The Moneyball for Janitorial Blog

How Modern Janitorial Software Enables Real-Time Profitability‍A mid-sized BSC running $10M in revenue with just 5% labor overages loses $350K annually, often without knowing which accounts are responsible. This isn't a rounding error. It's the difference between growth capital and crisis mode.Job costing should answer three basic questions: Is this account making money? Which sites need immediate attention? Is the contract priced for profitability? Most commercial cleaning companies struggle to answer these questions until weeks after the work is done. The problem isn’t mathematical— it's structural. 

The Entry-Level Software Trap: When Growing Janitorial Companies Hit the Ceiling‍Most janitorial service providers start with the same playbook: land contracts, deliver quality, grow. When you're managing 20 or 30 sites, basic scheduling software gets the job done. You know your cleaners, your clients know you, and you're generally aware of problems before they escalate.Then something changes. You hit 50 sites. Then 100. Then 200. The tools that worked when you were smaller start creating blind spots. Shifts get skipped without anyone noticing until the client calls. Quality control becomes inconsistent across regions. Your supervisors spend more time hunting down information than preventing problems.

Part 6 of the Janitorial Margin Playbook Series – turning individual metrics into an actionable system that protects profitability and drives sustainable growth.‍Over the past five articles, we've covered the metrics that matter most in janitorial: margins, time theft, overtime, budget discipline, and retention. But tracking metrics in isolation won't move the needle. The operators who win are the ones who connect these data points into a coherent system—one that catches problems early, assigns clear ownership, and makes course correction fast.This final installment shows how to put it all together: from G&A discipline to real-time oversight, and how to use the consolidated playbook table as your roadmap.

Part 5 of the Janitorial Margin Playbook Series — Why client retention becomes critical at scale, how portfolio discipline protects long-term margins, and why keeping the right accounts matters more than just adding new ones. A guest post from Jordan Tong of Elite BSC, co-author of the Janitorial Margin Playbook.‍When a janitorial company is small, growth often comes from saying “yes” to nearly every opportunity. A new account means more hours, more revenue, more visibility. But once you’ve scaled to dozens—or even hundreds—of accounts, the game changes.

Part 4 of the Janitorial Margin Playbook Series — how budget vs actual discipline protects profitability and why fixing overages early keeps margins intact. A guest post from Jeff Carmon of Elite BSC, co-author of the Janitorial Margin Playbook.In the janitorial industry, protecting margin is not just about getting pricing right or negotiating good supply costs. Often, the biggest leaks come from much more basic areas: jobs running over budget and accounts that never generate enough return to justify the work. Both issues are common, both are preventable, and both have a much larger impact on your profitability than most owners realize.

Part 3 of the Janitorial Margin Playbook Series — how overtime erodes profitability and what operators can do to prevent it.Margins in janitorial are already under pressure, and overtime is one of the fastest ways for profitability to slip. While some overtime is unavoidable, chronic overages are often the result of weak scheduling, poor oversight, or underpriced contracts. Left unchecked, they can quickly snowball into hundreds of thousands in lost profit.

Part 2 of the Janitorial Margin Playbook Series — how time theft erodes margins and what operators can do to prevent it. Margins in janitorial are already razor-thin, with labor consuming up to 70% of revenue. That leaves little room for error. As we noted in Part 1: The Most Important Metric, understanding your overall margin is the starting point, but time theft is one of the hidden factors that can quietly erode it.Imagine running payroll and noticing a site is consistently logging 20% more hours than budgeted. At first it looks like a data glitch, until you dig in and discover a pattern of missed punches, early departures, and edits made after the fact. What feels like small slips can snowball into hundreds of thousands lost each year.The good news: while some amount of time theft is inevitable, it can still be tracked, measured, and reduced — but only if owners know what to look for.

In the janitorial industry, growth often came with complexity. More sites meant more staff, more variables, and more chances for things to go sideways. For Vancouver-based Cleantech Service Group, that complexity was starting to slow them down. They needed to rethink how their field operations were structured.In 2023, the Cleantech team adopted BrightGo's janitorial workforce management software to bring their workforce management into a single, integrated system. The platform combined real-time janitorial time tracking, mobile inspections, and site-level cleaning company KPIs. The results? A 50% reduction in account loss, $1M+ saved by reducing time theft, and 60% revenue growth over two years.

Part 1 of the Janitorial Margin Playbook Series, co-developed with Elite BSC to provide operators with industry benchmarks and profitability strategies.Margins in janitorial are notoriously thin. Labor consumes the majority of revenue, clients demand more for less, and even small inefficiencies can erase profitability. Despite their importance however, margins aren’t always thoroughly understood. Many owners know top-line revenue and payroll costs, but lack clarity on how their performance compares to peers, or where hidden leaks are cutting into profit.