ServiceMaster by Ayotte

Employee Spotlight – Beth Ayotte Naumann

Name:  Beth Ayotte Naumann

Title:  Vice President & General Manager

Focus:  On-Location Services (Residential, Commercial & Disaster Restoration)

Status:  Married to Hans Naumann (owner of Deutsche Contracting, Inc.), Two children: Jordyn Elizabeth (6 ½ ) and Justus Danny (almost 5)

Interests: Absolutely anything outside (especially when the sun is shining!)

Community Involvement: PTO (Bridgewater Elementary, Northfield), Sunday School Teacher (Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Lakeville), Board Member – treasurer (Northfield Area Chamber of Commerce), Chamber Member (Northfield, Faribault, Owatonna, Blooming Prairie & Mankato)

Achievements:  Bachelor of Science (Minnesota State University, Mankato), the cleantrust certified (formerly the IICRC) in WRT (water restoration technician), ASD (Applied Structural Drying), OCT (Odor Control Technician), FSRT (Fire & Smoke Remediation Technician), ServiceMaster Clean HAZWOPPER, Pack-Out and Mobile Service Manager certified, successful completion of Dakota County Leadership Academy, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Six Sigma and Strengths Finder 2.0

It has been said that your business will run better if you learn from the trenches.  Speaking from experience, I couldn’t agree more!  When my dad bought his first ServiceMaster franchise in 1995, I was a junior in high school with absolutely no thoughts of getting involved in his business.  After all, he was running it out of our back entry! I was however, hungry for a means to fill my passion which at the time included shopping!  So, it wasn’t long after he started selling new accounts that I picked up the backpack vacuum and a cleaning kit and started a cleaning route of my own. I continued helping out nights and weekends while in college, mostly doing overnight strip & wax jobs alongside my dad.  Although I wrote a business and marketing plan for ServiceMaster as a part of one of my courses, this was the extent of my involvement, in what would eventually be, our family business.

After graduating from Minnesota State University, Mankato with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communications and a minor in Marketing, I took my first job as the Director of Public Relations at the Cannon Falls Community Hospital & Clinic.  This was only a ¾ time position, so I worded for my dad doing all of his marketing and helped out in the office with basic administrative duties as well.  You could have called me a work-a-holic, because during this two year period I also did Event Planning for the Burnsville Bowl and Hot Shots night club, and somehow also found time to work at the Northfield Municipal Liquor Store on nights and weekends.  Although I loved my job at the hospital, after 2 years, it was still not in their budget to hire me full time. I was approached by a small computer company to do sales and marketing for them as they desired to grow their business from their home base in Waseca, into the Northfield and Faribault markets.  This was a new challenge for me as I was not a ‘techy’ at all.  I gained some wonderful experience, but most of all I gained a renewed perspective on the value of family business.  If it weren’t for a God-sent yellow canary that hit my windshield on an afternoon drive home, I may not have ever turned yellow full time.  But I am a believer in God’s hand, so that afternoon I drove straight to my dad’s office and asked him for a job.  By the time I came on board full-time, my dad had purchased an additional franchise in Dakota County.  That would be where I would begin to sew my seeds.

From office management and accounting, to marketing and scheduling to hard-core dirty production, I was on-board and in the trenches, ready to grow our business.  I can honestly say there isn’t a service that we offer that I have not done myself (although I have not operated our truckmounts by myself, I have pulled the wand for extraction and used our mini-extractors for carpet cleaning).  This hands-on field experience, along with the unwavering trust that my dad put in me, has helped me to better organize our business and schedule our teams, from what was once a 4-person operation to what is now a team consisting of 9 full-time production staff, two full-time coordinators, one full-time and one part-time marketing staff, and a production manager.  And this is just our on-location division that I oversee.

For more information on ServiceMaster by Ayotte and what we can do for you, please contact me at (507) 366-7149 or e-mail me at beth@smbyayotte.com

Tags: Blooming Prairie, Employee Spotlight, Faribault, Mankato, Northfield, Owatonna