15-02-2025
From Serbian immigrant who spoke no English to Idaho small-business success story
Nikola Prvulj is an American success story.
The 30-year-old immigrant from Serbia didn't speak a lick of English when he came to the United States in 2015 on a basketball scholarship at Northwest Nazarene University.
Today, he runs a million-dollar office cleaning business in the Treasure Valley with 24 employees serving 70 commercial properties totaling 1 million square feet.
'He's a very intelligent person, and he basically figured everything out and took on the language and has done really quite well,' Konya Weber, professor and associate dean of the NNU College of Business, told me in a phone interview. 'He's constantly thinking. He's constantly trying to improve things and change things and make things better, and to be very competitive in his business model.'
Prvulj has a remarkable life story, born in 1994, quite possibly the worst time to be born in Belgrade, Serbia, in a country suffering economic and political hardship under the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic in a time when Serbia was heavily involved in the Yugoslav Wars involving Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Prvulj described his childhood as being akin to the character Mowgli in 'The Jungle Book.'
'I grew up very freely,' he said. 'I grew up like a Mowgli. I felt like Mowgli in the middle of a jungle. The world was a jungle, and I just wanted to have fun. I had fun. Everything I did, I had a lot of fun.'
Amid the harsh environment he grew up in, sports became a mainstay in his life.
'Sports was the biggest thing in my life, and because of sport, I actually had an opportunity to do something with my life,' he said. 'It taught me discipline, persistence and consistency, and hard work.'
He played youth basketball and rose through the ranks to play for what would be considered the juniors in the United States, winning a Serbian national championship when he was a teenager.
That led to a scholarship to play basketball at NNU, where he played for four seasons, from 2015-19.
Prvulj could have just stuck to basketball and had a good time for four years.
But he came to get an education, despite the fact that he couldn't speak English.
He said he spent about a year-and-a-half relying on other Serbian friends who spoke better English than he before he learned English well enough to start learning on his own.
He gravitated to NNU's business school, where he graduated with a double major in marketing and accounting.
He earned GNAC all-academic honors twice for basketball and took 18 credits each semester his junior and senior years, according to a profile of Prvulj in the NNU alumni magazine.
He also received the Gorden Olsen Outstanding Business Student award, voted by the business faculty as the senior business major most likely to succeed. The plaque hangs in his office today, one of his proudest accomplishments.
'He's very smart about thinking about how to make a system to improve his business,' NNU's Weber said. 'He reads a lot, and he's very focused on continually improving.'
Weber served as Prvulj's academic adviser when he arrived on NNU's campus and for all four years. Her family still invites him over for holiday dinners.
'I would say he's definitely in the top 5% who really have had that entrepreneurial drive and really lived it out,' Weber said. 'He didn't just talk about, 'I want to start my own business.' He started one, he did it, and he continues to do it at a high level.'
Not only that, Prvulj also worked as a janitor through college, which proved to be the foundation for starting his own cleaning business after graduating. So, really, he had three jobs: academics, athletics and cleaning.
'To me, that's very impressive and just remarkable,' Weber said.
One of the things that impressed me during my conversations with Prvulj was how magnanimous he is about others for helping him along the way.
He gave credit to his youth and junior basketball coaches, he thanked a litany of professors and coaches at NNU ('I wouldn't be here without them,' he said), and he raved about Berger, not only for taking a chance on him but for mentoring him in business. He lavishes praise on Paul Fleming of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce for helping him.
Prvulj not only gives credit to all of his current Executive Cleaning employees, but to those who have left the company, as well.
'Each one of them, since I started forming the leadership team, they have a credit for what we are today,' Prvulj said. 'I want to say that we had some great people. They're not all with us now, but I think they gave their 120%. I couldn't ask for more, and I couldn't get more.'
My first interview with Prvulj was at Slow By Slow coffee shop in downtown Boise, a location with significance because that's where he first met with local angel investor Dan Berger, and Executive Cleaning of Idaho was born.
To start Executive Cleaning, Prvulj started cold-calling business leaders and investors who were part of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce. One of those people he talked to was Berger, a recent Boise transplant from New York City, where Berger founded Social Tables, which he sold to Cvent for $100 million in 2018. Berger moved to Boise shortly thereafter for a greater sense of community and belonging.
'He reached out to me on a weekday, and he called my cell, and I picked up, and he was like, 'Hello. My name is Nikola. I want investment,'' Berger recalled. 'I was like, all right, well, I got nothing to do, and this sounds interesting, so let's meet up. So we met up the next day.'
Berger said he saw something in Prvulj and was impressed enough to fund the startup of Executive Cleaning.
'What I saw in him were the two qualities that I think every entrepreneur needs,' Berger said, 'which is work ethic — can they, will they bust their (butt)? — and coachability — will they listen to mentorship?'
It wasn't always smooth sailing, and Prvulj tried to scale up too quickly in 2023 and almost ended up losing the business. But he listened to Berger's advice and righted the ship, so that by 2024, the business was back on solid footing with more than $1 million in revenue.
Prvulj's long-term vision for Executive Cleaning includes using artificial intelligence to make the business more efficient and potentially franchising the business to expand its reach.
Prvulj came to the U.S. on a student visa but has stayed here on asylum. But that means he's unable to travel outside the U.S. to see his 5-year-old son, Viktor, who was born in the U.S. but is back in Serbia with his mother.
Their separation weighs on Prvulj. His eyes well with tears when he talks about Viktor.
'He is my biggest motivation for everything,' he said. 'I never experienced the amount of love than when he was born.'
When I stopped by the Executive Cleaning offices in Garden City recently, Prvulj was talking to Viktor via video on his phone as Viktor was going to bed, something they do every night.
Prvulj is in the process of applying for permission to continue staying in the U.S. under the International Entrepreneur Rule, which would allow him to travel in and out of the country so he can see Viktor.
But the U.S. immigration system is broken. It's slow, backlogged and onerous, unnecessarily punishing people like Prvulj, someone who is contributing to the economy and the community.
Prvulj in every sense is an American immigrant success story.
As we were talking, it occurred to me that he hadn't said anything about sports, which he said has been a center of his life.
What's he been doing since he stopped playing basketball for NNU?
Nothing, it turns out, and that was becoming a problem, he realized. He needed that outlet and that balance in his life.
'I'm an athlete,' Prvulj said. 'Without that sport part, I wouldn't be able to function.'
So he took up mixed martial arts, training in the evenings in Nampa and competing as an amateur. His record is 2-1.
So MMA fighter by night, Executive Cleaning Idaho executive by day.
When it comes to the business, Prvulj is a man obsessed, thinking of ways to grow the business, make it more efficient, more profitable — and a better place for its workers.
'I want to create an extraordinary workplace for local people,' Prvulj said. 'We offer great wages, we offer a lot of great benefits to people. I want to create an environment that local people will have a career. I want people to retire in Executive Cleaning and to serve Idaho, to serve the Treasure Valley.'
Given where he's come from in just the past 10 years, I think it's a safe bet that he's going to be successful.
