How to Scale a Cleaning Business: 5 Days, 11 Hires, and a Contract They Almost Lost

Zach Brown was an agriculture science teacher. His wife Lauren taught culinary arts. In May 2020, sitting at home during COVID with his dad’s Jani-King franchise as a reference point, they signed franchise documents and started ZBLT Industries. Within a week they had their first contracts. A year later, they had five employees including themselves.

Then a call came in that changed everything.

In Lessons from Scaling a Cleaning Business on Tech & Tidy, Zach tells the full story, including how a contract they’d already lost came back with five days’ notice and no crew lined up.

The contract that forced the jump

PEC, a large electrical company in central Texas, had a multi-location account: 15 to 20 buildings spread across eight different cities. The Jani-King regional office originally offered Zach and Lauren part of it, then over a weekend gave the whole thing to another franchise. Frustrating, but they moved on.

July 25th. Five days before the August 1st start date, Zach got a call from Dennis, the regional franchise owner. The other franchise couldn’t make it work. Could ZBLT take the whole contract?

They had five employees, counting themselves.

“How are we gonna pull this off?” Zach told the office they needed to compress the building walkthroughs to one day instead of two. He had to spend that time hiring, not touring. Over the next five days, working around the clock, posting on social media and leaning on word of mouth, they hired 11 people. By August 1st, they were operational.

Dennis had even promised: “If I got to come out to Johnson City and scrub toilets with you, we’ll make it happen.” Zach told him he might hold him to that.

By the end of August, PEC added more buildings. They were happy. ZBLT has held that contract for five years. They’re halfway through the second three-year RFP cycle and will bid it again in 2027.

What actually scaled them, and what surprised Zach

Landing the PEC contract forced a jump from 5 employees to 15–20. But Zach learned something counterintuitive once the big contract was running: he needed more small accounts, not fewer.

The multi-location work wasn’t enough hours per person at each site. Buildings spread across eight cities, cleaned a few times a week, which isn’t a full-time schedule for any one employee. To keep staff happy and close to full-time hours, ZBLT needed to layer in smaller contracts: the once-a-week, couple-thousand-square-foot accounts that fill the schedule gaps.

That mix of an anchor account plus a portfolio of smaller recurring work is what gave Zach the crew stability to actually grow.

The franchise question: why it was a “no-brainer”

Zach gets asked about the franchise decision a lot. Independent vs. Jani-King. His answer is consistent: no-brainer.

The support structure handled things Zach didn’t want to build from scratch. A sales team that worked leads and handed off signed contracts. A finance team that handled billing and collections, so he never had to chase a customer for payment before he could make payroll. An operations team for walkthroughs and one-time work.

“I didn’t have to hire a sales team. I didn’t have to go knock on doors to get paid.” He’d heard stories from employees who’d worked for other cleaning companies: if the owner didn’t collect from a client, staff didn’t get paid. ZBLT never had that problem.

Whether you’re a franchise or independent, the lesson is the same: someone has to own sales, billing, and operations. At small scale you can juggle all three. When you start landing PEC-sized accounts, you can’t.

The hardest thing nobody talks about: customer service

Zach’s answer when asked what he’d do differently: learn patience faster.

“Customer service is probably the hardest aspect of janitorial work. Everybody thinks they can clean, and there is a little bit of an art to it.” Teaching that art to staff and working through client concerns without losing composure is its own skill. Zach says he lost a few contracts early because he let frustration get the better of him.

Grace with staff. Grace with customers. That’s the operational lesson he kept coming back to, more than anything tactical about staffing or contracts.

Lauren and Zach run the business around two core values: Christ and common sense. He views his staff as coming to ZBLT for a reason, and that framing, he says, is what keeps him grounded when a site goes sideways or a client is demanding.

What the growth actually looked like

Six years in, ZBLT is at the managing-the-business stage. Lauren and Zach stepped out of the night-to-night cleaning once the PEC contract stabilized. They promoted supervisors and managers. The focus shifted from doing the work to building the systems that get the work done consistently.

That transition from operator to owner is what commercial cleaning software is designed to support. When crews are spread across multiple cities, you need GPS-verified time tracking so you know who showed up and when, not a text from a supervisor you hope to hear from by morning. When you’re managing a contract on its second RFP cycle, you need inspection records and photo proof you can hand the client instead of a verbal assurance.

Multi-location management is how you stop being the bottleneck when the work is happening in eight cities at once.

The scrappiness is the point

Zach and Lauren started with zero cleaning experience, in the middle of a pandemic, because they wanted to be their own boss and build something. Five days to hire eleven people for a contract they almost didn’t get. Cattle business running alongside it the whole time.

The operational systems come later. First comes the willingness to figure it out under pressure.

Watch Lessons from Scaling a Cleaning Business on Clean Smarts YouTube to hear Zach tell the full story, then book a demo to see what multi-site visibility looks like on your own accounts.