The Power of Persistence

Francisco Gali has never waited for opportunity to knock. Instead, he has aggressively pursued new challenges throughout his life and career. At age 13, he left Venezuela to attend a boarding school in Pennsylvania. After attending college, he was able to hop onboard the George H. W. Bush campaign, ultimately parlaying his political experience into a position with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Still, secure though his position at the institute was, Francisco was not content. “You don’t make a lot of money in Congress, and I needed to make ends meet,” he explains. “I asked the office manager what they paid the cleaning company, and they were paying about $1,200 a month or so. I told them I could do it for $800, and I’d do a much better job. That was big time for me!” With that first official cleaning contract, the company that would one day become GSI Group was born.

Today, Gali Service Industries, or GSI Group (GSI), is a $30 million business employing over 1,000 staff members. The group offers a wide range of integrated facility services for clients including commercial office properties, schools, stadiums, hotels, airports, and data centers. Along with specialty cleaning services, GSI can also provide exterior grounds maintenance, moving services, daily porter services, and a myriad of other necessary upkeep services for commercial and residential buildings. “One of the unique things about GSI is that we’ve managed to do a wide variety of things very, very well,” explains Francisco, “Most companies don’t fall into that profile. They’re either commercial or residential. But GSI has succeeded in meeting the needs of both verticals, amalgamating a series of services that work well together for our clients.”

As founder, CEO, and Chairman of GSI Group, Francisco has worked to ensure the success of the business for nearly 30 years. The broad range of the services offered are a work in progress that has developed over time as Francisco worked overtime to keep clients happy and grow the business. As its inception in 1988, with its first-ever cleaning job, the business was called Spot Professional Services. A couple of years later, the name was changed to Argus Commercial Services. Finally, in 1992, the rapidly growing business became GSI Group, as its menu of services had already expanded significantly. “We started as a cleaning company, picking up trash and vacuuming office buildings, and then morphed into doing a lot of residential common areas and highrise apartment buildings,” he recalls, “We started providing porters in addition to cleaners, as well as assistants for light engineering. Over the years, clients would ask, can you do this or that? We wanted to provide the best and most robust service possible, so we always said yes. We started getting into carpet cleaning and floor refinishing. Last year we started a concierge service, and within a year, that offering has reached almost $2 million in sales. That’s just one example of a project we launched because people were asking, which went on to great success.”

Client feedback was a major motivation of GSI’s continual growth and expansion. But Francisco’s own ambition was another central component of the company’s rise to the top. “After I got my first $800, I went out and got a contract $1,800,” he recounts. “And I thought, well, if I can hit $100,000 a year, I’ll be hitting the big time. Then when I got the $100,000, I thought, well, to get to critical mass, I’ve got to hit $500,000. When I got that, I thought, man, I won’t be any good until I get to that $1 million!” No matter how much money the business made, Francisco saw success just over the horizon. He never rested on his laurels, but continued to push himself on toward that next mountain, proving the power of persistence.

Francisco never imagined the heights he would one day reach while growing up in a dusty, rural town in Venezuela. Both sets of grandparents had emigrated from Spain, so both his mother and father were immigrants to Venezuelan. His father was a businessman who owned hardware stores, and Francisco credits him with passing along an entrepreneurial gene and a drive for excellence. “He’s a very determined, self-made person who I admire because he educated himself through reading,” Francisco explains. “And beyond that, he educated his brothers and sisters. He didn’t go to college or have the kinds of opportunities I had, but he had this persistence. My mom is very determined and hardworking as well. She’s always been very much a giver, and I inherited that trait from her. I always want to help everyone and do everything, sometimes to a fault.”

As a kid in Venezuela, Francisco remembers running around outdoors with friends and working at the family hardware store from a young age. He was expected to help out with the business almost from the time he could walk, sweeping the floors and killing rats with his trusty slingshot. “For the week, dad would give me a fuerte, which is five bolivars,” Francisco laughs. “I used to think that if I kept killing those rats for the next thirty years, I’d be a millionaire! Dad always had me working.”

Growing up, Francisco and his older sister learned a lot about the U.S., studying with American students at the bilingual school. Then, in 1977, he and his father went on a trip to New York City. It was his first time visiting the States, and his first impression was a good one. “All I wanted was to do two things: go to FAO Schwartz, the largest toy store in the world, and see Star Wars,” he remembers. “When I got to New York and saw that enormous city, I couldn’t believe it. It was like a dream. We didn’t even have a movie theater in my hometown, and going to FAO Schwartz, I couldn’t believe something like that existed. It was the biggest moment of my life up to that point.”

Unfortunately, at the age of eleven, a traumatic incident affected young Francisco deeply. He was abused by an employee of the family, an older man. Afraid of what might happen if he came forward, he was silent about the abuse for decades before finally opening up. “I carried that inside until my thirties,” he says. “I never discussed it with anybody, and I think it affected me and my sense of self-worth a lot in business. Sometimes I wonder how much farther I might have gotten if I didn’t have so many doubts manifested from that event.” The man disappeared one day, but the memories of the trauma lingered. Francisco carried this trauma with him when, at a mere thirteen years old, he began as a student at the Hill School in Pennsylvania.

Moving abroad alone at such a young age would be challenging for anyone. It was an especially steep mountain to climb for Francisco, who had so recently been through a terrible, but private, ordeal. “I was terrified,” he recalls. “It was very hard, but I thank my parents for the incredible education that the Hill School gave me. It instilled a desire to learn and an ability to see things from different perspectives.” The Hill School was a private, exclusive school for boys, grades eight through twelve. The school was strict—the boys were expected to wear suits and ties, and classes were held six days a week. In addition, every student was required to work a campus job. Right away, Francisco began to display the ambition that would serve him so well in adulthood. He was assigned a job clearing tables in the dining hall, but he didn’t remain in the position for long. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be cleaning plates here,’” he recalls, “So quickly I became a table setter, then a row captain, and then a shift captain. Ultimately, for the next few years I ran the whole dining room, serving around 1,400 people every day.”

In short order, Francisco had realized that excelling in his work would ultimately place him in a better position, and he quickly rose through the ranks of student workers in the dining hall. He credits the experience as a sort of training course for managing employees, since he was responsible for directing teams of other students. Academically, he also strove for greatness, and by his senior year, he was selected to be a Prefect and awarded special privileges. Among these privileges were the ability to leave campus, and the coveted “long weekend”—not having to attend class on Saturdays. It was during this time that Francisco and his close friend, Aleco, would drive to Aleco’s family home in DC, where Francisco met and began dating his high school sweetheart, Kris.

As Francisco considered his college options, Kris’s location was a major consideration. They decided to both attend George Washington University (GW) together, although Francisco isn’t sure GW would’ve otherwise been his top choice. “It’s a great school, but it was my backup school and I decided to go there for her,” he recounts. “But I did have a desire to come to DC because I loved that it was the seat of power of the United States. I had always really admired that, and I felt drawn to the city.”

Francisco loved life at GW, but he was concerned about his parents back home. His mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 Melanoma, an aggressive cancer with a 10 percent survival rate, and the doctors in Venezuela advised sending her abroad for surgery and treatment in New York. His father poured all of his resources into saving her life, and miraculously, it worked. Francisco’s mother recovered, but unfortunately, the family’s savings had dwindled to almost nothing.

The following year, an economic collapse hit Venezuela, and things really got bad financially for the Gali family. Francisco’s father fell into a severe depression, and Francisco describes this period as one of the defining times of his life. “I flew to Venezuela to be with him for a few weeks because I was honestly worried he might die,” Francisco recalls. “I spent a lot of time with him, even though at times we had a difficult relationship. He demanded a lot, which can be good, but also challenging. Thankfully, I was able to help him snap out of it and get back on his feet. He rebuilt his businesses again and ultimately did very well.”

Back in DC, it wasn’t long before Francisco’s dreams of working in politics came to fruition. During the 1987 and 1988 election season, he worked on the George H.W. Bush campaign. Kris, his girlfriend, went on to work at the White House, while Francisco went on to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In January of 1992, Kris helped arrange a photo of Francisco in the Oval Office shaking hands with then-President Bush. He still treasures the memory of that day and the photographs that were taken. “That was an incredible moment where I felt that I had truly made it,” he says. “It was the beginning of my business career, and I was proud of what I had already achieved. I was able to come from where I came from in life, all the way from a poor town in Venezuela, to set foot in the office of the most powerful man on the planet. I shook his hand and spent fifteen minutes talking with him. That was something really remarkable.”

By this time, Francisco’s cleaning business was growing rapidly. He credits his business mentor, Herman Greenberg, with taking a chance on him as his fledging career started out. Greenberg was the father of his close friend, Aleco from boarding school, and owned several buildings in the area. He told Francisco there was a job he could take on cleaning a place called the Somerset House, if he was sure he could hack it. “Boy was he tough on me,” Francisco laughs. “If there was a lightbulb that wasn’t working, he’d call me up. I’d have to go on my lunch break from Capitol Hill down to change the lightbulb. But I did such a good job there, I got to bid this other big job at Seminary Towers. Once I got that job, we really started to grow.”

But growing the business wasn’t always as easy as that. Francisco had majored in political science at GW, and he often found himself improvising when it came to running a company. When the real estate crisis hit in 1992, there was a down period of intense cuts. “That was probably my first big professional challenge,” he says, “I was learning business on the fly. When you go into these shortage modes, there’s not a lot of capital, and banks don’t want to lend you money when you’re a small company. That was a big challenge.” Thankfully, Francisco’s dedication and persistence paid off. GSI’s fortunes quickly revived over the next few years, and soon it was expanding faster than ever.

Meanwhile, Francisco worked closely with his father on a couple of major side ventures. “I was shuttling back and forth to Venezuela and we started a pumping services company for the oil and gas industry,” he explains. “It was gravel packing, which is something you do in wells. After two years, we sold that venture because we wanted to get into cementing. We bought a company called Toucan and provided cementing services in Venezuela.”

The second venture was also successful, but Francisco felt that the political climate in the country was becoming too tumultuous. After Chavez was elected, he began to look abroad for a new location. Toucan moved to Indonesia, where they again achieved success and ultimately decided to sell the operation to an Indonesian group.

Francisco was glad to have worked with his father professionally, and over the years of collaboration, their relationship had grown much closer. As the situation deteriorated further in Venezuela, Francisco decided his parents needed to relocate to the U.S.. They’re both now working for GSI Group, heading up a successful new division. “They’re incredibly helpful,” reports Francisco of the arrangement. “They run a profitable division, and they run it very well. It’s called GSI Homemade Solutions. It caters to extended stay hotels.” Francisco’s father is also serving as interim President of GSI Group while Francisco addresses his ongoing divorce proceedings.

The divorce has been tough on Francisco, but he’s learning to rely on the good friends and close family around him in this difficult time. “I think the important thing is, there have been great people around me reaching out—people who have been incredibly supportive,” he says. “If you’re a competitive person who likes to be successful in business, chances are that success is important in all aspects of life. That’s how it is for me, and I especially never wanted my two older children to see me get a second divorce. Divorce hurts especially when the person you trust and love turns out to be something they are not. In my bad moments, I see it as a failure. But there’s always a lesson learned, and in this case, it’s the importance of taking your time to get to know people. Sometimes you learn who your real friends are during these periods. It’s a journey I’m going through and a test that I’m going to have to deal with as it comes.” His focus now, then, is to make his little children, Francisco III and Isabella, happy and well-adjusted kids.

Francisco’s two older daughters from his marriage to Kris, Miranda and Sophia, are both high-achieving students at college. To them and to other young people preparing to launch their careers, Francisco advises the same determination that turned GSI Group from a small cleaning business into a $30 million company. “I told them that, to be successful, the number one most important thing is to be persistent,” he emphasizes. “And number two, you have to be honest. Number three is, don’t be afraid. As one of my favorite quotes goes, it is not your aptitude but your attitude that will determine your altitude.”

As a leader, Francisco has always striven to provide a role model to the Hispanic community, and to young people in general. “I believe that empowering people to be the best they can be is the key to running a successful organization. It’s all about empowering them to do the work. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the hardworking people on my team.”

Francisco credits one of his bosses at the Hispanic Caucus Institute with driving that important lesson home for him early on. Beverly Ellerman was the Executive Director of the group, and she served as a mentor to young Francisco. “She said to me, if you want to move up in life, you have to be confident, and you have to train someone to replace you. Because if not, you’re going to be stuck in the same place, in the same spot. So don’t be scared to compete, embracing all the potential that lies in both yourself and others. As long as you have a vision to strive for and the will to persist, there’s no telling how far you’ll go.”

Francisco also credits several people who will always have a special place in his heart: His parents, Francisco and Angela Gali; Ronny Ortowski who has been a great friend, mentor, and business role model; former Congressman Xavier Becerra who is a true gentleman and role model of leadership and courage; and the great and loyal employees of GSI who have been by his side for so many years

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