Omaha-based KB Building Services, led by company president Channing Johnson,  has leaned on ISSA’s CIMS-GB with Honors certification and its network of peers to scale a 40-year-old company without losing its culture.

KB Building Services has focused on serving customers throughout the Midwest, building a strong culture, consistent service, and a commitment to continuous improvement. What does it take to build a cleaning company that thrives for decades?

Two women with a passion and drive to work

Founded in 1984 by two women with no formal business education and a drive to work hard, the Omaha, Nebraska, company started out cleaning homes before commercial clients began asking for the same attention to their office buildings.

The company’s primary owners, the Rezacs, a husband and wife, took over in 2003. DJ Rezac’s mother and aunt had started the business nearly two decades earlier. According to Johnson, the new owner spent the next several years pounding the pavement to build the company up, literally wearing through the soles of his shoes. Johnson joined in 2009 after finishing a business management degree, starting with bid proposals and marketing. Seventeen years later, she now serves as company president.

KB expanded into Missouri in 2018 and became the first building service contractor (BSC) in Nebraska to achieve ISSA’s CIMS-GB with Honors certification. The company has held that certification since 2014, recertifying every two years, a process Johnson credited with pushing KB toward more consistent, process-driven operations.

A relationship built on more than an audit

Johnson pointed to her longtime CIMS assessor, Bruce Stark, as central to what the certification has meant for KB. She described him as a driving force for the broader industry and said the value has never been limited to the audit itself; it comes from what the company learns from him throughout the process. When KB pursued CIMS-GB in 2014, the goal was to formalize the processes that the association identifies as marks of a well-run BSC. The scope, more than 150 standards, felt daunting at first, Johnson said, but the company has kept coming back to it every two years because of how much it continues to learn.

That relationship has pushed KB to think beyond the certification checklist. Johnson said Stark has floated new ideas over the years that the company has moved quickly to implement, sometimes within days.

Johnson credited the certification process with teaching KB how to build standard operating procedures and, just as important, how to keep them updated, something she said technology and AI tools can help smaller and larger companies alike sustain going forward.

Growing pains

Johnson pointed to two things when asked about the toughest stretches in KB’s history. The first was technology. In the company’s early years, operations ran on paper and landlines; longtime supervisors have described starting their shifts by sitting next to a phone for the first hour and a half, waiting for calls before heading out to cover assignments. Moving from landline check-ins to smartphones and, eventually, custom-built internal software required teaching an existing workforce an entirely new way of working, and KB lost employees who struggled with the shift. Johnson said the company did not always do a good enough job meeting people where they were.

The second, Johnson said, was herself. She described being a perfectionist by nature, with a fear of failure that, for years, kept her from fully living out the trust she told her team she had in them. She said she would tell employees she trusted their judgment without setting them up to make decisions on their own, and that her need for control held the company back in ways she is only now able to name.

Johnson credited the last five years with a shift in her executive team, who she said carry the same titles as five years ago but operate as fundamentally more confident decision-makers today. She attributed the change to her own willingness to be vulnerable about her mistakes, lead by example, and, as she put it, point the thumb at herself instead of pointing a finger at someone else.

Finding a peer network through ISSA

Three years ago, Johnson set a personal goal to step outside her comfort zone and attend an ISSA event on her own. That event, the Business Growth Strategies Conference (now the Altus Summit) in Chicago, became a turning point. She said it opened her eyes to opportunities beyond the annual ISSA Show to connect with manufacturers and like-minded operators who share a focus on efficiency, innovation, and people.

Out of that experience, Johnson built what she calls a trust tree: a small peer group of BSC leaders in her region who compete for some of the same business but choose to collaborate rather than guard information. She said the arrangement reflects a broader belief that no single company can elevate the janitorial industry on its own, and that competitors who share ideas ultimately make their own customers and employees better off.

Johnson said she was honored to take part in this year’s Altus Summit programming and pointed to cleaning for a reason as another ISSA-connected initiative her team has embraced and made its own, pairing the nonprofit cleaning program with custom touches like branded equipment and personalized thank-you notes for the families it serves.

A handwritten thank-you as company practice

Johnson has become known in the industry, including through a LinkedIn post that drew attention outside her own company, for prioritizing personalized thank-you cards to employees. She said the practice matters to her because, no matter how much technology and automation change the work, the people who show up every day are still what has carried KB through more than 40 years. She said she knows firsthand how it feels to receive a handwritten card rather than an email or a text and has heard from employees whose families got to see that their loved one’s work is noticed and appreciated, even when that work means missing a child’s baseball game or dance recital.

Johnson said the practice does not have to disappear as a company scales, though the format can change; one peer group member pointed her to a machine that replicates a person’s own handwriting for a few hundred dollars. At KB, writing cards is not just Johnson’s habit; it factors into how her team is measured, with pay tied in part to what the company calls partner and employee extra touches.

She said the practice is ultimately a way to keep the company grounded, regardless of how many states it operates in or how many employees there are on staff.

Culture as the foundation for growth

Johnson traced much of KB’s growth back to a decision the company made years ago to stop treating its mission, vision, and core values as words on a wall.

To mark the shift away from reactionary decision-making and toward hiring, firing, and operating strictly by those values, the company held a symbolic burial (see photo at the top of this page) outside its Omaha headquarters, complete with a headstone. Johnson said the company posted record sales, retention, and net income in the years that followed.

That foundation now shows up in how KB trains and recognizes its people, including a culture class new hires attend before they are formally brought on, a decision-making matrix meant to keep operations running even if a key leader is unavailable, and an annual veteran’s party for employees who have been with the company at least two years. KB tracks the results: customer retention at around 99% and employee retention around 91%, numbers Johnson attributes to a company-wide effort to protect what has been built rather than any single program.

Where the industry is headed

Looking ahead five to 10 years, Johnson said technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics will keep shaping the industry, a theme she said is now a constant at ISSA conferences and on the trade show floor. She pointed to rising labor costs as a driving factor: companies cannot keep asking customers to pay more indefinitely, but employees need to earn more, and she expects technology to help close that gap.

Still, Johnson cautioned against treating technology as a cure-all. Smaller companies may not be able to afford every new tool, she said, and the more important question for any operator is finding the one change that moves the needle, whether new equipment or something as simple as a thank-you card that improves retention.

Advice for the industry

Asked what advice she would offer other operators, Johnson pointed back to the people who helped build KB in the first place. She said business owners should not forget the employees who contributed ideas along the way and who often understand the day-to-day realities of the work better than leadership does. Giving those employees a forum and the trust to speak up, she said, has been central to KB’s ability to keep scaling without losing what made it successful in the first place.