When my wife Laura and I launched our first school more than twenty years ago, our official titles were Directors. That was what we put on the paperwork, what we told parents, but we both knew the truth…

…we started each morning by sweeping the floors and ended most nights scrubbing bathrooms and hauling trash bags to the curb.

We had no money. So we did what needed to be done.

We were directors, teachers, administrators, accountants, marketers, enrollment officers, and yes, janitors. There was no hierarchy to hide behind and no one else to call when something broke, literal or otherwise. If a classroom was dirty, we cleaned it. If a process was confusing, we fixed it. If a student was struggling, we stayed late.

That experience taught us a lesson we still carry with us today, two decades and several schools later.

You can hire people to take on almost every role in an organization. You can delegate teaching, operations, finance, support, and eventually leadership itself. But there is one role you will never fully hand off as the founder or leader of a school.

You will always be the janitor.

Not in the literal sense, although sometimes that too. In the deeper sense of responsibility. The person who cleans up the messes. The one who notices when something smells off before anyone else does. The one accountable for the environment in which learning happens.

Every school, whether physical or online, produces messes. Confusion accumulates. Processes decay. Incentives drift. Communication breaks down. Small issues, ignored long enough, harden into systemic problems.

No job description covers that work cleanly. It does not fit neatly into a department. And it rarely shows up on an org chart.

But it always belongs to the founder.

In our early brick-and-mortar schools, this was obvious. A dirty classroom affected learning immediately. A chaotic schedule showed up in stressed teachers and frustrated students. Neglect was visible.

Online, the messes are quieter but no less real.

They live in broken onboarding flows, outdated curriculum, unclear expectations, tools that multiply instead of simplify, and communities that slowly lose their sense of purpose. They show up as disengaged students, burned-out teachers, and teams working hard but pulling in slightly different directions.

In an online school, no one smells the trash. That makes it easier to ignore.

The Janitor Mindset is the discipline of not ignoring it.

It is the willingness to step into the unglamorous work of cleaning up systems, clarifying expectations, repairing trust, and restoring order. It is noticing when a student is lost not because they lack ability, but because the path is unclear. It is recognizing when teachers are frustrated not because they are difficult, but because the environment makes excellence harder than it should be.

Most leaders want to focus on vision. That matters. Growth matters. Strategy matters.

But none of it survives long in a dirty environment.

Learning requires clarity, safety, and trust. Knowledge does not transfer well through chaos. And no amount of branding, technology, or automation compensates for a neglected foundation.

The irony is that the more successful a school becomes, the more tempting it is to believe this responsibility can be delegated away. That is usually when problems compound fastest.

The Janitor Mindset is not about doing everything yourself. It is about owning the state of the system. It is understanding that while others may clean, you are accountable for whether the building is clean at all.

Twenty years ago, Laura and I learned that lesson with brooms and bleach.

Today, we apply it to dashboards, curricula, communities, and culture.

The tools have changed. The responsibility has not.

In every school that works, someone is quietly making sure the environment is ready for learning. In the schools that fail, that job is usually the one no one thought they still owned.

Leadership, at its core, is not about escaping the janitor’s closet.

It is about never pretending it is not yours.