Best Of - Conspiracies in the Cleaning Industry with Ed Selkow

·55 min·5 clips

Ed Selkow reveals how cleaners taping a door helped the Watergate burglars enter the building.

50 years changes how a cleaner talks. Ken brings Ed Selkow into part one of a two-hour interview and lets the stories do most of the teaching. Ed has owned four janitorial companies. He also worked for some of the largest janitorial firms in the country, so his advice comes from both sides of the business. The Watergate story shows up early. A locked door, a taped latch, and a cleaner's routine turn into the kind of industry story Ken clearly did not expect. From there, the sales advice gets plain and useful. Ed talks about going door to door in big buildings, easing into a conversation, and trying to get someone to lunch or drinks instead of forcing a pitch. Ken hears the point right away: make friends, serve people, offer help, and let the relationship have room to turn into something. The episode keeps its work boots on. Ed knows his two-drink limit, then remembers another salesman having 10 scotches at lunch before heading back out for calls. Nobody makes that sound glamorous. It paints the early eighties cleaning business as rough around the edges, with smoking indoors shaping the job in ways newer cleaners may barely recognize. Even the office-cleaning formula sticks: trash, ashtrays, and bathrooms, boiled down to tab. That little acronym says a lot about the post-ashtray era by contrast. Ken keeps steering the memories back toward judgment. He wants the lesson inside the story, not just the strange story itself. Part two is still ahead, but part one already has plenty: systems, relationships, surprises, and the kind of practical sense that only shows up after a long time in the field.

As heard by us

A cleaning-industry veteran turns wild job stories into a grounded look at sales, limits, and overlooked doors.

Ed Selkow's 50 years in cleaning come through as a tour of a business built on persistence, trust, and knowing where to draw the line. The episode is strongest when ordinary trade detail bumps into stories that feel almost unreal: a Russian dog on a Chicago payroll, stolen…

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Why you'd press play

You get a cleaning-industry mystery tour that runs from two-drink limits to the taped door behind Watergate.

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