Being in the right place at the right time might be Derek Christian’s life story. This Southwestern alumnus found a job with Proctor and Gamble through a UT job fair (held in partnership with SU), took advantage of a niche the huge conglomerate was unwilling to pursue, and has built and sold cleaning companies all over the country as a result.

And how did this happen to a Berkner High School graduate from Richardson, you might ask?

The first right place was choosing Southwestern over Baylor, UT, and Trinity University. “It is hard to explain, but these were my people,” he says. “I applied early admission, so my college search was very brief.”

While on campus, he loved it when classes moved outside. He also enjoyed Dr. Don Parks’ business classes. A memorable study with Dr. Parks and Dr. Timothy O’Neill in Political Science showed him “the ways government has to balance multiple stakeholders and how businesses could benefit from doing the same.” This led Derek to a double major in business and international studies with an emphasis on Latin American History.

Following graduation, Derek began his career in sales at P&G, but said, “I was always very entrepreneurial, so I was in a group called the Innovation Team. We were looking at options for P&G to get into the service industry. We knew more and more folks were hiring people to clean and do their laundry, and as a company that made a lot of money selling cleaning products, it was a trend we needed to lead.”

Eventually, P&G opted out of the home cleaning space as too big a liability risk for a billion-dollar brand. That’s when Derek decided he was in the right place to dominate a wide-open, fast-growing industry, left P&G after 12 years, and opened My Maid Service in Cincinnati in 2008. He sold to a venture capital firm 10 years later and started home cleaning companies in Dayton, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Portland, and Cleveland. After selling those, he moved to Fort Collins, CO and with his wife, started All Star Cleaning that employs 55. Derek currently coaches other cleaning business owners.

He considers Fort Collins to be the right place to live out their lives as their home backs up to a lake and on the other side is the start of the Rocky Mountain Forests and national park. You might say he’s made a clean sweep of work/life balance.

-Written by Iris Bullard Foster ’75