ServiceMaster history

In 1942 Wade sold his first franchise license for his residential and commercial on-site carpet cleaning business.

After recovering from temporary blindness caused by a chemical accident in 1945, Wade was inspired to create a company that viewed “each employee and customer as being made in God’s image—worthy of dignity and respect.”

In 1947, Wade started a new cleaning company with Kenneth Hansen, a graduate of Wheaton College.

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

In 1958, the company became known as ServiceMaster—a name that referred not only to the firm's business, but also to the founders' commitment to Christian ethics.

In 1962, as ServiceMaster began to sell stock to the public, it also started to serve as a cleaning contractor for hospitals.

In 1970 ServiceMaster sold its first nonhospital cleaning franchise in Japan.

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.

Wade died in 1973, but his successors expanded the business, reaching $7.7 billion in annual sales by the end of the 20th century.

By the following year the company had sold more than 1,000 franchise licenses in its consumer cleaning division, and by 1975 ServiceMaster's health care division had signed contracts with 466 hospitals to clean their premises.

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.

By 1983 ServiceMaster's health care management offerings included laundry and linen services, physical plant operations and maintenance, clinical equipment maintenance, materials maintenance, and a fledgling food services sector, in addition to its traditional housekeeping services.

On the last day of 1986 the business of ServiceMaster Industries, Inc. was transferred to ServiceMaster Limited Partnership.

These "Support Service" contracts were slow to gain popularity, enticing just 12 of ServiceMaster's 1,300 hospital customers by early 1987, but the company remained confident that the program would eventually win converts.

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.