Pushing Through the Noes
When James Barnes graduated from high school, he says he had two choices: take the traditional college route or focus on business. He chose the latter, establishing Immaculate Cleaning, of which he is the founder and president. Having run microenterprises since the age of 14, Barnes leveraged local accelerator programs — JumpStart's Core City: Cleveland Impact program, University Circle's NextStep, for example — to grow his commercial cleaning business to become the cleaning partner of the Cleveland Monsters.
"When I chose to focus on business, I still wanted to increase my education," he says. "So, those different programs gave me a chance to still learn about business. We'll never figure it all out. We don't know everything. So, I wanted to continue to educate myself. And still do."
The NextStep program, he says, was particularly eye-opening.
"I had my way of what I thought business was," he says. "They had different modules. We came to the financial module. We had to bring in our P&L, our balance sheets. That was a nightmare for me. I hadn't seen those documents. I didn't know how to put it together. So, it forced me to dive into those things that made me uncomfortable."
Getting deeper into the company's financials helped Barnes get a better perspective on his business.