Business owners determine growth trajectory, whether it be through expansion or acquisition. But they need to be able to streamline and optimize to create an impact for your company, or you’ll never grow. 

A southern Florida property management company named Property Works came face-to-face with this exact challenge back in 2016. They were rapidly growing the janitorial side of their business by acquiring numerous companies and hiring subcontractors.

But with no actual 1:1 experience in commercial cleaning services, the company’s business leaders struggled with maintaining quality, efficiency, and driving growth. 

That’s when they began searching for an answer to their dilemma, one that could supercharge their expansion into the cleaning industry and provide leadership with the tools to navigate that growth.

The need for a scalable framework

Eventually, along your business’s growth journey, you’ll hit a wall. Your cleaning company will achieve a new stage of growth that your current processes can’t surmount. It’s not something every small business can see coming, especially when expanding at an increased rate, but it is inevitable. 

Investing in a new system for operating your scaling business will be essential. For Property Works, that system was Aspire’s business management software.

The Batallan brothers are entrepreneurs who came from a background in real estate before founding their property management and maintenance startup. They specialized in building systems that allowed them to manage their variety of properties, but as they expanded into the uncharted territory of janitorial services, they realized they needed more. 

“We were making a couple of million dollars a year, and we wanted to grow,” said Antonio Batallan, founder of Property Works. “We were struggling. How do you find bigger potential clients? How do you reduce costs and have information on hand when making decisions? I was on this mission. I put it on myself to find what larger organizations did—that’s where we wanted to be. That’s when I found Aspire.”

Aspire enabled Property Works to build frameworks across the board that drove consistent success, allowing them to:

• Curate individualized and companywide performance dials to increase visibility

• Standardize workflows throughout their network of businesses to maintain consistency in processes and operations

• Provide a centralized hub for communication, operations, and collaboration

Connecting their growing company through a management system gave them the visibility to monitor and steer each area of their business with a personalized touch, increasing the number of potential customers they could serve with their current infrastructure.

A streamlined roadmap to growth

Growing a service business is a marathon, not a sprint. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to speed up the journey. Every growth stage is an opportunity to fast-track success and get ahead of your competition, but only if you invest in the right areas.

Employee Success

If your managers, decision-makers, and operators don’t have the skills or capacity to scale your business, you’ll hit a gridlock. Your company has to first grow from within to withstand growing externally by taking on new customers.

You can keep your internal team ahead of your growth trajectory by investing in a system that enhances employees in their:

• Work capacity

• Skill sets

• Learnings  

For Property Works, they realized through Aspire’s management platform they hadn’t only found a framework for taking on new business but empowered leaders who could make a difference.

Chief of Operational Strategy at Property Works, Dana Shaw, understood the impact Aspire had on developing leaders as the business grew.

“When a new account manager comes on board, they're given their own accounts,” Shaw said. “They have a task of going into Aspire and reading and learning independently. It's their responsibility to find the billing contact, find the primary contact, get a meeting, and look at the ongoing jobs that have been sold. Maybe look at the jobs that have been lost. Why didn't we sell them? Where are we at in the gross margin overall? Where are we at in our individual jobs?”

Go beyond marketing strategies to create a culture of innovation and growth in your organization

Expanding your business into new cleaning services and markets isn’t a factor of your marketing campaigns and Facebook ad buys. Instead, growth is a commitment to ongoing improvement in your current operations. Successful cleaning businesses must act quickly to get new hires up to speed so they’re able to contribute new innovations to the organization.

Aspire is an employee-enablement system that encourages adaptability from top to bottom. It’s a tool for scaling, as well as onboarding. Aspire removes the nuance of onboarding and empowers teams to expand their skill sets independently, whether you’re onboarding an entirely new sector or hiring a team of decision-makers as the face of your business. 

“It's a task in itself to sit and learn the new account that you've been given before you even go and step foot on the property,” Shaw says. “The ability to do that would be impossible without Aspire.”

Streamlined functions

Instead of walking employees through multiple systems, communication lines, and processes, Aspire reduces these steps to a few simple clicks. Streamlining tasks and automating certain operations is how janitorial companies build their companies to move at the speed of their own growth trajectory. 

“What I like about Aspire’s platform is that everything was very laid-out,” an account manager at Property Works said. “You don't have to do all these extra steps, as Aspire does it for you.” 

Account managers have dozens of tedious and menial daily operational tasks required by each property and cleaning job ticket. These nuances can make it hard for new and growing leaders to find confidence in their roles.

The right management software makes hard work more rewarding, minimizes tedium with CRM automation, and provides business owners with more value for their labor costs by freeing new talent to focus on the more critical areas of your business. 

“[Aspire] helps me organize everything. I probably couldn't do it without it because it's too much to keep track of,” another account manager said. “You can put in when you want the proposal, when you think it will start, write the description, attach photos, and send it directly to the client. You don't have to do anything. It's a one-stop shop. That makes it easier to manage.”

The proper management software should function as a personal assistant to your leaders and the functions of their roles, enabling them to operate confidently, flexibly, and efficiently.

These benefits have proved valuable in Property Works’ growth journey. They’ve ramped up new hires much faster, even trusting new managers with no industry experience with high-profile accounts in their target markets.

Remaining fully connected

Keeping all the details connected is essential with the many moving pieces that go into an expanding business. Whether subcontractor hires, new business acquisitions, or service expansions, you need a system to manage it as if it were your flagship business. This was a priority for Property Works, with services and companies in various property types. 

Business management software keeps your operations running from one centralized location, regardless of how big your own business grows. The right software should provide the right mix of functionality to keep your business aligned:

• Enhanced Visibility: Regardless of the measure of success for your services, you need all your performance monitoring and reporting coming from one hub to ensure you’re not searching for insights across siloed platforms.**

• Clear communication: As a decision-maker or manager, you need to be aware of what’s happening throughout the business, from progress on jobs to the status of accounts, overdue invoices, and issues on the job site. Aspire users can follow up with team members and customers right from the platform.

• Collaborative Features: The only way to further the expertise of your developing teams is to merge organizational knowledge into a collective unit, where decisions aren’t made in silos and different perspectives can be heard. 

“You have one place to go to, and everything's there. Your employees, your properties, your profitability, everything's there,” Jim Ciotti, Property Works’ Operational Director, said. “You're not going to 10 different programs or whatever to figure out things. It's all in one place.”

Use exhaustive visibility to create a specific, actionable business plan for scaling your cleaning business

As a supervisor of operations, having comprehensive visibility is critical. Aspire allows leadership to monitor the business from top to bottom, allowing them to get as involved as they need to, where they need to be.

“I use the platform for tracking opportunities with the account managers, going through them monthly to see what they have out there, what we can close, revisit, and resend. I use it to track review dates for employees and expired licenses,” Ciotti said.

The right business tools remove the risk of operational silos and tunnel-vision decision-making. Aspire enables customizable companywide transparency for how your business operates. This means leadership can step in from afar to direct local business teams to seize rising opportunities or address potential issues.

Discover the tricks to investing in your business scale

Identifying a need for scale before it arrives is half the challenge. Knowing what solution to invest in once you reach that need is just as important. For Property Works, the decision was clear from the onset.

“There's a close alignment between Aspire’s drive to continuously innovate and improve its product and our drive to not just gain new clients but continue offering new services to existing clients,” Shaw said.

Aspire’s cloud-based janitorial business software provides the features that enable cleaning business owners to expand their operations into new services, increase employee development, and facilitate the infrastructure needed for a high-growth company.

→ A comprehensive management platform is crucial to the growth of your commercial cleaning business.

If your company wants to invest in scale and growth, it takes more than just increasing your spending on Google Ads. Download our ebook, How to Grow Your Janitorial Business with Management Software. Discover more about Property Works’ journey to growth and get an insider perspective on what it means to supercharge growth with management software.

Use the form to tell us about your janitorial company, so you can begin investing in your growth today.