Wichita State graduate Jason Van Sickle decided to create his own business—one that’s run differently.

He is the founder and president of J. Van Sickle and Company, a business that builds apartments and provides services to the apartment owners.

Van Sickle came to WSU as an undergraduate in 1991. However, he had to temporarily leave school to care for his family after he and his wife divorced. He has been a single parent for 16 years.

“I think I’m lucky that I had it difficult really early in life, in terms of getting married too young, and then having to put off school and work for a while to help provide for my family,” Van Sickle said. “It gave me some time to figure out what I wanted to do and made me work some manual jobs that I didn’t want to do and learn the value of education.”

Van Sickle held several jobs after leaving WSU, including one that allowed him to be close to his two children while he worked.

“I worked at a pre-school when my kids were very young, so that I could be with them during the day,” he said. “My boss let my kids go there for free because I worked there, and let me take some time off to go to class.”

Eventually, Van Sickle earned his bachelor’s degree from WSU in general studies with a major in philosophy and a minor in mathematics. He completed a master’s degree in sociology from WSU in 2001.

He said he decided to go into real estate, initially because it taught him the business fundamentals necessary to become self-employed. After working for other people long enough, he decided to start his own business. 

“I wanted to change the ways companies did business, the way they did when I worked for them,” Van Sickle said. “And that’s into the whole wanting to create a business where everybody has ownership, where you focus on doing right. Where it’s more about quality of projects you do than making money.”

He said his current company evolved from building apartments exclusively to include offering services to the apartment owners.

“We’ve now started branching out into related businesses where we find we can meet real needs that people have,” Van Sickle said. “That leads into Housekeeping Professionals, where we realized we really wanted to provide free cleaning in the apartments. We figured out how to do it so affordably that we realized we could provide home cleaning for people at a price that people could actually afford.”

Van Sickle’s time as a single parent showed him how difficult it can be to find time to clean the house in between work and caring for children. Eventually, Van Sickle and his company learned they could provide cleaning services for a low price.

“When we realized we could clean somebody’s home for less than the price of the average cable bill,” he said, “we thought ‘we need to get out there and provide this as a service to other people.’ That really just falls into our whole focus on only starting businesses that fulfill real-world needs, and genuinely improve the quality of people’s lives.”

Van Sickle and his company have been expanding their market over the last few months.

“Our Housekeeping Professionals has grown just like our real-estate development, by leaps and bounds,” Van Sickle said. “And so, just as we found a great formula for apartment development in Wichita, we have expanded rapidly into six different markets across three different states. We also have put in a plan to expand housing professionals across the country.”

In Van Sickle’s company, the hierarchy of an owner being the head of the company, with supervisors and employees below them, does not exist.

“When people are part of our organization,” he said, “we don’t look at the structure of ‘employee, boss and owner,’ and instead, replace that with ‘student, mentor, visionary.’ If somebody comes in and has exciting visions of where they could go with business concepts, then we put all the resources of our company behind trying to create those businesses.” 

His company offers opportunities for interns to hold management positions once their internship is over. Samantha Richardson, who graduated from WSU in December, had an internship under Van Sicakle for two months during the fall.

“I was so incredibly lucky that I got the internship,” Richardson said. “After I graduated, Jason called me up and offered me a position, and I just couldn’t say no. I couldn’t be happier doing this job for him.”