Debbie Sardone never set out to build a business. Early in her marriage, she and her husband were poor enough to qualify for government assistance, though pride kept them from accepting it. He worked three jobs and eventually went back to the police department for a steady paycheck. She started cleaning houses out of the trunk of her car.

“It was rewarding, and it was a paycheck,” Sardone said. “I never thought it would be a business.”

That side job grew into Buckets & Bows Maid Service, a $4.5 million residential cleaning company in Texas with more than 65 employees. Today, it runs without her. Sardone also founded Cleaning Business Fundamentals, a coaching academy for residential cleaning business owners, along with the nonprofit Cleaning for a Reason, now an ISSA Charity program, and has provided free house cleaning to more than 70,000 families with cancer.

At the 2026 ISSA VEO Conference in Dallas, Sardone closed out a long day of sessions with “Systems That Scale, Purpose That Lasts: 40 Years of Lessons from the Cleaning Industry.” Her message to a room full of tired owners was blunt: The biggest danger to a successful cleaning business usually comes from inside it.

Drowning in opportunity

Like many owners who start by doing the work themselves, Sardone found that good work brings referrals faster than one person can handle. She began hiring, assuming it couldn’t be that hard. It was. Keeping good people year after year, instead of month after month, proved far tougher than she expected, and she described feeling trapped inside her own success. She worked constantly, and there never seemed to be enough money to make it worth it.

She came close to quitting. She urged anyone in the same spot to hold on a little longer.

Sarcone shared, “97% of the people who quit too soon are employed by the 3% that never gave up.”

About 28 years ago, she hired a business coach. Nine months later, the business took off, and in 1998 the little suburban company crossed the $1 million mark. Her book, Mop-Free Millionaire, covers the hard lessons and mistakes she made along the way.

“Success isn’t easy, but it is predictable,” she noted.

What really took down Kmart

Sardone asked the audience to name the biggest threat to their businesses. Answers came back as labor, inflation and burnout. She responded with a history lesson.

Kmart opened its first discount store in Garden City, Michigan, in 1962 with a simple idea: everything a family needs under one roof, at prices no one else could match. The formula worked from day one. By the end of 1981, the chain had more than 2,000 stores and trailed only Sears among American retailers.

Then the company went shopping. Over roughly a decade, Kmart bought its way into books, home improvement, sporting goods and office supplies, picking up Waldenbooks, Builders Square, The Sports Authority, OfficeMax and Borders. Sardone pointed to CEO Joseph Antonini, who led much of the push. The idea was to become a retail conglomerate. The result was the opposite. Executive attention drifted away from the stores that had made Kmart dominant. Shelves went empty as inventory management fell apart, and many locations went years without renovation. Customers began complaining about dirty, outdated stores.

None of the acquisitions worked out, and Kmart had sold or spun off most of them by the mid-1990s. Walmart passed Kmart in sales early that decade and never looked back. Kmart filed for Chapter 11 in 2002, then the largest retail bankruptcy in U.S. history, and merged with Sears in 2005. Sears Holdings went bankrupt in 2018. From a peak of 2,486 stores in 1994, Kmart is down to three locations.

Walmart opened its first store the same year in Rogers, Arkansas. Sam Walton never bought a bookstore chain or an office supply company. He focused on building the most efficient retail supply chain and delivering the lowest prices every day. Walmart now ranks among the largest companies on Earth by revenue, at the time of the VEO conference, second only to Amazon.

“Your biggest threat is not your competitor,” Sardone said. “It is the moment you stop investing in what made you successful, and you start chasing things that sound really exciting.”

She has chased a few herself, including a wine store she put at a $250,000 lesson.

“Your customers fell in love with your core product,” she explained. “They did not ask you to go buy different companies.”

“The businesses that last are the ones that go deep, not just wide,” she added.

When comfort becomes the crisis

Sardone believes Kmart’s leaders simply got comfortable. They were number one, customers loved them and they had money to spend on businesses they knew nothing about. In her experience, most business crises don’t come from a pandemic or a hurricane.

“The crisis is the comfort,” Sardone said.

When business gets easy, owners start abdicating responsibilities, culture slips and the numbers follow. She pointed to COVID as the counterexample. Many owners who made it through 2020 came out stronger than ever because the crisis forced them to focus.

“We only improve when we focus,” she noted. “Distraction is one of the most expensive mistakes we make as entrepreneurs.”

Signal, noise and long hours

For the rest of her session, Sardone channeled the late business philosopher Jim Rohn and laid out five principles. The first is to control your signal-to-noise ratio, a concept Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary credits to Steve Jobs. Signal is the three to five mission-critical tasks that must get done in the next 18 hours. Anything that gets in the way is noise. O’Leary has said Jobs ran at roughly 80% signal.

Most owners have it flipped, Sardone said, spending about 80% of their time in the noise. Covering for a manager who didn’t show up is noise. Working longer and longer hours is a sign of too much of it.

“Signal isn’t doing everything. Signal is leading, developing and improving everything,” she explained. “It doesn’t take 80, 90 hours a week to lead more. It does take 80 to 90 hours of your time to do more.”

Her answer is to build systems and develop leaders until the company no longer depends on the owner.

“Leadership is a continuous journey, not a final destination,” she said.

People first, then the numbers

Second, people are a company’s greatest competitive advantage. Most owners agree with that in principle, Sardone said, then try to pay as little as they can get away with. She urged owners to invest in employees, elevate their roles and “create careers, not just jobs.” She also wants them to encourage self-education all the way down to the front line.

“Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune,” she said, quoting Rohn.

At Buckets & Bows, a committed, full-time A player can bring in $90,000 to $120,000 a year in revenue, Sardone noted.

“I can’t get 50 A players if I’m trying to pay as cheap as I can get away with,” she admitted.

Third, growth without profit is just more work. Sardone has watched owners pass $1 million in revenue and end up more broke than before, with everyone getting paid except the owner. Although she stepped away from daily operations years ago, she said she can still rattle off every important percentage in her business, from cost of goods sold to administrative salaries.

“If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business,” Sardone said. “Profit cannot be hoped for. Profit must be planned for.”

Her advice for owners who are struggling is to stop blaming the economy, sit down with more successful peers, be honest about where they stand and soak up everything they can.

A new devil at every level

Fourth, never stop evolving. Instead of insisting an idea won’t work in their market, Sardone wants owners to listen, ask questions and take notes. She was pointed about technology, too.

“Stop using AI to do the wrong thing efficiently,” she said.

Growth also depends on who gets an owner’s time. Following Rohn, she encouraged owners to spend less of it with people who make them feel like the big shot in the room and more with people well ahead of them. She also pushed them to work harder on themselves than on their jobs, right down to exercising and swapping soda for water.

“If you want to be a $50 million service provider, you’ve got to become a $50 million leader,” Sardone said.

Even then, the work doesn’t stop. Just when an owner thinks everything is figured out, the next challenge shows up. “There is a new devil at every level,” she added.

Built for the hard seasons

Fifth, build something bigger than yourself. Sardone acknowledged legacy is hard to think about when you’re scrambling to survive. She also dismissed the notion that anyone can grow a multimillion-dollar company working a few hours a week, a promise she tied to The 4-Hour Workweek.

“Nobody’s getting wealthy in their spare time,” she said.

She shared former Intel CEO Andy Grove’s view that bad companies are destroyed by a crisis, good companies survive one and great companies come out of it better. Her own business nearly went under two or three times, including during COVID. As the industry pushed to have cleaning recognized as essential, Buckets & Bows employees carried cards identifying them as essential workers, and the company rewrote its message to clients.

“We know you need us now more than ever,” Sardone said the message read.

Some cleaning companies she knew shut their doors and struggled to reopen. She saw a similar split among Cleaning for a Reason partners, some of which pulled back on free cleanings for cancer patients while others kept showing up.

She closed with Airbnb. Weeks before the pandemic hit, the company was preparing to go public at a valuation of around $31 billion. Bookings collapsed almost overnight. CEO Brian Chesky stepped back into what’s now called founder mode and made decisions based on principles rather than business models. Airbnb went public that December, and Sardone said Chesky later called that year its finest hour.

“You can’t control what happens next, but you can control what you do next,” Sardone said.