if I can get that 1% incremental improvement every week, by the end of the year, I've got huge shift. So the way you coach, the way you coach for improvement is the first thing you do is you tell your person something they're doing really well that you want them to continue doing. And then when you're the, you give suggestions, next time you might consider doing X. So you never tell people that they're doing something wrong. You tell them what they're doing well so they'll repeat it. They're reinforced on that. And then you make a suggestion to improve their performance next time. And you never give them more than one suggestion at a time. And you do it constantly. And so that way, because adult learners do not take criticism well. And I learned, I actually learned this back in my, the dark ages of my past when I was a law professor and a trial lawyer. And I got certified as an, by the National Institutes of Trial Aggressiveness. Advocacy to teach trial law to law students and to young lawyers. And they were teaching us all about the psychology of adult learning. And they said, don't criticize, don't judge. Just here's what you're doing really well. Here's what you need to do to improve and leave it at that and be constant about it. Be very consistent. And you, they say you'll see much faster results than the old way of just criticizing people and saying, well, you did that wrong. And yeah, that, that, that style, doesn't work very well. So anyways, you can think about that and play with it.

Yeah, that's good. That's—

we're getting, getting to the end of our conversation. I always like to end my conversation by asking this question. Adam, what's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us? Good one, huh?

About myself, like internally, or just in general?

Anything, whatever comes to your head.

So the only thing that's coming to my head, just right on the spot here— I am, and I have not practiced in a very long time, I am actually a second-degree black belt in taekwondo.

I am a, I'm a secondary black belt in a northern Chinese kung fu style called xiu xiu, and I'm a tai chi master. Wow. Yeah, how about that?

Very cool.

I think there is I haven't studied martial arts in a long time too. I'm getting a little gray to be doing that, but I think there is much to be learned in the discipline of the martial arts.

And absolutely.

And the, it was the learn, studying Tai Chi after I was awarded my secondary black belt, I started studying Tai Chi and that's what caused a major life change for me and got me out of the practice of law into peacemaking. It was the paradoxes of Tai Chi. The softer you are, the stronger you are. The more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are.

Very cool.

Pretty cool. Well, I got to tell you, Adam, this is one of the most wonderful conversations I've had in a long time. Thank you so much for your time today, and best of luck to you and all the success in the world. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great Guests, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.