“The Wardon” is one of the names Ronna Fraley goes by. She got that nickname from one of her sons. He always said she was the one that was the stickler, the one that got him in trouble for everything he did. That’s why he named her “wardon,” and the nickname just stuck around. She spells it wrong on purpose. She likes to be different and make people think. Now that nickname goes beyond just her – she is also known as the Wardon in her and her husband’s janitorial business. Ronna Fraley and Doug Fraley Sr. started A-1 Performance 23 years ago.
My dad’s tour in the Army was up, so when I was three years old we moved to Brewster, Washington. I was like every other kid growing up. I liked school and playing outside. I remember when I first got a job. I was 14 years old, thinning apples in an apple orchard. Not many teenagers at 14 get jobs. I loved to work. After a couple years, I got to move into the apple shed packing apples. I had a few other jobs growing up, but I knew I wanted to go to college to be an accountant. I married my first husband and moved from Brewster to Omak, Washington when I was 19 years old. I started going to college when I was 20. Then life progressed after that. When I was 21, I had my daughter, April, and I decided to go to H n R Block’s schooling, graduated with an A, and worked for them for two seasons. Then I ended up getting divorced. I was 28 years old when I met my second husband, Doug Fraley Sr., and the love of my life. I fell in love with Doug right away – there was just something sweet about him. When Doug and I started talking about getting married, he would tell me that if he ever got married again it would be on the beach at sunset. We got the map out and decided on a beach. We got married in Ocean City at sunset in 1989. Doug is the reason I got into janitorial.
I remember working three jobs when Doug and I got married. I worked my three jobs and computed all the books for the janitorial company. I would clean the bowling alley in Omak at six in the morning, then went to the racket ball club and babysat for an hour or so and finally would go to my third job cleaning rooms and doing laundry at a hotel that I lived behind. After I got involved in the janitorial company, I realized Doug didn’t have anything. We needed pretty much everything to do a basic clean of a house. We didn’t have the money to go out and buy the stuff so we went to the owners of the bowling alley that I cleaned seven days a week and asked for their help. They asked us what we needed. We told them we needed around $900 dollars for an electric buffer. We needed the buffer for the Les Schwab that we cleaned in Omak. They asked me if I had a phone or any other cleaning supplies. I told them that we didn’t. So they said, well, you need all of that so I think you will need more than nine hundred dollars. They took the title to my truck and loaned us the money to get the stuff we needed. We got a used buffer, a mop, mop bucket, a landline phone, and a bunch of basic cleaning supplies. We used my truck and got started cleaning.
My husband was a great talker. He could talk anyone into anything. I always said he was such a sweet talker he could even talk someone into buying beachfront property. Therefore he was in charge of setting up the accounts and cleaning them. My role was to do the books. I already had my three part-time jobs and agreed to organize all the books for the company.
Our first account was Les Schwab in Omak, Washington. This account is the reason why we had to buy the used buffer. Eventually, Doug had set up five different accounts around Omak. It was only Doug and I running the business and cleaning the accounts. It was very time consuming. Sometimes, whenever Doug Sr. couldn’t clean, I would work all day and do the cleaning accounts, which meant I wouldn’t get off work until 2 a.m.
We decided for our first year anniversary we were going to come back to where we got married. When we came across the pass and came over the mountains, we felt at peace. It was such an indescribable feeling of peace. It was wonderful. I can’t even describe the peace we felt. It’s hard to describe something like that if you have never experienced that kind of peace before. It was like we were meant to be here.
After feeling such peace, we talked and decided we wanted to move here. We talked a lot about moving here and where we would live and work when we got here. We finally decided that Doug Sr. would talk to the pastor that married us and see if he could go stay with him for 30 days and try and find work. We said if he could find work, then we would move over and if he couldn’t then it wasn’t meant to be. We believed in fate. The first place Doug went to was the unemployment office and was told not even to bother trying to start a new business on the Harbor. The unemployment office said there were so many janitorial companies here that he wouldn’t get any work with the economy the way it was. Doug didn’t listen to them. By the 3rd day he was there, he got a job working for the mall doing maintenance. He called me and said let’s get a U-Haul, we’re moving tomorrow. I had no clue until he called me, but he was already on his way back to Omak to get me and the kids. I didn’t know what to say after he said that to me. I honestly didn’t think he would find any work. I broke out in hives. They were everywhere even all the way up my neck. I was just a wreck. I was not ready for this. Everything we heard was just so negative. While we were on the phone, I asked Doug where we are going to live when we get there. He said, “I’m driving. Can we talk about this when I get home? But I have everything covered.” While Doug was in the Harbor he went to Ocean Shores looking for places for us to live. He was walking through stores looking at the bulletin boards where people place ads when he ran into a guy he went to school with in Omak. They got talking and the guy was moving out of a place the same weekend we needed to move into a place, so we basically moved right into his place as he was moving out.
Our first account over here was also Les Schwab. After getting this account, Doug got another job at the Canterbury Inn in Ocean Shores doing maintenance. I also got a job after we moved to Ocean Shores at a tool rental place. So I worked at the tool place doing the books during the day and cleaned Les Schwab at night, while Doug was working at the Canterbury Inn. It was too much for Doug to work at the hotel and go into town and clean at night. We slowly worked at getting a few more accounts. We got about five more accounts within that year. We just thought we were so big [laughing]. Then we just got to the point to where it was all too much. Doug had to quit the Canterbury to help keep up with all the accounts that we had. We had a couple accounts in Ocean Shores, but all the rest of them were in Aberdeen. So we had quite a bit of driving to do every night. Our goal was to just keep cleaning and keep trying to get more accounts and just get bigger and bigger. That is all we wanted to do, but we didn’t want to do it too fast. We wanted to make sure we could cover all the accounts ourselves. We did this for a couple years, and then in 1997 we started hiring employees to help us. As we got more accounts, we hired more employees. We worked every day, including weekends and holidays. At that time, we gave our employees weekends and holidays off. Then we got smart [laughing]. For some reason, Doug insisted on giving all our employees all weekends and holidays off which made us work seven days a week. It took me a year to talk some sense into him. We were getting exhausted working so much. We finally made the transition into taking weekends and holidays off ourselves, whenever possible.
At one point, we wanted to move to Oregon. It was just so beautiful there. We wanted to keep all our accounts and our employees to clean them while we moved. When we started to focus on moving there, our business just started falling apart. Our workers were quitting or we were getting a lot of complaints. We finally decided that that was our sign to stay here. As soon as we decided to stay put, everything just seemed to smooth out. We were meant to be in this community. We started looking at buying a house. We saw a house in Cosmopolis that we both just fell in love with. When we went to look at it, unfortunately for us, someone had already bought it. We continued to look at houses but ended up staying in Ocean Shores, just renting our place. I would say it had been about a year since we started looking into buying a house. We just couldn’t find a house we loved. We drove by the house in Cosmopolis we wanted to buy and it had a for sale sign just sitting there in the front yard. We knew it was our chance. We bought that house and lived in it until about a couple months ago. We finally bought our house out in the country so we could eventually retire.
We both believe that everything that has happened to us has happened for a reason. Throughout all the years we have been doing this, we have, maybe not intentionally, helped a lot of people. We have given away stuff like furniture, beds, helped people get into cars and houses. We have done a lot for other people over the years. We did all this just because this is how we are and I believe that with our business doing so well we had the means to help people. We didn’t set out to do this stuff, it just happened.
~Interviewed & transcribed
by Kamie Watkins
