Finding Their Shine | Squeegee Squad
By LISA LOEWEN | Photos by BRIAN PETERS
Jordan Kuntzsch knocked on Mike and Melissa Coburn’s door in June 2020 with his arms full of dripping wet clothes. His girlfriend’s washing machine next door had broken mid-cycle, and he needed help.
As they waited for the clothes to finish spinning, the Coburns learned about Jordan’s life and career plans. By the end of the night, they had offered him a job at their window cleaning company, Squeegee Squad.
“Mike and Melissa spent a lot of time with me, helping me realize what I am good at and what I want to do with those skills,” Jordan said. “I can’t imagine working anywhere else.”
That’s how the Coburns run their business: finding potential in young employees and training them for both the job and their futures. Jordan now supervises all of Squeegee Squad’s technicians.
Mike and Melissa didn’t start out as entrepreneurs. Both of them were former Westar employees who were climbing the corporate ladder. As the director of fleet and facilities, Mike oversaw 20 buildings and 300 trucks. Melissa was the manager of a high-performing IT app development team.
They both loved their jobs but were also busy raising three children. None of that stopped them from purchasing a four-bay car wash in North Topeka, in 2018, from friends whose family had owned it since 1965.
“We really cut our teeth as entrepreneurs with that car wash,” Mike said. “We were both still working full time, we just added late nights and cold mornings to our already hectic lives.”
“People think owning a car wash means passive income,” Melissa said. “What they don’t know is that Mike was shoveling mud at 6 a.m. every single morning because we have a lot of big trucks in North Topeka. And I was counting money and refilling soap dispensers twice a day.”
CRYSTAL CLEAR PLANS
In late 2019, when both of their fathers experienced health declines, Mike and Melissa began looking for a way to spend more time with family. That search led to an opportunity where they could start a boutique window cleaning company in Topeka.
“Mike has always had that entrepreneur ‘jump’ spirit,” Melissa said. “He has these hare-brained ideas all the time, and for some reason they don’t scare me when we do them.”
Melissa quit her job the next day, and they signed the contract with Squeegee Squad in January 2020. The entire window cleaning crew consisted of Melissa and one employee, whom she had interviewed at the McDonald’s in North Topeka because they didn’t have an office.
“We had a hard time finding employees who would stick with it,” Melissa said.
Then in June 2020, they hired Jordan Kuntzsch. With a crew of three, business began to steadily pick up, enough so that in October of 2020 Mike felt it was time to quit his job and put his full focus on growing Squeegee Squad.
“It was during the COVID shutdowns, and the opposite of what was happening to other businesses happened to us,” Mike said. “Businesses shuttered and people were sitting at home looking out of dirty windows. Our business boomed.”
Over the next 18 months, Mike and Melissa poured their energy into their residential window cleaning business. In 2021, they put out a Facebook post looking for additional employees. Jordan Finnesy, a Washburn football player from out of town, answered the ad.
They were so impressed with his work ethic that they bought season tickets on the 50-yard line just to watch him play. The next summer he brought six more players with him. That opened the doors to a whole new seasonal employee pool, and the business steadily grew.
“We go to the Washburn games and scream for every player who has ever worked for us,” Melissa said. “I actually had someone ask, ‘Whose mom are you?’”
In 2022, they took the leap into the commercial window cleaning arena. With specialized training on commercial glass and high-rise equipment, they discovered a burgeoning business opportunity that soon became 60% of their revenue.
“We were small but mighty,” Melissa said. “We knew from the beginning that we wanted our business model to be customer service based. Having personally seen what a poor customer experience looked like, where contractors didn’t show up on time or didn’t provide the service as expected, we were passionate about offering our customers something different.”
Mike and Melissa focused on customer service and hired honest, hard-working kids, found what they were good at and then directed them on that path. People started taking notice, and referrals and repeat customers kept their schedules full.
Their success also caught the attention of the Squeegee Squad corporate office, who asked Mike and Melissa to help turn around a struggling franchise in Des Moines, Iowa.
“We spent six months driving to Des Moines on Mondays and coming home on Fridays while our team managed operations here,” Mike said.
“A team of 24-year-olds, by the way,” Melissa added.
Even though that experience was a little chaotic, it allowed Mike and Melissa to identify the holes in their own operations: the processes they didn’t have defined and the cross training and knowledge transfer that was needed to ensure every customer experience met the same standards.
“Chaos seemed to be working just fine until this year,” Melissa said. “In 2025, we know what we really want to do for a living. We want to empower young people and help them discover a path to a successful career no matter what education path they choose.”
ONE WINDOW AT A TIME
Mike and Melissa assessed their personal strengths and used them to figure out how to better train employees. Next, they implemented generational training concepts to help them understand the different lenses that their employees bring to the workplace.
“Mike and I were banging our heads against the wall at first,” Melissa said. “It seemed like we were speaking in Greek when we were trying to train some of these young people early on. We figured out that putting someone younger in that role and helping them be successful was better for us because they could speak their language.”
The blank stares Melissa would get when she suggested someone turn to the employee handbook for answers to questions turned into nods of understanding when Jordan Kuntzsch, who is now in charge of supervising all the technicians, would simply tell them to scan the QR code on each piece of equipment.
Mike and Melissa also started role-playing with their employees to help them learn better communication skills. They do a company reset twice a year, where they have the entire staff in training for a day. The first half is technical training, and the other half is interpersonal and communication training.
Melissa is the first to say those interpersonal skills are the reason the business continues to thrive.
“Just because you face a window, it doesn’t mean someone isn’t standing on the other side watching you. And if someone asks you a question, a smile and eye contact go a long way when you give them an answer,” Melissa said.
In fact, an interpersonal connection is what drew them to Haley Smith, who now runs the front office. Mike and Melissa met Haley at the local Mexican restaurant Jose Pepper’s, where they liked to go every week after church. Haley waited on them several times, and one day they asked her if she would consider coming to work for them at Squeegee Squad.
“Her customer service was just so beautiful, we had to have her,” Melissa said.
Haley had been waitressing since she was 16 and was coincidentally looking for something that would give her different work experience. Realizing they were serious about the job offer, she called them the next day and started working at Squeegee Squad two weeks later. She has been there almost two years now and says she loves it.
“Everyone at Squeegee Squad is so close. It is like we are one big family,” Haley said. “Mike and Melissa are so supportive. They understand that we all have lives outside of work and that sometimes things happen that we don’t plan for. I didn’t have a babysitter one day when my son was out of school, and they didn’t bat an eye when I asked if I could bring him to work with me for the day.”
Mike and Melissa still ask to sit in Haley’s section on Sundays at Jose Pepper’s, where she still works on the weekends.
A JOYFUL DISCOVERY
Mike doesn’t do the day-to-day work anymore. He goes out on jobs to monitor each crew to make sure the customer experience is top level and find those employees who might need a little extra support that day.
“That is the emotional support we try to give our team. We can tell when someone is struggling or has some additional stress,” Mike said.
Many of their employees are Washburn football players from out of town, which means they often don’t have immediate access to their parents. Some of them just need some ‘dad’ things, like a chain saw, a tool or even advice. They all know that with Mike, they have a Topeka dad.
“The people who work for Squeegee Squad in the summers learn about what it means to be professional, to complete a job with exceptional care, how to talk to customers, even in the corporate world,” Jordan Kuntzsch said. “But the personal life lessons are valuable as well. Lots of the guys have bought their first car, their first house, gotten married or had kids. They have a support system here to help navigate those things.”
Melissa says she enjoys watching these young people grow and that she and Mike have learned how to work together effectively.
“Mike does everything from 35,000 feet and I am at five feet,” Melissa said. “Every time we have a conversation, we know that now, but it took us six years to figure that out.”
“We received a contract a year ago for a big gas station company that had more than 200 stores they needed pressure washed. I did the sales pitch. I got the contract. I was done. I tossed it over the wall to Melissa,” Mike said.
“I then had to figure out how to manage a five-state contract to service 223 buildings,” Melissa said. “We sent two of those Washburn football kids up there, and they smoked it.”
THROUGH THE GLASS
In addition to the window cleaning business, Squeegee Squad has a lighting division that installs custom Christmas lights for more than 100 houses and does event lighting.
“What goes up, must come down and be inventoried and stored,” Melissa said.
That winter work enables the company to maintain a core of six employees that work throughout the year. Many of those employees are now working on setting up lighting displays for this year’s Zoo Lights.
Mike and Melissa have worked with the Topeka Zoo since 2021 to install the lights that are in the higher areas of the zoo. Their involvement with the project has grown every year and after their response to a request for proposal last year, they were awarded the entire project. This means Squeegee Squad is managing the design, the volunteer schedule, the project plan and every detail for Zoo Lights.
“We have been working on this project since June,” Mike said. “It is quite complex because unlike other lighting projects, we have to take into consideration curators, extinction cycles, hibernation cycles, color intolerances, pedestrian traffic and so many other factors.”
Mike and Melissa chose the Zoo Lights theme “Holidays Around the World” this year to celebrate the demographics and ethnicities that make up the Topeka community. They see the Zoo Lights project as significant for the Topeka community.
The Coburns attribute some of their success to sheer tenacity, and the rest to the Topeka community.
“The other small businesses around us have been amazing,” Mike said. “Even those that you might think of as competitors have been some of our biggest champions.
TK
