Cleaning Windows For 1 Day Or A Hundred Years?

Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich, right, cleans a first-floor window at the Valparaiso campus of Ivy Tech Community College May 25, 2011. Josh Reberg, left and Jacob Hernandez used ladders to get to the second-floor windows. Davich spent the day learning the ropes of window cleaning with the help of employees of Bren-Mark Window Cleaning Service.

Jerry Davich: Five jobs in five days, starting with cleaning windows - Today’s column is the initial installment of my “five jobs in five days” series where I work a few hours at five different occupations to experience the challenges of, ahem, a real job. First up, I join the streak-less ranks of Bren-Mark Window Cleaning service in Valparaiso during a “monster job” at Ivy Tech Community College on the city’s east side.

Jerry Davich

Candy Smith chuckled at my amateur attempts to properly clean a large office “practice window” using a professional mop and squeegee. No matter which technique I used — the horizontal swipe, the vertical swipe or the tricky swirl swipe — I left a streak or two somewhere on the window pane. It was very frustrating. Although I sported an official Bren-Mark T-shirt and tool belt, to hold my sopping-wet mop and bucket, two squeegees and clean-up towels (a white one to clean the sill, a blue one for the pane), washing windows was tougher than it looks from inside an office building. “Sometimes a window just doesn’t like you,” Smith told me sympathetically after I left yet another streak of soapy water on the window near the firm’s Valparaiso office.

Smith, the firm’s operations manager, has been here 11 years after starting as a window cleaner. She knows windows inside and out, and she made it look easy to clean them. Despite popular belief, it doesn’t matter which brand of soap is used, Smith told me. (On this day, we used Palmolive dish soap.) The secret is how to squeegee. “OK, now I’ll show you how we really clean windows” she told me as she swept her squeegee from corner to corner and back around in a swirl motion. “It’s all in the wrist.”

Within five seconds, without lifting her squeegee from the window, she removed every trace of soapy water. Amazing, I told her. “You’ll get the hang of it eventually,” she replied. (I never really did, though.) Some new employees get scared off after the first day, complaining it’s either too hard, too strenuous, too repetitive or too confusing. Others simply don’t return the next day. Still, after a half hour of practice, we headed to the day’s work site, Ivy Tech Community College, on the city’s east side for a “monster job.”

How hard can it be? At Ivy Tech, which is seemingly made from various shapes and sizes of eye-catching glass, I met with Bren-Mark’s owner, Don Markovich. “When an architect draws huge buildings like these, with so much glass, the drawing never has dirty windows,” joked Markovich, a stocky man with thick arms and a no-nonsense attitude. “But it’s our job to make them look like they did in the drawing.” Bren-Mark has experienced a 10 percent growth spurt each of the last two years, an impressive statistic these days for any business. The firm is known for charging top dollar for a high quality job. There are no contracts, per se, just a lot of repeat customers, from both residential and commercial accounts.

“Just about every piece of glass you see will be cleaned at some point by somebody,” Markovich said during a tour of the work site. “Most people think of window cleaners as hanging off high rise buildings or maids on ladders with Windex and paper towels. We are somewhere in the middle.” Some of the firm’s customers get their windows cleaned once a month or even weekly, while others only once a year. But if windows remain dirty for too long, it only makes the job that much harder, especially if the business is located near grimy steel mills.

Josh Reberg cleans windows at the Valparaiso campus of Ivy Tech Community College May 25, 2011. Reberg works for Bren-Mark Window Cleaning Service based in Valparaiso.

 Bren-Mark’s niche is “low-rise” buildings, three stories or below, simply because there aren’t many high-rise buildings in Northwest Indiana. “Once you go over three stories, equipment requirements and cost of insurance jumps dramatically,” he added. Standing outside Ivy Tech’s main building, Markovich handed me a towering “Tucker pole,” a long, heavy extension tool which uses filtered water to clean high-rise windows with a spot-free rinse. Unfiltered water has minerals that leave stains on windows, and steel wool is often used for such stubborn windows, I learned.

He explained that his job takes a certain mix of intelligence, friendliness, persistence, professionalism and good old-fashioned elbow grease. “Cleaning windows is a simple business — it’s not called Bren-Mark Rocket Science — but it is not easy,” Markovich said as I slowly guided the long (and did I say heavy?) pole back and forth across each window. “We have to provide service, without any mistakes or problems, on schedule to hundreds of commercial customers and dozens of residential customers each week. This can total up to thousands of individual windows, even in the extreme cold.”

Not rocket science, but… In addition to using the Tucker pole, I also climbed to the roof of the building to clean outdoor windows overlooking a lobby. With the sun beating down, I worked alongside Josh Reberg, Scott Sliger, and Jacob Hernandez, who showed me the ropes of the job as well as how to use extension ladders to clean second story windows. Bren-Mark workers say they’re often asked, “How hard can it be to clean windows?” “We don’t just spray Windex on a window and wipe it off,” Hernandez told me. “We make it look easier than it is. It took me a few months to get it down.”

Inside the school building, I worked alongside veterans Mary Martin and Marlon Sayles, an older man who’s taught many other professional window cleaners through the years. Together, we stood on a high-lift machine to clean second and third story windows. Sayles didn’t say much so neither did I. My only goal was to not slow him down. Bren-Mark workers routinely begin their work day at 8:30 a.m. and they go home when their list of jobs for the day is done. Some days end earlier than others.

 Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich uses a squeegee to clean a window at the Valparaiso campus of Ivy Tech Community College May 25, 2011. Davich spent the day learning the techniques of window cleaning.

They are paid per job, based on a percentage, with new hires earning 31 percent of the total price and more experienced workers earning 35 percent, Reberg said. This averages between $15 to $20 an hour, depending on their speed, experience and quality of work. An agreed perk of their job is the freedom to work at different locations without having a boss always looking over their shoulder in a (windowless) office. The toughest part of the job is often gaining access to clean windows, and I can vouch for that after straddling a tipsy ladder planted in mushy grass.

Another downside of the job is cleaning off more than merely dirt from windows. For instance, bird droppings, rotten eggs and paintball remnants. “You name it, we’ve seen it all on windows,” Markovich told me. As I cleaned yet another dirty window while wondering how much longer until my lunch hour, I had a minor epiphany: I don’t want to be a professional window cleaner. Or, as they say in the trenches, the job is a pane in the glass.

Springfield janitorial service achieves rare century mark: Springfield janitorial service achieves rare century mark. Witenko Enterprises Inc. began a century ago this year when a man who fled the Ukraine in the late 1800s began washing downtown Springfield windows to make money. Dmitri “Jim” Witenko began in 1911 what became a 100-employee company by going door-to-door offering the service. It was a time when dozens of manufacturing facilities, stores and office buildings populated the city center and beyond; the demand for window cleaning was high, according to current and third-generation president Mike Witenko.

Early on, Dmitri Witenko’s window cleaning service weathered such significant events in human history as the Great Depression and World War I before incorporating formally in the 1930s as the Springfield Window Cleaning Company. Few companies can claim such longevity as Witenko Enterprises, and even fewer can claim a fourth-generation family company. Kristina Witenko, Mike Witenko’s daughter, joined the company in 2005 and currently serves as operations manager. She plans to be the family’s fourth-generation president in the future, she said.

A search by the Clark County Historical Society of 1911 business directories resulted in only a handful of companies known to be operating locally in some fashion today. Companies with recognizable names like Littleton & Rue Funeral Home, International Harvester, Chakeres Theatres, James Leffel Co. and Woeber Mustard join a few others in that select club. As demands declined, Witenko Enterprises found it necessary to fold together some operations and cease others. Employment is down significantly from its peak of nearly 100 workers in the 1970s. “As need disappears, you back off,” said Mike Witenko, who joined the company in 1968. “When need goes down, we have to make a decision (to stop operations).” “Business has always been up and down, but this might be the worst,” Mike Witenko said of the current economic climate.

Staffing now is down to 10, but Mike Witenko said things appear to be turning around. “We’re seeing see good signs coming, but it’s going to take a while to build back up,” he said. Tom Kaplan, Ness Chair in Entrepreneurship and associate professor of business at Wittenberg University, said a long-running family business has a different approach than others. “It’s the stewardship mind-set,” Kaplan said. “It’s the way that you run a business. You’re not looking at meeting the next quarter’s goals. You’re thinking ‘I’ve got grandkids and what do I need to do’ ” to get them and the business ready for the company’s future.

As economic times evolved, so did Witenko Enterprises, launching a host of other service businesses and a venetian blind sales and service division. In 1945 it added window blind sales and service to their list of companies. That chance paid off when Levolor blind company named Springfield Venetian Blind Sales & Service a national distributor. Then, in the 1950s, the window cleaning service added an inside and outside wall cleaning service under the leadership of Dmitri Witenko’s son, George Joe Witenko. That same decade, the company took another chance and added Springfield General Maintenance to their list of services. The division tackled jobs like cleaning the facade of the Clark County Courthouse and cleaning ink from the walls and ceiling of the Springfield News and Springfield Sun’s press room.

The next decade George Joe’s son and Mike Witenko’s brother, then president George Louis Witenko, saw more room for expansion and opened Springfield Janitorial Services. In 1960, the company brought its many divisions together under the umbrella Witenko Enterprises Inc., which exists today mainly as a janitorial service. It reached peak staffing levels of close to 100 in the late 1970s. Said Wittenberg’s Kaplan: “A fourth-generation company is unbelievably rare, and it’s not an accident.”