American Dream Achieved
IBA, as a fifty-year old business brokerage firm serving the entrepreneurial community of the Pacific Northwest, has been uniquely positioned since before the American Bicentennial celebration of 1976 to witness and hear the stories of thousands of people who have lived the American dream through entrepreneurship creating beloved businesses by employees, customers, and communities while finding personal fulfillment and financial prosperity through execution of their ideas, hard work, perseverance, and ability. In an effort to share these stories heard throughout the years by our team of business brokers, who are commonly regarded as the “best listeners” in the M&A industry, IBA has retained highly regarded writer, Nesha Ruther, to tell their stories. It is our goal to share one story a month. It is our hope that you will find the stories as inspirational and motivational as they are to us and the buyers who bought the businesses in IBA facilitated transactions in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.
The Story of Dave & Niki Salisbury of White Glove Home Improvement
By Nesha Ruther
Work has been a central part of Dave and Niki Salisbury’s life and marriage from the moment they met. The couple first crossed paths at Microsoft where she was a receptionist, and he the building’s facilities manager. “He spent a lot of time there and passed by the front desk a lot,” Niki recounts with a smile. “The rest is history.”
Born in Northwest Montana, Dave was raised on a farm and helped his father build the house he grew up in. “We didn’t pay people to fix things,” he says. “We always took care of it ourselves. I guess that’s where it started. I was always very hands-on.” When Dave became an adult, he joined Microsoft’s real estate and development department doing commercial work. After he and Niki married, he moved to another company in Kirkland, Washington that did both residential and commercial work. It was the residential work that Dave truly enjoyed. “I really liked the residential part of it, being able to help people directly felt better for me.”
After their children were born, he drove trucks for a few years while Niki stayed on at Microsoft. “I was trying to make a living versus doing something I loved,” he says. Still, construction was in his bones: on the side, Dave would do home projects for friends and family members. It was this side work that eventually became the basis of their company, White Glove. “In 2008, with the state of the economy I wasn’t working much at my regular job, but my side job of doing construction really took off. There was so much work pouring in that I didn’t have time to go to my other job. They would call me in for a day or two and I’d pass. Eventually it was making me more money than the truck driving job was,” he recalls.
Dave’s skill for construction and passion for helping others was visible to everyone around him. “Everybody saw it,” Niki says, “People kept saying to him, ‘Dave, I know you’ve been helping us as a friend, but there’s something here, you’ve got to turn this into a business.’” Niki saw the potential too, and despite still working full-time at Microsoft in key administrative and operational roles, she immediately jumped on board to help Dave start his fledgling business. “I was all in to help, I kept my full-time job at Microsoft, but my skill set carried over so a lot of what I did for Microsoft I was able to do for our business,” she says. “I handled a lot of the tech side of the company, the operational side: setting up the website and our IT infrastructure, I handled the QuickBooks and all the accounting and licensing.”
In February of 2012, White Glove Home Improvement officially opened for business. The name itself, was Niki’s idea. “I went to Japan for a business trip and I noticed all the people in the service industry wore white gloves,” she says. “They were all very well-respected. The waste management workers wore crisp white gloves, the bus drivers, anyone in the service industry. I thought it was so professional, and I saw they took pride in what they did. To me, as a visitor, the white gloves seemed a sign of respect. I called Dave in the middle of the night and said, ‘What about White Glove?’ That’s how it started.”
In terms of starting the company, Dave and Niki were lucky. Microsoft had a Homeowner’s Alias where employees could refer contractors, cleaners, and whatever services someone might need. Niki threw Dave’s name into the hat. “I was able to do a couple jobs for some really powerful people at Microsoft who were just the nicest people,” Dave says. “One of them really advocated for me. He literally told everyone he knew about me. At one point when I was first starting out, I didn’t have enough work to get through the week, and he said, ‘Anytime you don’t get your 40 hours in, you can come to my house, and I’ll give you work.’” Dave was able to work at this customer’s home until the business got on its feet.
Another close friend and mentor was Niki’s boss at Microsoft, Denise. Denise was going through a divorce, becoming a single mother, and needed help getting her new home in order. “She asked me if Dave would be able to help her with her move. She was one of the people who really mentored us and encouraged us to make it a full-time business. She saw something in you that maybe you didn’t see in yourself,” she says to Dave, who agrees.
For the first few years, Dave stayed away from major renovations despite his construction background. In the few instances where he did take on larger projects, Niki’s father would help him out, but otherwise, he kept to jobs that were feasible for a one-man team. “He mostly did the Honey-Do list,” Niki says.
After a few years, Dave reached out to his best friend, hoping to bring him on as a full-time employee. “We’ve been friends for 35 years, and he didn’t like his current job so I asked him a couple times if he would come work for me and he finally said yes,” Dave says. Dave could now take on bigger projects with a guaranteed two-men team. “That was probably the most fun period of running the company, when it was me and him,” Dave says. That passion and enjoyment of the work was clearly visible to their clients, because four months later Dave had to hire another friend-of-a-friend, and then another, and then another. At their peak, White Glove had eight construction workers and were completely booked out on jobs for months at a time.
As the construction side of the company grew, so too did the administrative side. For the first few years, Niki worked full-time at Microsoft and would spend her weekends doing the bookkeeping for White Glove. “I was run ragged,” she said. “I spoke to my sister, and she said, ‘You need to talk to my friend Stacy, Stacy will take care of you.’” Stacy was hired to take over the bookkeeping and help run the office, removing some of the administrative burden from Niki’s shoulders.
Like so many entrepreneurs, Dave and Niki were figuring it out as they went along, and part of that process was hiring people who could help them. “We were hungry to learn,” she says. “We wanted to understand how to be entrepreneurs and business owners, so we went to classes, we talked to people, one of the early things we learned was the importance of finding people to be in your boardroom. We learned to find experts and put them at our board table to keep us out of trouble and make sure we were satisfying all the requirements.”
In the same way that work has always been central to Dave and Niki’s marriage, it was also central to their family. It was Niki’s father who helped Dave with those early construction jobs, Niki’s sister connected them with valuable staff members, and once Dave and Niki’s kids were old enough, they joined the business too. “We involved our kids in every aspect of the business,” Dave says. “Our son has been working on crews since he was 11, packing lumber, building decks, he worked with the team every summer, spring, or midwinter break.”
Similarly to how Niki built the administrative structure when White Glove first started, it would be their daughter who modernized it. “Our daughter set up our entire basic operations system,” Dave says. “She researched platforms, set up the system, and taught all of our employees to use it.”
“We were doing paper invoices and writing everything by hand,” Niki adds, “Our daughter saw that there were inefficiencies, that there was time wasted, and completely unsolicited began looking for applications to handle the kind of work we were doing. She streamlined the billing, scheduling, and customer experience. Not just streamlined but improved. She really modernized the business. Both of our kids have been pivotal in the growth of the business.”
Niki and Dave never demanded that their kids partake in the business, but like their entrepreneur parents, it was simply second nature to them. “They took an interest, and we jumped at it,” Niki says. “We never wanted to force them, but we’ve always been the type of family that does everything together. We help each other out and I think they saw that we needed the help. I was working 60 hours a week and helping with White Glove and so our daughter jumped in, and when our son saw that Dave was overbooked, he would jump in.”
“They were on the payroll too,” Dave adds. “They enjoyed what they were doing, and we didn’t have to hound them, but we weren’t going to make them work for free.”
Being exposed to the entrepreneurial mindset left an indelible mark on both their children. Niki and Dave’s daughter, Megan, was accepted into an entrepreneurial program in high school where she would go attend business pitching contests. Later, she used her experiences with White Glove in her interviews for an entrepreneurial scholarship to university, which she won. “She saw that her contributions could really make an impact and it just lit a fire in her,” Niki says. Megan went on to get her degree in finance, something her parents attribute to that early experience of organizing the company’s billing.
With the company growing, Dave began stepping into more of a leadership role; a challenge for a man who was so used to going out and doing the manual labor himself. “I’m not a manager, I’m a construction worker,” he laughs. “Hiring and managing people was a struggle from the beginning. But on the other hand, I was my happiest when we had an amazing team. It was a struggle to achieve, but when we did, everything worked perfectly. It always felt good to be somewhere in the city and see a White Glove van and know it’s clean and good shape. People would call me saying, ‘I just saw four of your trucks in my neighborhood.’ I would see on a neighborhood Facebook page pictures of our vans and staff helping people out in an emergency. There was a big sense of pride.”
When it came to creating the distinct magic of the perfect team, Niki cites shared values. “They were all there because they liked helping people. It wasn’t that they needed this job, it was that they liked helping people and they liked helping each other.”
Dave also took it upon himself to help foster this connection, establishing monthly meetings and team breakfasts that allowed employees to connect on a different level. “It could be a bit lonely,” Niki says. “They take their vans home and then go straight to a job; they didn’t have a ton of interaction with their colleagues. Dave found ways to incentivize them, like group competitions or the team breakfasts that really built morale.”
In the same way that the team forged connections with each other, they also built trusting relationships with Niki and Dave. “I think they appreciated that we took care of them,” Dave says. “If someone was going through a bad time, I made sure they were taken care of. Some people needed time off, some people like money, some people ran into legal problems. I took care of them because they took care of me. It made them want to work hard for us.”
“Not just them but their families too,” Niki adds. “Asking people ‘How’s your family doing?’ We really cared about the bigger picture. If someone needed time off to go to their child’s performance or if someone was sick, we were there to help.”
“Part of the reason I started the business was because I wanted to spend weekends with my family and I was always being forced to work weekends,” Dave says, “I didn’t force the guys to work weekends, or if they had a kid’s baseball game at two o’clock on a Wednesday, I made sure they got there. Whatever it was, I made sure I treated them like they treated me.”
And even as the team grew and Dave had to delegate some responsibilities, there were others he always prioritized. “It got to the point where it was so busy that I couldn’t get any actual construction done because I was on the phone with customers all the time. At that point I stepped away from working on crews and would just meet with customers, vetting them, and doing the estimates. I really enjoyed meeting people and filling that role, and it got to the point where just managing that and the schedule was a full-time job,” he says.
In 2021, Dave and Niki finally hired an operations manager to take over many of those responsibilities, but for nearly a decade Dave had his hands in every part of the business’ operation. “We were a scrappy team, I mean we hustled,” Niki says.
Even as much changed for White Glove through the years, some things never did, namely the company’s values. “Contractors get a bad rep,” Dave says. “For good reason, there’s a lot of shady contractors out there. But I’ve always wanted to make sure that we weren’t one of them. That we were reliable, we showed up on time. I have a zero-tolerance policy for flakiness. That we were fair, if something didn’t work out right, I always made it right. Those actions snowballed into us becoming someone that people could trust, and I think that’s a big part of our success.”
“In the very beginning when we were deciding whether to start the company, a good friend said, ‘first, you need a business plan,’” Niki recalls. “So, we spent a weekend vision boarding and drafted our business plan. We thought about what experience we wanted people to have. How do we want people to feel after they’ve had White Glove come to their house? What would we want as customers? You want to feel good about the people that are coming into your home, you want them to be clean and organized and have their act together. That exercise led us to center integrity, communication, and trustworthiness. Those were our values from day one and we shared those values with our employees. If anyone gave us any sort of indicator that they weren’t going to carry out those values on our behalf, then they weren’t going to be part of the team.”
As any entrepreneur can attest to, finding employees who can live up to the company’s standards can often be the hardest part of the job. “Sometimes it would take a couple of weeks to see that someone wasn’t a good fit,” Dave says. “But during their probation period it always became very clear. If we didn’t have a good feeling about the person after their probation period, we just let them go. And a lot of people didn’t make it. As hard as it was sometimes, we weren’t going to go down that road.”
In the end, White Glove’s best employees came on the same way as those first few employees: prior relationships and word-of-mouth. “My best friend was a godsend because he took over the training and carried on those same values,” Dave says. “I could trust that when he was training someone, he was instilling those values. But for the most part, the best hires were a friend of a friend, word-of-mouth connections. Otherwise, we would just be on Indeed, shuffling through hundreds of people to find three.”
When it came to the prior experience Dave looked for, he prioritized people who, like himself, were generalists. “I didn’t want to hire someone who was just a drywaller. I looked for people who had general knowledge. I could teach people to become really good at specific things, but they had to have a general foundation to start from.”
Dave would also hire someone based off a strong connection, knowing that he could invest the time to give them further training down the road. “He believed in people and was willing to train them a bit more if the skill set wasn’t initially 100%” Niki says. “He’s really good at seeing people’s potential, even if it meant going against the grain a bit, and usually those people would end up being the best hires ever.”
Niki, who did the majority of the research on potential employees, had her own system as well. “I would always go on Facebook and see how people handled themselves on social media. If they were being disrespectful, I knew that wasn’t the type of person we wanted,” she says.
In every part of the business, from hiring, to finding customers, to the logistics, Niki and Dave, despite their varying skillsets, planned it out together. “We were always aligned in everything,” Niki says. “We would have our list of things that we wanted to do, that we needed to do to achieve our goals, and we would divide and conquer. We’d dream up the list together and then say, ‘Okay, I’m taking these three things and you’re taking those three things.’”
Despite their shared dreams and shared work ethic, after over a decade of running White Glove, running the business began to take a toll on the pair. “I could see that we were both burning out,” Niki says. When Dave began struggling with some serious health issues, they realized it was time to make a change “It was a wakeup call that we have one life to live, and our health is more important,” Niki says, getting a little misty. “It’s a little hard to talk about.”
In a moment fraught with health challenges, as well as the logistical burden of selling a company, Niki and Dave knew they needed to find someone they could trust. “I came across a post from a neighbor that said, ‘If you ever need to sell a business, go to IBA. I came across it before I we were even thinking about selling, but it stuck in my head,” Niki recalls. “When Dave got sick, I filled out a form with IBA and thought I would never hear back, within a couple hours I heard from Gregory. He immediately introduced us to Sally, and we hit it off. I could tell she was knowledgeable and experienced, but she also has a big heart and cared about us as people.”
For Dave, who always prioritized taking care of his employees, selling the business presented its own set of concerns. “It was really important to me that the business didn’t die. That it didn’t get turned over to the wrong person and run into the ground. I really wanted to make sure the team was taken care of. I didn’t want to sell the business to somebody unless I trusted they were going to do right by it.” While Dave wanted someone who could keep the business going, he also wanted something who could help it grow. “I’ve always wanted to take that next step to become a bigger company and do bigger jobs. I was looking for the person that had the energy and smarts to do it.”
Niki agrees, returning to the idea of heart that allowed her to connect so strongly with Sally. “I keep bringing up that word ‘heart’, but it’s really that human connection. Yes its money and its business, but how are you going to treat the team? There was a lot of interest in the business, but Sally only brought us the best of the best. She knew what was important to us and she only matched us with the best people.”
Dave and Niki closed on the sale of White Glove in January of 2025. Niki has since left Microsoft for a new job, and Dave is helping the new buyers with the transition, “I’m still a bit involved, but I’m getting used to having less responsibility, slowly but surely,” he says.
At the time of our conversation they just returned from a much needed vacation and are looking forward to travelling more in the future. But most importantly, they want to take care of themselves and their loved ones. “We’re going to take it easy, take care of our health and family and invest in friendships that we didn’t have as much time for before, because that’s what life is about,” Niki says.
When Dave and Niki first started White Glove, they had one guiding, long term goal: “Our main goal was putting our kids through college,” Dave says. “And we did, we gave them a great life.”
“The American Dream to us was being able to provide for our family,” Niki says, “and we achieved it.”
“We wouldn’t have been able to sell the business without you doing everything right from the beginning,” Dave says to Niki appreciatively. “I just wanted to be head down and go to work, but you were always very methodical and committed to doing it right.”
“We were the dream team,” Niki says with a smile. “We built this together, through the good and the bad and the kids…but we were the dream team. We did it hand in hand the whole time and I’m very proud of that.”
“But I’m not going to do it again,” Dave says with a laugh.
Dave doesn’t need to, he and Niki have already achieved the American Dream, all that’s left to do is enjoy it.
Nesha Ruther
Nesha Ruther is a writer and editor from Takoma Park, Maryland. She received her BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she received a full tuition scholarship through the First Wave program based on academic and creative merits. She was a 2016 Young Arts winner in spoken word, a 2016 winner of the DC Commission of the Arts Larry Neal Writing Award, a 2017 winner of the Mochila Review Writing Award, which was judged by Nikki Giovanni, a 2020 winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Award, and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Participant. She has been commissioned to write and perform for the National Education Association, and has had work published in NarrativeNortheast, Angles Literary Magazine, Beltway Quarterly and more. She currently lives in Cincinnati Ohio, is a Lead Writer at Bond & Grace, and a co-host for the podcast Lit Talk (https://www.bondandgrace.com/the-lit-talk-podcast).