The Dirtiest Mind in Business

By: Ellen McGirtMon Jan 28, 2008 at 6:05 PM

Jill Greenberg

How filth met opportunity and created a franchise.

Seven Dirty Habits of Highly Effluent People
Mike Rowe’s seven rules for job satisfaction.
Voyage of Discovery
Discovery Communications (DCI) which airs Dirty Jobs has more than 100 TV networks reaching 1.5 billion subscribers. Here are four of DCI’s key properties.
Video: Mike Rowe 'Bears' All for Fast Company
Get an exclusive behind the scenes peek at Dirty Jobs star Mike Rowe, getting good and dirty for Fast Company while romping with a bear.

Related Content

By 2006, Rowe had a bona fide hit on his hands. His carefree jig was up: The happy hand-modelizing prankster with a heart of gold and a short attention span had morphed into a BlackBerry-wielding impresario. When Whirlpool reached out to him in 2006 to help promote a new washer-dryer set, Rowe was open to the idea. He is, after all, a guy with lots of dirty clothes. They arranged a meet-and-greet with customers at a Lowe's in Woodstock, Georgia, near where he was filming. "We were expecting a couple hundred people," says Audrey Reed-Granger, Whirlpool's director of public relations. "More than 2,000 came--whole families, World War II veterans, an entire Boy Scout troop." Rowe, scheduled for a 2-hour visit, stayed for more than 10.

Rowe and Whirlpool are inking an agreement to do more events in 2008. And he has another deal on the boards with HP that's being finalized now. ("HP was started by two guys in a garage," he says admiringly.) He has also been in demand as a speaker for, of all things, tech firms such as Motorola.

But the largest, juiciest fruit in Rowe's basket is his new multipart arrangement with Ford. "About two years ago, I made a really short list of sponsors who would be right for the show," Rowe says. "Ford was the first name on it." To Rowe, Ford is the ultimate American company. Its trucks are, of course, fixtures on dirty-job sites. But when Ford first reached out to Rowe late in 2005 offering a Web campaign, he took a big gulp and passed. "I said, 'I'm interested, and I'm not sure I'm ready for a big national campaign, but that's what I want.'"

A year later, now with a hit on his hands, he took the extraordinary step of calling Ford back himself. And it was a much different conversation. In fact, in what amounts to a freak of nature in the traditional network-talent power structure, it was Rowe who brought Ford to his bosses. On Christmas Eve 2006, Rowe put in a call to Billy Campbell, then president of Discovery Networks. "I've just been offered, from the inventor of the automobile, an embarrassingly large deal," Rowe told him. "I have to make it. They need to be a sponsor of the show. Oh, and they have to know by the first of the year."

The move sent the network into a tizzy, partly because Toyota had already expressed an interest in the show. But Rowe, who describes himself as "half missionary and half mercenary," didn't see the Japanese as a fit. "They're a great company. But Ford makes sense." Moreover, the Toyota deal didn't include him: Ford was offering the most lucrative payoff of his career--by far. The deal coincided with an executive shuffle at Discovery; Campbell, among others, was out, and David Zaslav came in at the top. "We had some trepidation" about Ford at the beginning, Zaslav says. "We needed to make sure it worked for everyone." Ultimately, Rowe says, "we all got in the sandbox and sorted it out." Rowe gives Discovery credit for being fluid enough to accept his newly enterprising nature. In a line that wouldn't sound out of place in one of his six-figure speeches, he tells me, "Corporate cultures tend to step over good ideas if they don't come through the proper channels." But Rowe deserves credit for forcing the network to the table.

The Happy Few

The crew that puts on Dirty Jobs is, in every way, a band of brothers. Good-natured punking is part of life on the road. They can reengineer windshield-wiper nozzles to become moving water pistols; I watched them gleefully "test" a toy pellet gun on the torso of the willing production assistant. But the operation is remarkably sparse: There's Barsky the field producer (who also operates a camera), an audio technician, a director of photography, two other camera operators, and a production assistant. No location scout. No hair, makeup, or wardrobe people. No scripts. They've gotten seasick in eel boats, been attacked by monkeys, crawled through caves, and been lowered into storm drains hauling 100 pounds of expensive equipment. They're all dirty jobbers themselves. And they all get the point. "We really show up and do what they do and do the best we can to film it," says Barsky.

Today, on a loop through South Carolina, the last shoot of 2007 is a repaving of the NASCAR track at the nearby Darlington Speedway. It has an obvious synergistic appeal: NASCAR has a lot of fans, many of them holding down dirty jobs of their own. But Rowe is uncomfortable.

"Forget the fact that we're at war in an oil field, and these cars are burning fuel," Rowe muses when we talk about it. "This is a slickly packaged, multimillion-dollar corporate enterprise with millionaires driving 200 miles an hour on a curved track that regular people can't drive on." He searches for his next thought. "Is that really the mission of the show?"