He started with a vacuum cleaner and a used car. Twenty-eight years later, he’s still the one who shows up.
Some businesses have a founding myth (a garage, a napkin sketch, a eureka moment). Gregg Layer’s story isn’t a myth…it’s much more human than heroic.
It started at a restaurant table in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. Gregg was working his way through college at Rutgers University, waiting tables at a nice place, the kind where regulars became familiar faces. One of his regulars owned a commercial cleaning company. One evening, he offered Gregg a job. Gregg took it.
He spent the next three years learning the operations side of the business from the inside — managing crews, handling chemicals, building client relationships, keeping everything running after hours when nobody was watching. He was good at it. But he noticed something: he didn’t know how to sell. And selling was the piece that made everything else possible.
Gregg could have stayed with that company to learn the sales side. But by that point, he was ready for a new horizon. Atlanta was growing fast, full of opportunity, and he had friends there. So he packed up, headed south, and got to work.
A new city, a steep learning curve, and a calling he didn’t expect.
Atlanta in the mid-nineties was a city in motion, and Gregg arrived with ambition, a work ethic, and almost no idea where anything was. (He got lost. A lot.) He was working at a restaurant at night to keep the lights on while spending his days learning the one thing he still needed: how to sell. It was grinding, unglamorous work. And he almost gave up on it.
Then a chance conversation with his parish priest reframed everything. Gregg had been wrestling with whether the janitorial business was really where he was supposed to be — whether it was enough. He asked the priest how he would know the right path. The priest’s answer stayed with him: that running a business built on serving people, especially people who depend on steady, honest work, is its own kind of calling. As long as the business serves, it will not lead him to failure.
Gregg has never forgotten that. It’s why service shows up in how he runs his company, how he treats his employees, and how he thinks about every facility he’s responsible for. And it’s what gave him the purpose to go all in.
In October of 1998, he quit his restaurant job, incorporated CityJan Inc., threw a vacuum cleaner in the back of a used car, and started knocking on doors.
What 28 years of showing up actually looks like.
CityJan isn’t a franchise. It never has been and never will be. It’s one company, with one owner, who still personally walks every new facility before a proposal is ever written. That’s not a marketing line, it’s just how Gregg has always done it, and it works.
Over 28 years, that approach has built something that most janitorial companies can’t claim: client relationships that last. Not because of a contract, but because the work is good, the communication is honest, and when something goes wrong (and in any building, something eventually does) you know exactly who to call.
Gregg has shown up on Christmas Day when a burst pipe threatened to flood a client’s warehouse. He’s been the one to notice a plumbing problem before it became a disaster, a water leak before it became a remediation job, a landscaping issue before it became a liability. That’s not above and beyond for him, it’s the way he shows up to serve.
Today, CityJan serves more than 70 commercial properties across Georgia and Tennessee, covering over 1.5 million square feet. The company has grown steadily, built entirely on referrals, repeat business, and the simple idea that if you do the work right and treat people well, everything else tends to follow.
The person behind the company.
Gregg is still a Philadelphia kid at heart. His friends and family will tell you he makes the best cheesesteak in Georgia! And he remains a proud Eagles, Phillies, Sixers, and Flyers fan (though after almost 30 years down here, he’s learned when to keep that to himself). When he’s not serving CityJan clients, he spends time with his wife and stepchildren, with regular visits to see his grown son in Maine.
Most of all, Gregg believes in paying it forward. Whether that means lending an employee money for a car, covering for someone who needs it, or simply treating the people who work for him the way he’d want to be treated, it’s a philosophy that he’s built into everything CityJan does. And he believes it’s why both employees and clients seem to stick around.
What you can expect when you work with CityJan.
When you reach out to CityJan, you’re not going to get a sales rep. You’re going to get Gregg. He’ll come walk your facility, ask the right questions, listen more than he talks, and give you a straight answer about what it would take to keep your space clean.
If it’s a good fit, great. If it’s not, he’ll tell you that too. He’d rather be honest upfront than have a client who isn’t happy — and after 28 years, he can usually tell pretty quickly which way it’s going to go.
