In the driver's seat

SHREWSBURY — In 2009, Lillian Radke left a cushy job in sales to join Unic Pro Inc., then a small janitorial company her husband, Silvano Radke, co-owned. The company had acquired just four accounts since it started in 2006, and Mr. Radke’s partner was preparing to leave the business.

One day, Ms. Radke overheard the two men arguing about Unic Pro’s future. The partner had handled sales for the company, while Mr. Radke dealt with the operational side of the business.

“The partner asked, ‘If we split, who’ll do sales?’” Ms. Radke recalled during a recent interview at Unic Pro’s headquarters here on Route 9. “My husband said: ‘My wife.’ The partner said, ‘There’s no way she can do sales: This job is for tough men; nobody expects a lady to walk in.’”

In the nine years since that conversation, Ms. Radke has taken over as Unic Pro’s CEO and brought in more than 120 new accounts, including medical facilities, YMCAs, child care centers, universities, schools, government buildings and professional offices.

Under Ms. Radke’s watch, the company has grown by nearly 50 percent each year, along the way increasing its payroll from six to 117.

When she became CEO in 2011 after her husband left to start another company, Unic Pro was averaging about $350,000 a year in revenue. Today, the company nets $450,000 a month and expects to hit nearly $5 million in sales by the end of the year.

And in April, the U.S. Small Business Administration named Ms. Radke its Woman Small Business Owner of the Year in Massachusetts, citing Unic Pro’s “rapid growth and job creation.”

“She has a wonderful personality, a tremendous amount of energy, and she’s doing amazing things in an industry that’s predominantly male,” said SBA Massachusetts District Director Robert Nelson of Ms. Radke.

Ms. Radke has faced many doubters since coming to the U.S. in 2003 from Sal Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city, on a volleyball scholarship. Early on, she enrolled at the University of Arkansas, a move that forced her to learn a new language and adapt to a major culture shift. Yet she quickly overcame those challenges to become the captain of the university’s volleyball team.

She leaned on that experience to prove Mr. Radke’s partner wrong – a triumph that still stands among her sweetest.

“In the beginning I didn’t feel respected: I felt underestimated being a young woman,” Ms. Radke said. “Now our growth speaks for itself.”

Ms. Radke credits Unic Pro’s success in part to guidance she’s received from the SBA and organizations like the Center for Women & Enterprise and the C12 Group, which is an advisory group for Christian CEOs.

The SBA directed Ms. Radke toward joining its Women-Owned Small Business Federal Contracting program, which aims to level the playing field for women business owners in industries like cleaning and manufacturing. The government tries to award at least 5 percent of all federal contracting dollars to women-owned businesses, so companies that are at least 51 percent women-owned have a better chance at having a winning bid.

The program has helped Unic Pro gain contracts to clean military bases and courthouses, Ms. Radke said, among other federal buildings.

When looking for new contracts that aren’t federal buildings, Ms. Radke searches for niches. In 2012, Unic Pro began cleaning the North Suburban YMCA and used rave reviews from the staff there to gain contracts with 26 other YMCAs.

“The YMCA in Woburn said it never had a company that knew how to clean its locker rooms until us. Imagine a YMCA locker room: hundreds of people taking showers and kids and camps,” Ms. Radke said. “After that, we started to call all of the YMCAs in the state.”

As CEO, Ms. Radke’s philosophy has been to recruit managers more adept than her.

“I always make sure to hire someone for a position who’s better than me in that area,” she explained. “I hire someone better than me with numbers, or I hire people better than me at training. This way, I can focus on working on the business, not in the business.”

More than anything else, though, Ms. Radke has focused on how she treats Unic Pro’s greatest assets: its cleaners. Employee mistreatment and abuse is common in the janitorial industry, she said, but not at Unic Pro.

“A lot of our cleaners tell us how they were mistreated working for other companies,” Ms. Radke said. “Here, we show them how much respect they should earn from their work. We tell them they’re just as important as a teacher, just as important as a nurse. Without them, the nurse couldn’t perform her work the next day.”

This mindset – inspired by Ms. Radke’s faith – allows Unic Pro to keep its employees happy and maintain a turnover rate of just 13.5 percent in an industry where the standard is 85 percent.

Unic Pro’s cleaners also often share their experience with family and friends, Ms. Radke said, which creates a well of potential employees.

Ms. Radke, an immigrant herself, enjoys mentoring Unic Pro’s diverse group of cleaners, including Americans, Brazilians and Haitians, so they can rise in the company.

She loves watching their progression, too: Cleaners become special service crew members, then supervisors, then managers.

“That’s one of the reasons I want to keep growing,” she said. “It’s not even about money: My salary stays the same. It’s about seeing people grow within the company and grow personally.”