Mark S.

Mark has been in commercial cleaning since the 1980s. In 1991 he started his own company and grew it the slow way, building to hundreds of recurring customers and a crew of over 150 workers. Some of the customers he won stayed for decades. He systematized the operation and eventually sold it.

Along the way he ran the inspections himself, built up a team of managers and supervisors, and watched the same pattern repeat: nobody calls about the hundred things a crew gets right, only about the one thing that gets missed. Customers told him directly: “All cleaning companies are the same. You are great for three months and then the service goes downhill.”

The successful companies are the ones who can overcome that stereotype and deliver high-quality services to their customers for decades.

That is why he co-founded KleanProof. In his words: the problems cleaning companies have today are the exact same problems they had 40 years ago, proving the work, keeping the customer, and scaling past what one owner can personally watch. KleanProof turns inspections into proof: every deficiency photographed, tracked from found to fixed, and reported in a form customers actually care about. It is all about proving your value to the customer and showing that your company is worth their loyalty.

What Mark writes about

Mark’s articles are written for the person running a cleaning company: hiring your first supervisor, keeping customers past the honeymoon, and the quality systems that let you stop managing by assumption. Everything he publishes here draws on what he did, not what he read.