Brent Monson

Brent Monson co-founded Clean Smarts and wrote the first version of it himself. For two years he was the only engineer on the product — scheduling, time tracking, inspections, payroll — built to the standard he’d learned writing financial systems that had to be correct at scale, every time, for publicly traded companies.

Why he took the problem seriously

Guillermo Rojas came to him in 2016 with a problem from inside the cleaning industry: crews he couldn’t see, work he couldn’t verify, and no software that closed the gap. Brent had spent his career on systems where “close enough” wasn’t acceptable, and he recognized the same class of problem — operational truth, documented and trustworthy.

They talked through what janitorial software would need to do that nothing on the market was doing, and came away with a name and a plan. Clean Smarts was incorporated in October 2016. First revenue arrived nine months later.

The calls he made early

Brent was the sole developer for the first two years. A few of his early decisions still separate Clean Smarts from other janitorial software:

• Multilingual from day one. The first customers already had multilingual teams, so internationalization was a launch requirement, not a later add-on. “I don’t know how competitors introduced Spanish late in their product development,” he says. The app supports more than 30 languages.
• Offline, when no one else was. He built punch-in/out to work without a connection. Most operational tools in competing platforms still require one.
• Bootstrapped, eyes open. He’d seen how investor pressure tilts a product company toward short-term growth. He and Guillermo chose to run lean instead, so the roadmap could follow what operators actually asked for.
• Always designing v-next. He thinks software has a short shelf life. Within a few years of shipping v1 of the mobile app, he assembled a great team and began tackling v2.

Most of the platform’s standout features — geofenced clock-in, QR-code location verification, the comprehensive meal and break compliance tracking that California clients pushed for, and payroll that replaced entire spreadsheet workflows (keep your own provider via export or sync, or run full-service payroll with Clean Smarts) — came out of the loop he set up: a customer asks, the team validates, it gets built properly.

Why documentation protects the cleaner

There’s a scene in UHF — yes, the Weird Al Yankovic movie — where a TV station executive fires the janitor for throwing away important documents, then discovers he’d left them on his own chair. Brent references it without irony. “I feel like janitors often get blamed as a reflex,” he says.

It shaped how he built the product. When cleaning work is documented — photos, timestamps, GPS check-ins, inspection records — accountability doesn’t only flow upward; it protects the person who did the work when a client points fingers after the shift.

The mobile app closes each shift with a line he added: “Thank you for making the world a cleaner place.” Small flourish, but it matters to him.