I paid people over $100,000 a year to clean the employee restroom.
And I cleaned it too.
Yes, I understand opportunity cost.
If you looked strictly at the numbers, having a six-figure employee stop what they were doing to clean a restroom probably wasn’t the highest and best use of their time.
Having the owner of the company do it probably made even less sense.
But here’s what I learned:
Not everything that creates value in a small business shows up on a spreadsheet.
Sometimes an hour that looks incredibly inefficient financially can create something far more valuable over the long term.
In our case, it helped create company culture.
And I didn’t fully understand just how powerful that culture had become until I almost broke it.
What Is Company Culture in a Small Business?
When people talk about company culture, the conversation can get overly complicated.
There are mission statements.
Core values.
Employee handbooks.
Retreats.
Benefits.
Slack channels.
Posters on the wall.
Those things can help communicate a culture, but I don’t think they’re where culture actually starts—especially in a small business.
In a small business, company culture often begins as an extension of the founder.
Your work ethic.
Your morals.
Your expectations.
How you treat customers.
How you treat employees.
What makes you angry.
What you’re willing to tolerate.
What you celebrate.
And, perhaps most importantly, what you’re willing to do yourself.
You can define those things intentionally, or you can let them develop accidentally.
Either way, your employees are watching.
And eventually those behaviors become “the way we do things around here.”
That’s culture.
Why Were Six-Figure Employees Cleaning the Restroom?
At one of my companies, we had several people making six figures.
We also had an employee restroom that needed to be cleaned.
We didn’t treat that job as something that belonged to the lowest-ranking person in the building.
Everyone took turns.
Including me.
And something interesting happened.
After a while, nobody complained about cleaning the restroom.
In fact, it almost became a competition.
People would try to get to it before I did.
Looking back, I don’t think anyone was particularly passionate about cleaning toilets.
Something else had happened.
We had created an expectation that nobody was above the work.
The restroom was simply the most obvious representation of it.
Leadership by Example Isn’t Always Efficient
I’ve heard the conventional business argument:
“The owner shouldn’t be doing $15-an-hour work.”
Generally, I agree.
If you’re spending 40 hours a week doing work someone else could handle while ignoring strategy, sales, hiring, finances and everything else only you can do, you’ve created another problem.
That’s opportunity cost.
But I think sometimes we take that lesson too far.
We start believing that once we reach a certain position, everything beneath that position is beneath us.
Those aren’t the same thing.
A CEO shouldn’t spend every Tuesday cleaning the restroom.
But occasionally cleaning the restroom might be incredibly valuable.
Not because the restroom needs the CEO.
Because the team might.
Get Off the Balcony and Back Onto the Field
Leadership requires what I think of as moving between the balcony and the field.
The balcony gives you perspective.
You can see the whole business.
You can think strategically, identify problems, allocate resources and decide where everyone should be going.
A leader who never leaves the field can become so buried in daily problems that they stop actually leading.
But there’s another danger.
You can spend so much time on the balcony that you forget what the field feels like.
That’s why I’ve always tried, whenever possible, to jump back into the weeds.
Sometimes I would intentionally take the worst job.
I worked beside people.
I saw what frustrated them.
I saw which processes didn’t work as well as I thought they did.
I learned things I would never have discovered from a report.
And most importantly, they saw me there.
There is a form of empathy that comes from actually doing difficult work beside somebody that I don’t think you can completely replicate in a meeting.
Then We Expanded
Eventually, the business grew to a second location.
And I did what most entrepreneurs would probably think was the smart thing.
I went looking for great people.
I wanted experience.
I wanted expertise.
I wanted people with impressive histories in the industry.
My original location, meanwhile, had been built by a much scrappier group.
We had grown together.
We had solved problems together.
We had developed habits and expectations together.
Without realizing it, we had also developed a very strong culture around work ethic.
Then something happened that put those two worlds directly against each other.
A Fire Forced the Two Teams Together
We had a fire.
The damage forced us to close one of the locations and consolidate people into the other.
Suddenly, the original scrappy team and many of the newer, experienced hires were working side by side.
And there was turmoil.
At first glance, it could have looked like an employee problem.
Looking back, I think it was something different.
It was a culture clash.
My original team had developed an expectation of extreme work ethic.
If something needed to get done, you did it.
Your title didn’t matter much.
Some of the newer people had impressive résumés and long histories in the industry, but they didn’t necessarily share that same belief.
Some felt certain jobs were beneath them.
The original team noticed immediately.
And they didn’t like it.
“I’m a Manager. I’m Not Cleaning Floors.”
One moment captured the entire problem.
We had hired a new manager.
His manager saw that something needed to be cleaned and asked him to clean the floor.
The response was essentially:
“I’m a manager. I’m not cleaning floors.”
His manager responded:
“If the boss cleans the restroom, I’m pretty sure you can clean the floor.”
That interaction stuck with me.
Because I realized the restroom had never really been about cleanliness.
It had become a symbol of an unwritten cultural rule:
Nobody here is too important to help.
And when someone violated that rule, the existing team immediately recognized that person as culturally different.
The Best Résumé Isn’t Always the Best Hire
That experience changed the way I think about hiring in a small business.
Skills matter.
Experience matters.
Expertise matters.
But you can hire someone who looks phenomenal on paper and accidentally introduce someone who conflicts with the fundamental beliefs of the existing team.
That’s particularly dangerous during rapid growth.
When a company is small, culture can spread almost automatically because everyone works closely with the founder and with one another.
As you add locations, departments, managers and employees, that becomes harder.
The founder isn’t standing next to everyone anymore.
And if you rapidly add enough people with a different set of expectations, your culture can change before you even realize it’s happening.
Culture Needs to Become Intentional Before You Scale
This was one of my biggest lessons.
Early in a business, culture may develop organically.
But eventually, organic culture has to become intentional culture.
Ask yourself:
What behaviors do we reward?
What behaviors do we refuse to tolerate?
How do we treat people when something goes wrong?
What does hard work mean here?
How do leaders behave?
What happens when something needs to be done and it isn’t technically anyone’s job?
What would someone have to believe to thrive on this team?
Those questions matter.
Because if you don’t answer them, your employees will answer them for you.
Culture Is What You Do, Not What You Say
You can write “We believe in teamwork” on a wall.
Then an employee watches a manager refuse to help because something isn’t their job.
Which message do you think wins?
You can tell employees that everyone is equal.
Then the owner expects privileges nobody else receives.
Which message wins?
You can say customers come first.
Then employees watch leadership ignore an unhappy customer because dealing with them is inconvenient.
Again, which message wins?
Behavior beats slogans.
Every time.
This is why leadership by example matters so much in small businesses.
Employees aren’t only listening to what the founder says.
They’re studying what the founder does.
Sometimes Opportunity Cost Is Worth Paying
This brings me back to that restroom.
Was cleaning it the most financially productive thing I could have done during that hour?
Almost certainly not.
Could I have paid someone else to do it?
Absolutely.
But opportunity cost isn’t always as simple as comparing hourly rates.
What was the value of showing a new employee that I wasn’t above them?
What was the value of understanding what their job actually felt like?
What was the value of creating a culture where highly compensated people didn’t believe success entitled them to stop helping?
What was the value of a manager being able to say years later:
“If the boss cleans the restroom, you can clean the floor.”
Those things are harder to put into Excel.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have value.
The Best Leaders Lead by Example
I don’t believe leaders should constantly insert themselves into every job.
That’s micromanagement, not leadership.
And founders absolutely need to learn to delegate.
But I also don’t think you should ever become too important to jump into the worst project with your team.
When things get ugly, show up.
When everyone is exhausted, help.
When there’s a terrible job nobody wants, occasionally be the first person to grab it.
Not because that’s where you should spend all of your time.
Because people remember who stood beside them when the work sucked.
That’s where trust gets built.
That’s where empathy gets built.
And that’s where company culture becomes something people actually believe rather than something written in an employee handbook.
The Small Business Culture Test
If you’re building or growing a small business, here’s a simple test:
Would your employees recognize your company’s values if they had never read them?
Could they identify them just by watching:
- what leadership does,
- who gets promoted,
- what gets rewarded,
- what gets tolerated,
- how customers are treated,
- how mistakes are handled,
- and who steps forward when something unpleasant needs to be done?
If the answer is yes, you probably have a real culture.
If the answer is no, you may have a list of values.
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Company Culture Will Scale—or Collide
I learned this lesson the hard way.
I didn’t sit down one morning and decide to create a company culture around cleaning restrooms.
It happened through hundreds of small behaviors repeated over time.
Then we expanded.
And when people with very different expectations were suddenly placed together, those invisible cultural rules became impossible to ignore.
That’s why entrepreneurs need to start thinking about culture before they think they need to.
Your first few employees learn culture by watching you.
Your next employees learn it from those employees.
Eventually, people you’ve never met may be teaching other people what your company stands for.
At that point, culture is scaling whether you intended it to or not.
So define it.
Protect it.
Hire for it.
And most importantly, model it.
Understand opportunity cost.
Spend time on the balcony.
Delegate the things you shouldn’t be doing anymore.
But every once in a while, get back onto the field.
Jump into the weeds.
Take the crappy job.
Work beside your people.
Because sometimes the thing that looks like the worst use of the CEO’s time on a spreadsheet is one of the best investments the CEO can make in the company.
The best leaders lead by example.
