One of Ventilation Power Cleaning, Inc.’s trucks vacuums sludge from pontoon cells on the floating Interstate 90 Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge.

Janice Benner, President of Ventilation Power Cleaning, Inc., rides in one the company’s impressive vacuum trucks.

Janice Benner grew up visiting her grandparents’ farm in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Her grandfather was a potato farmer, and Benner spent summers with him in the fields digging dirt with his tractor.

“I don’t know how to explain the passion I have for soil, for dirt, for the equipment,” says Benner. “But this way of life has always resonated with me.”

Benner’s family was big; her father had 12 siblings. When they all came together for meals at her grandparents’ house, the staple was potatoes. Breakfast was hash browns or fried potatoes. Lunch was sandwiches on potato bread. Dinner was creamed potatoes and corn. Her family lived, breathed and ate potatoes.

Over the years, people would tell Benner’s grandfather that he should branch into other types of crops to create different revenue streams, but he insisted on staying true to his expertise.

“He used to say, ‘If I only do one thing, but I do it really well, then I feel like that’s success,’ ” she recalls.

Her Father’s Business

Until Benner was 13, she and her two sisters had no idea what her father did for a living. He would come home from work and leave the day’s toil behind him; at home, his focus was his family. When she finally asked, he told her that he cleaned ducts. Unfamiliar with his line of work, she misunderstood and thought that he cleaned ducks and geese.

Benner’s father started his business as an HVAC contractor, working in the commercial, industrial and marine sectors. His first client was the Boeing Company. Over the years, his business, Ventilation Power Cleaning, Inc., evolved to working with large industrial vacuum trucks for a diverse range of construction industry applications.

While still in high school, Benner made extra money in the summers working for her father, and she slowly got a taste for what the business entailed.

“I was given the most disgusting jobs in those summers,” Benner says. “You’d think the guys would treat the boss’s daughter better than your average worker, but I’m convinced they gave me the most difficult work—the stuff they gave me to clean was hideous,” she jokes.

Despite the rough start, Benner took a liking to the business. In 1990, she joined the business in an accounting role that she remained in for 10 years.

“I’m grateful that I got that perspective because it really gave me a sense of what it takes to make a project profitable,” she says.

But after a decade working behind the scenes in the company office, Benner had sights set on another role: She wanted to go out into the field to do sales and estimating work. In order to do that, she had to convince her father first. That meant that she begged and pleaded for months on end.

“I got a lot of pushback from him on this. I don’t want to gloss over that part of the story,” she says. “Construction is a very male-dominated field. I didn’t quite realize just how male-dominated it was until I was on job sites, making calls and doing estimates,” she says.

A Woman Coming Into Leadership

But convince him she did, and with that she moved boldly into the real construction world. Benner was hooked. She loved the work—the impressive equipment and dirt hauling reminded her of childhoods spent on her grandfather’s farm—and she was good at it.

In 2005, when her father was nearing retirement, she knew that she was ready to take over. She hired her own representation, and with her father and their lawyers, they hashed out a deal. Benner purchased Ventilation Power Cleaning, Inc. eager to continue the family legacy while she put her own stamp on the business.

While Benner grew into a confident leader in the field, there was something that she always questioned. Why were there so few women in the field? The majority of women she encountered on jobs sites were in administrative roles, but rarely operating equipment or acting in any supervisory capacity.

Benner believes that there is no task in the construction industry that a strong, competent woman cannot do. She also believes that girls and women often don’t see these jobs as an option for them because there are so few female role models in these positions.

“It’s a serious gap, and it should be addressed,” she says. “Women come to the table with different skill sets than men, and women and men working together on the same playing field makes them more powerful and innovative.”

“My dad always stressed that you have to know what you do well and then be really honest, perhaps gut-wrenchingly honest, about what you don’t or can’t do well. And then hire people to do that for you. You have to realize the gaps and then fill those gaps,” Benner says.

In practice, that sometimes means that she finds creative workarounds to get deals done in a male-dominated industry.

“My ex-husband, Bill, works here with me. He’s charming and intelligent and knows the industry really well. If I have to send him out to close a deal and make someone feel great about it because they’re shaking hands with a man, that’s fine with me,” she says.

In other circumstances, it means assembling a team with a diverse set of skills and experiences around the table for hours to brainstorm solutions for jobs that initially seem impossible. This is particularly important for the type of work that Ventilation Power Cleaning, Inc. undertakes.

“We’ve done some crazy jobs, and every day is different,” she says. “There’s no boring day.”

Our jobs have ranged from odd (vacuuming a semi-truck load of spilled pickles from the interstate) to life-and-death (removing grain from a silo with an entrapped worker inside), to just plain hard (vacuuming spent sandblast 900 feet from the truck).

This creative culture has helped the company to stay ahead of its competitors. Ventilation Power Cleaning, Inc. has developed its own decant facilities to manage and dispose of accumulated waste in a way that is environmentally responsible, giving the company a competitive edge over others in the industry.

Benner notes the increase in use of vacuum truck services for hydro excavation. Hydro excavation uses high-pressure water in conjunction with a vacuum to expose sensitive utilities in lieu of traditional digging equipment. This lowers the risk of damaging gas, water, electrical or fiber optic lines, making excavation with vacuum trucks a safer process.

What Success Feels Like

The company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, and Benner sees a future for the business that extends out another 50 years. “I’m passionate about this business, and that passion just gets stronger as time goes by,” she says.

In recent years, a few major entities have been working to acquire independent businesses in the commercial vacuum industry, and Benner says that she has been asked more than once to sell the company. She asserts that there is no number that she would consider to be worth giving up the independence of her business.

Many of her competitors have decided to branch off into other kinds of work. Instead, Benner prefers to stay true to the vacuuming work that her company has been developing since 1969. She describes this focus and independence as a thread that extends back from her grandfather’s farm, through her father’s business and into her own. And just as with her grandfather’s potato farm, doing the one type of work she knows she can do well feels like success.

“I still think about those great memories I have of driving around in that farming equipment with my grandfather. The memories that are instilled in you as a kid, they just stick. In some ways, I feel like it’s really still what I’m doing today, digging up dirt,” she says. Then she adds, “And there’s nothing more badass than a vacuum truck.”