How to Start a Commercial Cleaning Business: Lessons From $10 an Hour to a Franchise
Matt Pencarinha left a corporate salary, took a $10-an-hour job, and bought his first accounts for $500. Here's what he learned about starting and growing a commercial cleaning business that actually scales.
If you want to start a commercial cleaning business, the fastest path isn’t a fancy website or the perfect logo. It’s a few accounts, a way to deliver them well, and relentless focus on the handful of activities that actually grow the company. Everything else is noise. That’s the throughline from how Matt Pencarinha built his.
On the very first episode of Tech & Tidy – From Corporate to Cleaning: Matt’s Journey, I sat down with Matt Pencarinha, founder of Asset Commercial Services and the voice behind the Commercial Cleaning CEO YouTube channel. We’d first met at ISSA in Vegas. His origin story is the kind most operators can relate to: humbling, unglamorous, and a little bit accidental.
Starting small: from a corporate salary to $10 an hour
Matt had a business degree and a “really nice corporate job.” He also noticed the guys earning big money around him were divorced and miserable, and he didn’t want a life that was just a job. So he left.
A mentor pointed him toward a small-business owner who needed help, and Matt signed on for $10 an hour as the man’s “vice president.” He walked into a business in shambles: cleaning, lawn care, and facility maintenance all duct-taped together. Three months later, the owner decided to shut it down. The owner planned to hand a few accounts to a neighbor. Matt offered to at least pay for the supplies. He wrote a check for $500, got one employee and a handful of accounts, and that was the start. Around 2014, he was doing houses, restaurants, and commercial work, taking everything the way most new owners do. It was hard.
He eventually turned that first company around and sold it. Not for a glorious number, but enough to count as semi-successful. The real payoff came after: once his mind could rest, the ideas poured in, and the whole thing felt far more possible than it ever had.
Buy the playbook instead of paying with a decade
One of Matt’s sharpest points was about consultants. He hired expensive ones, “the New York guys,” for formal business education, and he doesn’t regret it.
His framing: you’re going to pay for knowledge either way. You can pay with ten years of your time and a lot of pain, or you can pay upfront and get there in less than half the time. Take your earnings and you could park them in the stock market for 10 or 20 percent, or you could turn the same money into a multi-million-dollar business, if you know what to do, when, and how. Buying the information is how you skip the learning curve. By the time he started Asset, he already knew what he was doing and what he didn’t want to do. The answer was just: let’s go.
Return to signal: the habit that separates good owners from busy ones
Here’s the idea I keep coming back to. A mentor told Matt that what makes a successful CEO is how frequently they “return to signal.”
Signal is what actually moves the needle: marketing that produces results, clients you’re retaining, profitability you’re driving through how you set up operations, a team that sticks around because of the culture you built. Noise is everything that feels like progress but isn’t: sitting on the phone for an hour with a marketing service you’ll never hire just to be polite, or staring at your profitability reports so long you manage yourself to death.
New owners get stuck in the noise for a week, a month, a year, then look up and realize the business is sinking. High-caliber owners ask, in this moment, “Am I doing something that moves the ball down the field?” Matt pointed to Steve Jobs being obsessed with the next 18 hours instead of a 20-year plan. The discipline is constant. Good commercial cleaning software helps here. When your dashboards and reports surface the few numbers that matter, it’s a lot easier to tell signal from noise.
Time, money, and feelings: where signal actually lives
When I asked how he tells busyness from real progress, Matt gave three filters.
Time. Is this giving someone their most valuable resource back, whether that’s your frontline crew, your managers, you, or your clients? His example: hiring. If recruiting eats 40 hours a week of your management team’s time, build a system that does it in 20. Asset built one that handles it in about two hours a week at their size. That was a massive upfront investment of his own time to buy back months, even years, of his life, which freed the company to grow faster.
Money. Simply put: is it putting more money in someone’s pocket?
Positive feelings. This one’s underrated in our industry. Unlike a car coming off a line, a cleaning result depends on how the person doing it feels. Tick a cleaner off and it shows in the work. So building good feelings (starting with you, the owner) is signal, because it grows the company. Watch your job costing and margins, sure, but don’t mistake watching the numbers for changing them.
Real culture is making people feel important, not handing out gift cards
Matt is a Dale Carnegie guy. How to Win Friends and Influence People, he says, should be required reading for every owner, because most people problems trace back to breaking one of its fundamentals. The first: everyone wants to feel important. If someone feels like a number, they’ll treat you like one. You’re just another job to them.
So Asset built a feedback loop. Regularly (it started as quarterly), employees sit down with a manager and give feedback on the job, without the usual management talk about complaints and to-do lists. Just: How’s it going? Is the vacuum working? What do you need to be successful? Position yourself as the foundation for their success. Staff parties and food are nice, but without those real conversations, the rest reads as gimmicky and can backfire.
Culture is both scalable and not. You have to start it yourself, then make it contagious so your managers carry it. Matt learned this the hard way when he had to turn a company around. Once the managers owned the culture, the business could finally scale, which is exactly how Asset became a franchise built so the company only makes money when its franchisees do.
The takeaway for new owners
Starting a commercial cleaning business doesn’t take a fortune. Matt started with $500 and one account. What it takes is the discipline to keep returning to signal, the willingness to buy knowledge instead of bleeding ten years learning it, and a real investment in the people who do the work.
Watch From Corporate to Cleaning: Matt’s Journey on Clean Smarts YouTube, then book a demo to see how the right system frees you up to focus on what actually grows your company.
About the author
Co-Founder
Brent thinks about product the same way he thinks about the people using it — methodically, with an eye on what comes next. He was the only engineer behind Clean Smarts for its first two years, building the multilingual and offline capabilities no competitor had. Integrity and long-term thinking are how he works.
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