In 1978, nearly one-third of the $300,000 Beaver had taken in came not from construction but from cleaning jobs of all kinds -- everything from attending to the ashtrays, wastebaskets, and carpets of local offices, to steam-blasting layers of crud from machine-shop walls. In the process, Beaver's customers had consistently pointed out to him that someone with such a conspicuously cleansing touch really ought to concentrate on that gift alone. Driven by the pressures and frustrations of his own failing business, Beaver finally listened. He was especially attracted by the opportunities in industrial cleaning, in which each individual job was generally larger and more profitable than either residential or office contracts. But before he charged forward with his usual flair, this time Beaver asked himself how he might avoid the nerve-racking disorganization that had characterized his ill-fated construction adventure. He recalled that while he was operating his cleaning service at Wheaton College, he had frequently bid against franchisees from ServiceMaster Industries Inc., the billion-dollar cleaning-services giant headquartered in nearby Downers Grove, Ill. In addition to the technical and tactical support from the parent company, Beaver had also noticed that these franchisees possessed a comforting rationale for their existence nicely laid out in glossy brochures. And that sense of order and security was very appealing to a man who had narrowly escaped disaster, particularly when he learned that ServiceMaster had a division, Sermac, that sold industrial-cleaning franchises. "I saw a company that had grown from nothing to hundreds of millions of dollars," Beaver says, "and I thought they could do something like that for me, even in a small way."
Stapelfeld, now Beaver's friend and confidant, liked the idea as well, and after Beaver successfully pleaded with his banker for a $10,000 loan, Stapelfeld added $10,000 of his own money to buy a Sermac franchise. "I felt that no matter what happened, it was going to be fun," Stapelfeld says. "But I just knew it was going to turn into something." He was right. In April 1979, on his way home from a franchisee-training seminar in Chicago, Beaver convinced the good people at the Blank Book Co. that they could not survive without one of his $3,000 industrial-cleaning contracts. And business only got better from there. By 1982, operating out of a small, cinder-block building in Juniata, Pa., the Sermac franchise collected more than $500,000 in revenues and a profit of roughly 30% from some 45 customers. Of the close to 50 Sermac franchisees then in business throughout the country, theirs was in the top 5, and each of the others had been at it longer. At the same time, Beaver also converted his residential-and commercial-cleaning business, which he had kept up all along, into a standard ServiceMaster franchise specifically designed for those markets. It, too, did extremely well, so that in 1982 the combined revenues from these two franchises passed $1 million.
By this time, Beaver was quite thoroughly beside himself. Impressed, too, were those within the Sermac network, who considered him to have all the right leadership qualities -- resourcefulness, energy, enthusiasm, and a willingness to get himself dirty, very dirty. Even when his franchise used as many as 100 part-time employees, Beaver could still be found in a yellow rain suit and goggles steam-cleaning a ceiling from a catwalk high above a shop floor. As a result, his opinions were widely respected, a fact formally acknowledged by his appointment as chairman of the Sermac Advisory Council, in which capacity he regularly represented franchisee interests with ServiceMaster corporate executives. "You could say," Stapelfeld says, "that Don had become their fair-haired boy."
At this point, Beaver basked in the fullness of his success and prosperity. But what is that moving in the background? Could it be a gathering sense of foreboding that things are going a little too well for Beaver, who had just turned 30? Something bad isn't going to happen, is it?
In the fall of 1982, the fair-haired boy was invited to ServiceMaster headquarters to confer with none other than Bill Pollard, the company's president, and a few other executives. Beaver and his wife, Pam, discussed this mysterious summons and decided that Pollard was going to offer him some high-level corporate post. When Beaver, wearing his gray-flannel "power" suit, stepped into Pollard's office, he had already rehearsed how he would refuse the offer, since it would probably mean he would have to relocate. Instead, and to Beaver's utter amazement, Pollard offered him the ownership of the entire Sermac division, which Beaver was soon to learn had been foundering for some time.
"They knew what they were doing," Beaver says of that meeting. "They had a dog, and they wanted to get rid of it. They were probably thinking: 'Be still my heart, maybe we've got a live one here."
A live one, indeed. Two months later, Beaver and Stapelfeld bought Sermac without spending a dime of their own money. ServiceMaster, eager to close the deal, gave them a $50,000, five-year loan and agreed to buy back 15% of Sermac's common stock for $50,000 cash. "We did a leveraged buyout," says Stapelfeld, still amazed at the thought, "when we didn't even know what it meant."
