Learning to lead is a lot like learning to swim. You can stand at the pool’s edge, listen to an instructor explain the strokes, understand the mechanics in your head, and then jump in and flounder anyway. The knowledge is one thing. The daily practice is another.

This same issue is often seen in business and operations today.

That gap between inspiration and application was the focus of an ISSA Emerging Leaders panel conversation on leadership, featuring Neeraj Gupta, vice president of training, sourcing, and technical development at Jan-Pro Systems International, and Amber Reyna, chief revenue officer and partner at Verde Clean. Both brought decades of industry experience and a candor that went well beyond conference-room platitudes.

From cleaning houses to the White House

Reyna’s origin story is about as grassroots as it gets. She started cleaning—not metaphorically, but literally, at age 12, when her younger brother paid her to clean his room rather than do it himself. While other kids her age were babysitting, Reyna was cleaning neighbors’ houses. “Instead of babysitting, like all the other kids my age, I would clean my neighbor’s houses,” she said.

That same brother, it turns out, is now Verde Clean’s COO. “We’ve always talked about working together,” Reyna said. “When my partners and I started Verde Clean, that was when I finally roped him in.” She noted with a laugh that the brother who once hired out his chores to avoid doing them is now running operations—doing, in a sense, the work he never wanted to do as a kid.

Verde Clean has since grown into one of the more recognized names in eco-friendly commercial cleaning. The company has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for three consecutive years and was, according to Reyna, the first and only janitorial company invited to the White House by a sitting president, attending a State of the Union address in 2023.

Gupta’s path was more circuitous. An engineer by training, he came to the United States in 1982 and earned his master’s degree at the University of Maryland. He spent nearly three decades at ServiceMaster, working primarily in product research and development, overseeing, at the company’s peak, the development of nearly 140 products and collaborating with equipment manufacturers on customizations to meet customer needs. Six years ago, he joined Jan-Pro Franchising International, where his role centers on building programs that deliver value to the company’s franchise network. “I’ve been in this industry for almost 40 years in various roles,” he said.

The moment that changes how you lead

When asked about the defining moments that shaped their approach to leadership, both drew from personal experience rather than management theory.

For Gupta, the focus is franchising, and what a franchise award actually means to the person receiving it. “Franchising is small businesses, and small businesses are the heart of the U.S. economy,” he said, noting that franchising accounts for more than 3% of GDP and millions of jobs. “When a franchise is awarded, it can be a life-changing moment for the person who is awarded it.”

That recognition, that a corporate decision ripples directly into someone’s livelihood and future, became his north star. At Jan-Pro, his guiding principle is to champion the franchisee’s cause. “Once I understood that whatever we do has to be focused on the franchise owner … once you get that, then that becomes a purpose. And then the profitability, and the growth, all that falls in place.”

Reyna’s formative moment came early in her career; at a demanding advertising agency she described as something straight out of a movie. A creative director was preparing to take an anniversary trip to Paris with his wife—a trip they had long dreamed about—when the company’s CEO told him he wasn’t going. He had a pitch to run. If he went to Paris, he shouldn’t bother coming back.

The creative director canceled the trip. The agency lost the pitch. Three months later, he was fired anyway.

“I thought, if I’m a boss one day, I’m never going to make somebody choose between their family and work,” Reyna said. But she was careful to frame what followed: the work still has to get done. Her answer to that tension is cross-training. “There’s got to be somebody else who could do the pitch. There’s got to be somebody else who can do the proposal.” A team built around a single indispensable person, she argued, is a team with a structural flaw.

Integrity when it costs something

The panel turned to integrity under pressure; specifically, moments when doing the right thing came at a real cost.

Reyna returned to her early career, describing a chance encounter with a former boss at a gala years after she’d left that first toxic workplace. The woman had been dismissive when Reyna departed, warning her that she was in her “learning years” and shouldn’t be chasing money—a speech that had landed as hollow even then.

At the gala, the former boss was impressed to learn where Reyna was working. What she didn’t know was that Reyna’s title at the new company was the same as it had been under her: coordinator. Reyna had stepped back in title—if not in compensation—to pursue work she genuinely wanted to do. For a moment, she considered keeping her business card in her pocket.

She gave it over instead. The former boss looked at the card, looked at Reyna, and her glasses slid down her nose. “Coordinator?” she said.

“In that moment,” Reyna said, “I thought, that’s on you, not on me.” The experience cemented something she carries into her work today: that all work is good work, and that there is dignity in every job. It’s why Verde Clean’s company culture is explicit about it. “We tell everybody in our organization: everyone’s a janitor. If you think you’re too good to be a janitor, then we don’t want you working for us. From our CEO to the lowest-level employee, we’re all janitors.”

Gupta’s story involved a product recall, a scenario most companies dread and some try to manage quietly. His team discovered that certain batches of a disinfectant product had deviated from EPA standards during manufacturing. The response was unambiguous: stop sales, identify where the product sat in the distribution channel, and notify all customers holding the affected batch numbers.

“No matter what you’re doing, there will be problems,” Gupta said. “It’s not that you had a problem, it’s how you dealt with it that really makes the difference.” The company lost no business. There was no negative fallout. The recall, handled transparently, actually reinforced trust.

Making vision more than a poster

Both leaders were asked how they ensure their broader vision actually translates into day-to-day decisions, not just the big-picture aspirations, but what happens on a Tuesday afternoon.

For Gupta, the answer comes back to modeling. If Jan-Pro promises customers a one-hour response time on complaints, then the people making that promise had better be living by the same standard internally. “If you’re asking people to be responsive, are we being responsive?” he said. Practicing what you preach, he argued, makes more of a difference than any stated value.

Reyna was direct about the single biggest failure she sees in organizations: letting mission, vision, and values die on a wall. “Never, ever, ever let your mission, vision, and values die on a poster,” she said. At Verde Clean, the company’s four values aren’t framed and forgotten, they’re embedded in one-on-ones, town halls, and field observations. When a team member is spotted living one of those values, someone names it out loud. “That’s our value of awesomeness. That’s our value of social impact. Great job.”

Never lose the ground floor

The conversation closed on a question both leaders clearly feel strongly about: how do you, as a leader, stay connected to the frontline reality of your team, close enough to speak their language?

Reyna’s answer was part philosophy, part practical warning. She recalled an episode of Undercover Boss featuring a janitorial company whose executives were stunned to discover that women on the cleaning crew didn’t like wearing dresses on the job. “That is a leader that wasn’t on the ground floor with their teams, talking to their teams, asking questions,” she said. Her rule: look for people doing something right and say so publicly. And never bypass the chain of command just because you spotted something—coach the manager, not the employee directly.

“Never disconnect yourself from the frontline of your organization,” she said.

Gupta agreed and extended the principle outward to customers, who often sit across the country and require more than a phone call to really reach. “It’s hard to achieve that on a phone or on a web call. You really have to go and make some visits, not just talk to the managers, but talk to the people who are actually on the front line.” Those are the people, he said, who will often name both the problem and the solution, if you give them the chance.

Back to the swimming pool metaphor: what they leave with at the end of the event matters less than what they do when Wednesday comes, and the water is cold again. If the conversation is any indication, both Reyna and Gupta have spent a long time figuring out how to stay afloat, and how to make sure their teams do too.