14: The secrets to building and scaling with Cleanlogic Co-CEO Mike Ghesser

Cleanlogic Co-CEO and Vistage Member Award Winner Mike Ghesser joins Vistage CEO Sam Reese to talk about how his passion for prioritizing workplace accessibility grew from his personal experiences as a father and friend. Mike also shares how he persevered through challenges and roadblocks to build a thriving business from the ground up.

Highlights include:

• Perseverance, passion and purpose: Cleanlogic’s purpose is woven into the fabric of their culture, “creating an unstoppable force that impacts productivity, growth, retention, and collaboration.” Reflection Question: If your company’s purpose is articulated, are there ways it can be more deeply ingrained in your culture?
• Team collaboration and trust: Mike fostered a culture of trust and collaboration with his co-founder and team through listening, communication, and clearly defined roles. Reflection Question: How can you elevate the level of trust in your organization?
• Leadership principles: Mike’s leadership principles are, “being accountable to your word, learning and growing, and caring deeply by creating a sense of community at work.” Reflection Question: What are your leadership principles?
• Inclusive Leadership: Cleanlogic’s mission is, “Inspiring all to achieve independence and success.” Mike has found that prioritizing accessibility in the workplace enriches company culture, fosters retention, and drives productivity and growth. Reflection Question: How can you help your team be more successful? Asking them may help uncover easy wins.

Don’t miss out on more insightful conversations with Vistage CEO Sam Reese and award-winning Vistage members. Visit vistage.com/podcast to hear stories from CEOs about the challenges they’ve overcome and the lessons they’ve learned.

Transcript

Sam Reese: Welcome everyone to another episode of A Life of Climb Podcast. I’m your host, Sam Reese. Joining me today is Mike Ghesser, Co-CEO, and founder of Cleanlogic. Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. Was really looking forward to our conversation.

Mike Ghesser: Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.

Sam Reese: Yeah. What a great inspiring story. I know how connected you are to the business and how it connects to your family, but I also know that you are an entrepreneur as well. And I think one of my questions is that you caught that entrepreneur bug pretty early in your career, and as we were briefing for this, that included a stint as a concert promoter. You had a few other early roles. It’d be interesting to hear a little more from you on how this path led you to where you are today. Just share a little bit about some of your entrepreneurial path? I know our listeners would really be interested.

Mike Ghesser: Sure, yeah. For me, it started actually at a very young age. Some of my earliest memories were of being in kindergarten, five years old, going to… A lot of my friend’s parents were business owners and I remember going to their businesses and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. And I knew this as David’s dad or Brandon’s dad or Benji’s dad and so they were just normal people to me, but they were doing extraordinary things. And I thought, okay, well if my friend’s dads can do this, so can I. And so I remember just throughout growing up, knowing that this was the area in which I wanted to create my life and all of my experiences.

When you set your mind to something or it’s there, somehow you just seem to follow that path and I was just always attracted to things entrepreneurial, and I wanted to do anything I could to learn business at a very young age and understand business and find for me what was going to be the business that I wanted to be in and that’s just ultimately what’s happened.

Sam Reese: Yeah. Are you familiar with, you may be just listening to you familiar with that sort of famous quote from Earl Nightingale, “You become what you think about.

Mike Ghesser: Yes, absolutely.

Sam Reese: Yeah, you sound like that person. Now, where was it that you met your co-founder, Isaac, because I know that was also in during your entrepreneurial climb? Where was that? At what stage of your career did you guys connect?

Mike Ghesser: I remember very clearly the first day I ever met Isaac, he had just come back from a semester abroad in Argentina. And his plan was to create this business and import Hispanic foods from South America to the Hispanic grocery stores in Los Angeles, which had the biggest Hispanic population in the United States. And I’m like, “Okay, that’s interesting,” but the way that he was talking about this business was with more passion than I had ever heard anybody speak about a business in my life.

And I’m like, “This guy’s interesting.” And we just started talking more and I was asking him questions and I knew instantly that I wanted to work with this guy. And actually Isaac was the first true visionary I had ever met. And the other thing about him was I knew he was just a good genuine guy, but fascinating at the same time. And very quickly I realized that he and I had the same goals and aspirations. So we just started working together.

Sam Reese: How long ago was that, Mike?

Mike Ghesser: We were maybe 23 years ago, 24 years ago.

Resolving conflict by establishing trust

Sam Reese: I always think there’s a lot of stories in Vistage I know that you know where people try to manage this co-founder relationship. You guys have figured out how to do it, and I know it can be some often rocky terrain. do you guys manage this and how do you divide up responsibilities? How does that all work?

Mike Ghesser: It really is truly amazing when you think about it. And I’m extremely fortunate to have what I have with Isaac. And I think what we have is very unique, but he and I went through so much, it was kind of really the true story of entrepreneurship. We lived together, we were roommates together, we worked out of our living room. Very early on we lived off of a couple dollars a day. We went through so many struggles, and through that we built such an amazing bond. And I think we became brothers along the way, but the things that made us more and more strong over the years is trust, right? We just built such a huge trust in one another and we did that by having the ability to talk about anything and everything, engaging in conflict and understanding that when there is conflict, we are going to resolve it.

And listening to each other and understanding each other’s points of view, whether we agree or not, but support at the end of the day. And also very early on, we knew what our roles were going to be within the business. Isaac was in the sales and the marketing, and I was in the operations and finance and neither one of us ever wanted to step on the other person’s toes. It was always about bringing each other up, but knowing what our ultimate goal was, but I go back to just being devoted to our ultimate goal and trust. And I think a lot of the experiences that we had, the struggles that we had made what we have stronger, but you got to have the ability to trust, and you got to have the ability to communicate and engage in conflict and be willing to talk about anything and I think that’s the foundation that you need.

Leadership principles

Sam Reese: I’ve heard you describe your leadership approach is guided by three principles. You said being accountable, learning and growing and caring deeply about people.

Mike Ghesser: Yes.

Sam Reese: I just love that. How did you land on those three principles and why are they so important and still define how you work your business today?

Mike Ghesser: Yeah, so accountability, this is how you move forward. It’s how you get things done. Nobody needs to be perfect. It’s okay to make mistakes, but ultimately you need to do what you say you’re going to do. And one of the things very early on, I credit this to Isaac, he said to me, “Your word is the most important thing you have.” And I agree, and it’s one of the things that has allowed our business to get to where it needs to be, but I think it’s also one of the things that makes people who they are and allows people to essentially learn and grow, which is the next thing that I have as one of my leadership principles. And for me, learning and growing, it’s so important and very early on in my childhood, I have a memory. It’s interesting.

My parents used to read Dr. Seuss books to me, and there’s a quote from one of the books, “The more you know, the more places you’ll go.” And it stuck with me. Obviously for now, it’s 40 plus years probably, but one of the things as with this, I find so much personal satisfaction when I’m learning and growing and expanding my mind. And one of my Vistage Chair Irina, Irina Baranov, she’s like your brain is your strongest muscle, and you need to continue to flex that muscle and grow that muscle and I loved being able to learn and grow and share things with my team. And the more we share, I learned so much from Vistage and so many different experiences, and I find not just me, but everybody in my team, when we share our experiences, there’s so much team growth and so much overall improved team health, that learning and growing, you can just never stop doing that.

Sam Reese: I agree with you. What about and the caring deeply about people, that’s obviously just from the few minutes I’ve spent with you, that’s a key part of your makeup?

Mike Ghesser: Yeah, caring deeply about people. I’ve always loved people from when I was a kid. I’ve always been interested and fascinated with other people and talking to people, I’m very social, understanding their cultures and their experiences and things that make them who they are. And one of the things I realized about people, no matter who you are or where you come from, everybody needs a tribe and a sense of community, And for me, people when it comes to business, people spend more time at work than they do with their families. And I appreciate that, and I respect that. And for me, as a leader of a company, it’s always been my goal to be able to show this to them and one way I like to do that is by creating the best company to work for.

Sam Reese: Cleanlogic, I know donates a portion of its revenues to organizations that support individuals with disabilities. And this mission was your personal experience as you talked about it with you and Isaac and your families. You’ve talked about your family, how did Isaac get so connected to this same mission?

Mike Ghesser: Yeah, great question. So it’s called the Inspiration Foundation, and it’s a 501(c)(3) corp. And Isaac’s mother, Bea, is blind and Bea’s been blind since she was seven. And Bea throughout her career worked to teach other blind people how to use technology in the workplace. And the way that Inspiration Foundation started was to continue on with what Bea’s mission was. And what we did with Inspiration Foundation and through Cleanlogic was raise money to donate adaptive technology awards to blind and visually impaired individuals. And we would buy them iPads or screen readers or things that would allow them to either start their own company or work at other companies. One of the things for me was, and this is actually before I had my daughter Rosie, one of the things for me was I always wondered, why aren’t we hiring people? Why are we only giving them or giving out adaptive technology awards?

And at the time, I’m not sure we were in a position to do that, but for me, when Rosie was born, that kind of was the adrenaline shot, if you will, that I wanted to be able to do this, which I also think is extremely unique, both Isaac and I, coming from the positions that we do. Isaac growing up as a child with a parent who’s disabled and me being a parent of a child who’s disabled, it’s kind of remarkable. And it’s also something that he and I, it’s so powerful the way that we do it.

Sam Reese: Unstoppable force. Unstoppable, when I think about the inspiration you two have, I just imagine you two charging into the office every day saying, “We got to change the world here.”

Mike Ghesser: Yeah, and the thing is, and that’s exactly what it is, changing the world. And as we’ve built this company, it is not just something we do, it’s literally in the fabric of our culture. It’s woven into the fabric of our culture. It’s a beautiful thing. It really is. And you’re right, we march in here every day and doing it. I think every parent understands or knows you do everything you can for your child and for me, it’s like I come here every single day wanting to make sure that my daughter has something that she can go to, whether she works at my company or not, something that she can go to where she can be independent and successful. And I think ultimately what we’re trying to do with Cleanlogic is build a model that we can share with every other company in the world, if possible, of what accessibility looks like.

And I think a lot of people, business owners might be scared off by what accessibility looks like. For me, it’s normal. It’s part of my normal every day and I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve been able to just dive headfirst into making our company as accessible as it is, but there’s still so much more. But ultimately what we want to do is show business leaders and CEOs and companies that you can do too what we’re doing, and it’s not scary or it’s actually relatively easy. You just need to want to do it.

Sam Reese: Would you, for those of us that are listening and trying to learn here, how would you help us understand what accessibility really means when it’s implemented? If we were to walk the floor, the facility of Cleanlogic, what would we see? What would be different? Give us a feel for how you would define accessibility?

Mike Ghesser: Sure. Well, we have in our office, in our company, we have people with all disabilities. So for example, for those of our team members that are blind or visually impaired, when you walk in the front door of our office on the floor, we have high visibility tape that leads from the main entrance to our production floor, to our bathrooms, to our break rooms, to offices. So for somebody that is visually impaired, they can follow the high visibility on the floor, on the tape to see where they need to go. And for those team members that are totally blind, there is a wire under that tape and they can use their cane to get to wherever they need to go.

We have people who are on the spectrum who are sensitive to noise and distractions, for those that are sensitive to noise, we provide them with earphones, things that will block out extra sounds so that they can go to their, maybe it’s their workstation or the production floor and not be distracted by let’s say a forklift or moving pallets around or things like that.

And also we have in some of the offices or in certain places, barriers where in case somebody’s walking by, they don’t get distracted by certain things. It’s things that you just have to ask, “How can I make this a little bit easier for you to get your work done? What would make your space more comfortable for you to work?” We don’t have the answers. There’s really no playbook, and it doesn’t cost much money to do that, but you just have to ask. And also, we have things like screen readers for those that are visually impaired, where you can put a piece of paper and it will magnify it onto a special computer monitor. The monitor that we use for them costs the same amount of money as a monitor that we give to any of our other people, any of our other team members, and the screen reader, a couple hundred dollars maybe.

So there’s so many tools that you can use that don’t cost anything. Again, for me, it’s about people having the desire and wanting to take the first step to try it, and once they do realize that it’s not really that different.

Sam Reese: I think the thing that inspired me the most is just thinking about the dignity that it gives every one of your workers knowing that they can take care of themselves. That’s just such a blast to see a business like that. What’s amazing about what you’ve done is you figured out how to do these things with accessibility and still grow a great business. They go hand in hand where you would assume that they don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Tell us why that goes hand in hand with success because you’ve been very successful?

Mike Ghesser: First of all, the boost to my culture within my company by bringing people with disabilities has been enormous, right? There is no… You can’t even measure it. And you’re giving people that normally wouldn’t have an opportunity, an opportunity to come in and be part of a company and work for something and have meaningful employment and be able to take care of themselves and earn a paycheck where they normally don’t get that chance.

And it improves the entire culture. People are seeing this, people without disabilities are seeing this, and within my organization, everybody participates and everybody’s talking and everybody comes in in a good mood, and it just translates into productivity and growth and movement and collaboration, and these are all key ingredients of success. So there’s a direct correlation.

Sam Reese: And retention too, right?

Mike Ghesser: And retention.

Sam Reese: Everyone would want to work here. Great. I mean, that just creates this great stable workforce.

Mike Ghesser: Absolute. Loyalty and retention, and as a leader and a business owner, what’s better than that?

Sam Reese: What do you do to keep yourself inspired, sharp, and focused as a leader? What are some of the things you might share with our listeners that have helped you.

Passion for purpose

Mike Ghesser: Yeah, I think for me, the first thing is you said inspired, you have to do something you love. You have to do something that’s meaningful. If you chase the money, at least for me, it’s not going to be the driving factor. For me, it truly is about inspiring all to achieve independence and success. And I think for me, it’s my daughter. For Isaac, it’s his mom, it’s our team members. And again, for me, it’s also the people. I truly come here every single day wanting to build a better world for my daughter, wanting to create the best company for my team members to work at and delivering to our customers products that I know that they’re going to love.

It has to start with loving what you do and loving the reason why you do it. For those, when you can start achieving that every single day, the success will come, your team will join your mission. They have to have the same vision, and I think if it’s something truly remarkable that they can all relate to and get behind, that will motivate them, but you have to truly find your passion. For me, it just came naturally, especially with being a parent.

It’s a lot. It’s very busy. I credit a lot to Vistage. Vistage has given me so many tools to help me recharge and to help me make the most of my time. And before, very early on in my journey, I was not taking time to clear my head. And I think as a younger entrepreneur, you’ve got to put in everything that you need to, recharge, reset and get some clarity is music. I love music, and any chance I have to listen to music, live music, I will take that because I come back a totally fresh new person ready to go head first into everything that I love going head first into. So that’s for me, the biggest thing

Sam Reese: I want to ask you to end with a final piece of advice. What’s one thing you’ve learned on your climb as a leader that you would like to share with other leaders out there that you think might be helpful? Anything else?

Overcoming challenges

Mike Ghesser: Yeah, there’s so much. The one thing that I would say for me has been something that’s helped me continue is to really believe in yourself. And it might sound cliche, but there’s so many challenges you’re going to face on this life of climb, essentially, and it’s going to be steeper sometimes than other times, and you might be able to traverse some things easier and climb some things a little bit more difficult, but you always have to believe that you can put one foot in front of the other again and again and again, no matter how hard it is. And I think for me, there’s been so many challenges and so many roadblocks and so many things that are just like, “What’s next?” But just keep going because you’ll get there.

Sam Reese: I love it. It’s such a blast to listen to people that run small and mid-sized businesses. I mean, it really is, as you know, this is what makes our country and the countries around the world. This will go. I mean, listening to you, you’re building a business, you’re helping the community, you’re connecting it to your family. I just have to tell you, just an honor to spend some time with you here, Mike.

Mike Ghesser: Thank you.

Sam Reese: Just to hear your success. Thanks again for joining us on A Life of Climb Podcast. It’s just been a blast spending time with Mike Ghesser, CEO and co-founder of Cleanlogic. I think we all will leave a little bit more inspired by your message. Mike, thanks so much for spending time with us.

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