By
On a
Thursday night in October 2013, Simon Brooks packed his belongings and drove
west toward Silicon Valley, thinking he was on his way to creating the next Scrabble
app, a word game he called Gadzookery. He had little to lose. Mr. Brooks owed
more on his house in Louisville, Ky., than it was worth. His marriage was over
and he had been working in restaurants and bars for two years, ever since the
financial crisis forced him to leave his job as a mortgage broker.
“I put
my dogs and my bags in the car and drove to the Dojo,” Mr. Brooks said. He was
referring to Hacker
Dojo in Silicon Valley, a community space for technology
start-ups whose members (fees generally start at $125 a month) have
round-the-clock access. The hacker space proved to be the key to his new
enterprise — just not in the way he had imagined.
Mr.
Brooks arrived with $12,000 and a rough version of his educational word game.
He hoped to assemble a team at the Dojo to help him rebuild it but, once there,
he found neither the developers he needed nor a room to rent. He wound up in
motels instead. Four months later, he was out of money and living in his 1999
Lexus. When the Dojo’s manager asked for a volunteer to clean the restrooms and
kitchen every afternoon in exchange for free membership, Mr. Brooks raised his
hand. Without realizing it, he had taken the first step toward creating his
start-up: a cleaning company that relies on analytics to improve efficiency and
set prices. Larry Maloney, a founding member of Hacker Dojo, said people were
dissatisfied with the quality of the work done by the cleaners before Mr.
Brooks volunteered.
Normally, said Mr. Maloney, the Dojo smelled a bit sour, largely
because of developers working late into the night. “After Simon,” he said, “it
smelled squeaky clean.”That was no easy feat. The Dojo is
a sprawling space of more than 16,000 square
feet. It never closes and typically has at least 300 visitors each day.After
eight months, management got rid of the small local firm that did its cleaning
and began paying Mr. Brooks $400 a month for his services. Eight months after
that — having spent about two years trying unsuccessfully to create the
Gadzookery app — Mr. Brooks took a hard look at the commercial cleaning market.
“It was
a $51 billion industry,” consisting mostly of small firms, he said. Mr. Brooks
saw an opportunity. Hacker Dojo’s management agreed to give him a one-month
advance to buy the equipment and supplies he needed to start, and in 2015 he
started Squiffy
Clean. There are about 100,000 firms in the commercial cleaning
business in the country today, said John Barrett, executive director of ISSA, a
trade association for the global cleaning industry. The 50 largest companies
account for about 30 percent of the revenue, according to an industry report
published by Dun & Bradstreet, leaving the other firms plenty of room to
capture customers.
More
than 90 percent of janitorial services companies are sole proprietorships,
according to a report from the industry research firm
IBISWorld. But the greatest turnover is at the start-up level, Mr. Barrett
said.
“The churn is unbelievable,” he said. So far Mr. Brooks has
avoided that churn. Six months after he began, he was earning enough to move
his business out of Hacker Dojo and into an office in Palo Alto. His company is
unusually high-tech for the industry. It collects more than 700 points of data,
like the time it takes to mop a square foot, and uses the information to
improve and refine its cleaning methods, and to set prices. “We have a client
with an 8,000-square-foot building and we dove into the data and made changes
to how the cleaning is done, such as combining certain tasks or changing the
order in which they are done, and saved $600 in monthly labor costs,” Mr.
Brooks said. “Margins in the industry are so low that we have to shave off
every bit of labor we can.”
Most small cleaning companies
charge by the number of labor hours, but Squiffy Clean created an algorithm
that sets prices based on the data it collects about cleaning sites. The
company is also developing a technology to prevent fraudulent workers’
compensation claims. It will use data to help determine whether an incident
occurred. Mr. Barrett at ISSA says although large companies in the contract
cleaning business use high-tech methods, it is far less common among smaller
firms.
Compared
with other office cleaning companies, Squiffy Clean generally pays a higher
hourly wage (about $17 per hour). The median hourly wage in the industry is
$11.27, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It also gives cleaners
equity in the company and makes their safety a top priority. The residential
cleaning service Handy, for example, was sued in 2014 by two of its former house
cleaners, who accused the company of a variety of labor law violations.
Starting
any business, regardless of the technology, is difficult — and even more so
when the founder is homeless. But Mr. Brooks was physically and mentally
healthy and had the support of Mr. Maloney and others at Hacker Dojo. One of Squiffy Clean’s first clients was Singularity
University, a Silicon Valley think tank and start-up accelerator. “A lot of people view janitorial work as just a way to make
money, but Simon embraces it as the very important job it is and takes a very
scientific approach to it,” said Tom LeGan, the facilities manager at
Singularity. “He’s also very compassionate about his workers. You don’t see
that in many corporations, let alone a janitorial services company.”
Mr.
Brooks still faces many of the same difficulties as other Bay Area start-ups,
including a tight labor market. “We are all trying to attract the best engineers
and the cleaning industry is not sexy, so it’s tough,” he said. Whatever the
challenges, he said his life had been improved by entrepreneurship. He no
longer lives in his car and has moved into an old 34-foot recreational vehicle.
When he gets home, he is grateful just to have a shower and a bed. “I’ve lived
in vehicles for so long I’ve gotten used to it,” Mr. Brooks said. “And this is
a whole lot better than a car.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/business/smallbusiness/a-cleaning-start-up-wielding-mops-buckets-and-700-data-points.html?_r=0
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