By Doris RubensteinIt’s sort of a Cinderella story. Marie Bak’s first paying job had her down on her hands and knees. But she wasn’t begging. Yes, like Cinderella, she was scrubbing floors. But not just any floors. Bak was cleaning floors in the homes of Fortune 500 executives to prepare the foundation for her multi-million dollar janitorial services company, SDQ (Service, Dependability, Quality), Ltd. Deephaven-based SDQ, with over 250 employees, is now among the top ten companies in its field in the Twin Cities market.
Bak wasn’t born to the cleaning business. The California native lived a life of privilege as the wife of a globe-trotting government counter-intelligence agent turned corporate executive. Living the expatriate life in various eastern European capital cities, Bak always had servants in her home to do the cleaning and other mundane chores. That doesn’t mean that she didn’t appreciate their work.
“In Europe, every worker is respected, no matter what the job is. I try to treat my employees as professionals and as special individuals: remembering birthdays, anniversaries – even a favorite restaurant,” she says with pride.
It’s this attitude that has been the key to her success: she treats her employees like family. This is made easier because most of her employees are not only individuals – Bak hires entire families.
Most American families are highly mobile, seldom remaining intact in one city for more than a generation. So how has she made this family business strategy so successful when established American families are unlikely to stay with this kind of company?
While Bak’s first workers were farm wives who needed jobs during a depressed economy in 1983 (one of whom is still working for her at age 72), nearly all of her cleaning employees are now immigrants and second-generation workers.
Bak was introduced to her first Korean workers by her Korean dressmaker. She moved the Korean families lock, stock, and barrel from ports of entry on both the east and west coasts to Minnesota and provided them with housing and resettlement support outside of a union structure. She has used the same model to recruit from other immigrant communities such as Ecuador and Guyana. You might think of her as Cinderella’s fairy godmother with an All-American capitalist orientation.
Bak feels that by hiring families and providing salaries and support for “…a roof over their heads and bread on the table, it keeps them honest and they will give customers outstanding service; and they will be loyal to me.”
She’s right. Her average employee has more than 17 years of service to SDQ.
Songsu Noh has worked for Bak for some 15 years. His story has a Cinderella quality to it, as well.
“Marie Bak helped to pay for a Korean marriage broker to meet my wife Yeong (who also works for SDQ), and with her immigration papers; then she did the same for my brother and his whole family, and Yeong’s sister and her whole family. She helped provide a down payment for our first home. We’ve used company cars,” Noh recalls. “We have been blessed and our hearts belong to SDQ.”
Like Songsu Noh, her other employees have spread the word to their relatives about SDQ, and there is now a waiting list for potential employees that should take about two years for Bak to whittle down. This kind of employee retention has given Bak the security and reputation to build her client list of nearly 90 companies that include everything from residences to high-technology biotechnology and defense firms.
Consequently, from time to time Bak can be seen wearing not a shimmering Cinderella or “embassy wife” ball gown, but her own astronaut-like clean suit to follow up on her employees at their worksites. And unlike Cinderella, who had to be home at midnight, Bak checks the work of her midnight shift employees starting as early at 5:00 a.m. This kind of attention to detail is appreciated by the management companies who are her primary clients.
Those clients know about the family orientation of SDQ.
Linda Steinbaugh, Vice President of Property Management for Griffin Companies, says, “Since it’s a family-owned business, you work with the owner. They are attentive to us and responsive to any of our special needs.”
Bak intends to keep SDQ, Ltd. in the family. Her husband, Edmund, is long retired from the job as Chief Financial Officer of Medtronic that brought the family to Minnesota, but sons Scott and Dirk are on the path to management and eventual ownership.
Bak holds her own family to the same standards of training for their jobs as she requires for her workers.
“Many of my Korean employees, in particular, are highly educated. Their past experiences in high-tech fields in Korea allow them to move easily into some of the more sophisticated work we do for biomedical companies that require clean room certification,” Bak observes. “Federal regulators are very strict about this certification process.”
To prepare Scott and Dirk for their future leadership, in addition to their work with at SDQ, the brothers have formed their own company, CFM (Corporate Facilities Management) under their mother’s watchful eye. Their company now claims over $1.5 million in annual revenue.
Marie Bak stands only 4’11” tall. She’s a tiny Cinderella, but she can boldly look her competitors – those ugly step-sisters — in the eye with pride for the company she has built. Her employees are proud to be part of her professional family. She knows what Cinderella knew: “I bring class to cleaning!”
