Service Master Clean history

Together, Wade and the bow-tied Hansen incorporated the company that would become ServiceMaster in 1947.

In 1954 Hansen recruited a second Wheaton graduate, Kenneth T. Wessner, who had worked previously as an advertising salesman.

The company got its first contract to clean hospitals in 1962, when the Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois signed on.

By 1971 ServiceMaster had contracts with more than half the hospitals that looked to outsiders for their cleaning and the company had notched record profits of $1.2 million.

The company added another 42 medical clients in the first six months of 1976.

By 1979 earnings had reached $11 million and ServiceMaster had developed a method of doing business that was sensitive to the special needs of hospitals and also worked to its own advantage.

In 1980, the company began serving the education market and expanded its offerings to include a broader range of commercial services.

In May 1983 ServiceMaster signed its first contract to supervise home health care, in which hospital patients were discharged before their care was entirely complete as a cost-reducing measure.

1986: Terminix pest control business is acquired.

In response to this move, the company's stock made some of the largest gains in the market in the first days of 1987, when it first moved from over-the-counter trading to the Big Board of the New York Stock Exchange.

Despite these efforts, however, the amount of money generated by the company's hospital cleaning operations continued to drop and revenues crept up just seven percent in the first nine months of 1988.

The company augmented its home services division with the November 1990 purchase of two divisions of Waste Management, Inc.: a pest control business, and TruGreen, a lawn care service with commercial and residential customers.

ServiceMaster also purchased a 22 percent interest in the privately held Norrell Corporation in December 1991.

1992: Chem-Lawn is acquired.

As traditional sectors matured, they comprised an ever-smaller slice of ServiceMaster's operating income, shrinking to barely one-third by 1996.

The partnership's shareholders approved a plan of reorganization that would reincorporate ServiceMaster as a corporation in December 1997.

In the third quarter of 2000, ServiceMaster announced that its profits fell by twenty-nine percent.

Pollard continued to run the country until 2001, when he turned it over to Jonathan Ward, who came to the company from R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.

Robert J. Gillette was appointed chief executive officer in June 2013.