Mr. Clean Comes Clean

Pat Swisher was a brash young franchise titan until a stretch in federal prison changed the way he thought about business.

- Greg Lacour

Pat Swisher used to carry himself with a cocky self-assurance. He figured it was his due for being a successful, self-made man. Then he went to jail.

“I’ll never forget walking into the dorm,” he says. The first person he met was a huge, heavily muscled inmate with gold teeth. Swisher is a former college football player, but he’s not an intimidating man—about 5-foot-9, with a carefully combed coif of reddish-gold hair. As the inmate approached, Swisher remembers thinking, This guy’s going to beat the hell out of me.

Instead, “he put his arm around me and said, ‘I got you, man. If anybody messes with you, tell ’em to come see me.’” Swisher chokes up at the memory. “It turned out that this was the most genuine, sweetest man I ever met. To this day, I love that man. He didn’t have a dime. All he wanted to do was get out so he could see his son play basketball. Excuse me.” Swisher reaches for a tissue.“So, yeah,” he says, composing himself. “That’s how you learn who you’re dealing with.

”That moment altered the way Swisher, 62, conducts business. A lifelong entrepreneur, he started Swisher Hygiene in 1983 in Charlotte, N.C., a pioneer in franchised hygiene services for commercial restrooms, mainly in restaurants and gas stations. By the early 2000s, he had shepherded the company into operations in 23 countries, serving more than 100,000 clients and with annual revenue of $22 million from his 140 units. He had a virtual lock on the market, deep-cleaning with proprietary chemicals and treatments to protect surfaces from bacteria, viruses, and odor that soap-and-water cleaning and standard disinfectants couldn’t kill. He was living large. “Big ego, pursuing a fast life and my own plans—you know what I’m talking about,” he says.