Jose Macedo, a former poker player hailing from Portugal, is back in the news after several years because of his successful cleaning business at the UK-based University of Lancaster. Macedo had left the poker world after he got involved in a cheating scandal, which led to the loss of his sponsorship and the poker community’s trust. However, Macedo is back on the road to success after launching a successful cleaning service for the benefit of the university students.
According to SIC, a Portuguese website, Macedo decided to quit his poker gaming career and plunge into a business adventure, which gives university students the opportunity to earn money by getting involved in a cleaning service. Speaking about the initiative, which he handles with the help of two Portuguese students, Macedo said:
We have started by cleaning bathrooms and bedrooms on the university campus. In only three months, we have managed to clean over 1000 rooms.
Revealing further details, he said that the business has several clients and seven employees. He also said that his business initiative picked up quickly especially owing to high demand on the part of students, which encouraged the three entrepreneurs
to first extend the service to kitchens within the campus and then also to apartments off of the campus.
This generated a turnaround of as much as €240,000.
Commenting on the initiative, Joe Born of the Lancaster University Students’ Union said:
It’s common to have students with good ideas. But what these guys have been doing more than anything and more than anybody, is to make sure people have confidence in their business and allow it to happen in their campus.
Jose Macedo was a noted poker pro and had even earned the title of “Portuguese poker prodigy” before beginning his cleaning business. By the time he turned 18, he had amassed a small fortune playing poker. His poker success story, however, ended abruptly when he admitted to cheating in response to certain allegations on Two Plus Two Forum.
In 2011, he confessed,
I did something stupid. A friend of mine, whom I introduced to poker, made a suggestion to me which was, I’m not going to sugar coat it, cheating. I don’t know why I agreed. I don’t know why I did it. I guess it was a mixture of guilt and stupidity and feeling shitty for getting him involved in something which seemed to be bad for him
