The Million Dollar Mop

Many years ago, when I was running my ecommerce startup, Boston Light Software. We were operating out of a warehouse (which we rented at $8 per square foot). One day we had executives from Intuit scheduled to come visit us. I got up early that day to work on our presentation. While I was in the office working, one of my co-workers, Jim, walked by with a bucket and a mop. I didn’t think we had a bucket and a mop in the warehouse, and, I was not used to seeing Jim this early. I said “hey, what’s up with the mop” and he said “visitors today! Our bathrooms were dirty yesterday so I brought in a mop to clean them”.

This blew me away.

A team member who was so selfless that he took it upon himself to clean the bathrooms at work!

Later that day I was doing compensation planning for our startup, including some new stock allocations. Because of his remarkable team skills, I decided to grant him an extra chunk of stock which just a few months later ended up being worth $1M.