Crystal Clean saves thousands in monthly overhead with Aspire visibility, efficiency

The bottom line led Nathan McAllister to the family business.

“I had no money,” he said of his experiences shortly after college. “I had a Philosophy degree.”

Mind you, he’s glad to have the degree.

“I apply it to life, so it’s perfect,” he said.

But it didn’t lead to employment or income in Nova Scotia, the idyllic province that sits right on the ocean in the Southeast portion of Canada.

So McAllister turned to the family business. His grandfather was in the cleaning business, as were his father and uncles. So in 2007, McAllister started Crystal Clean Maintenance, a commercial cleaning entity that he said originally consisted of “me with a vacuum.”

Some 17 years later, Crystal Clean has 200 staff, 35 trucks, and almost $8 million in revenue.

One decision that helped the growth by clarifying processes and finances was when McAllister and Crystal Clean switched to Aspire, the all-in-one commercial cleaning and landscaping business software.

McAllister had tried two other types of software but found them not worth the price because they lacked certain features and cost too much to customize the software to the business.

Aspire, McAllister said, fixed a disconnect between operations and the administration that plagued the other softwares, and made billing smoother. That allowed him to concentrate on selling, which further helped the business.

“(Aspire) solves the issues at once, and quickly – like right out of the box,” McAllister said. “That’s the good thing.”

An immediate ROI with Aspire

He saw a fast return on investment, specifically with improved visibility of information and reduced overhead – which McAllister estimated at $23,000 saved per month.

“I need less admin help now, for sure,” he said. “We didn't have per-property reporting before Aspire, and it was not good. I'd look at the monthly P&L and say, ‘Oh shoot, that's lower than it should be. I wonder where the problem is?’

“Then the investigation would begin, which is a lot of time wasted trying to sniff out which locations were a problem. Aspire allowed me to reduce my admin from $55,000 to about $32,000 a month.”

A commercial cleaning business does serious work. Crystal Clean offers office cleaning, disinfecting services, industrial/warehouse cleaning, and commercial kitchen cleaning. Crystal Clean’s commitment is to quality; its promise is to address any concerns fully and immediately. Its subsidiary, Rainbow International, specializes in fire, smoke, water, flooding, ice and wind damage, and mold remediation.

McAllister said he will add a business this year involving snow removal.

“It’s the same world but different countries,” he said. “(Aspire’s) helped in that because I can see the whole picture quickly, and I can look at a piece quickly. It gives me more comfort in launching new services, having a structured, organized approach.”

More ability to track costs, profitability

Crystal Clear has offices in Elmsdale, Nova Scotia, and Fredericton, New Brunswick, areas McAllister calls “the least populated part of Canada.”

“So we’re driving three hours on two-lane roads in the woods to get to a job and cover it,” he said.

That matters because, before Aspire, Crystal Clean was not tracking incidental costs well – things like driving time, gas cost, etc.

“Now, suddenly, I have visibility,” he said. “Honestly, prior, we maybe were breaking even, once you think of the burden on supervisors, the gas, the travel time you’re paying.”

He’s just started wading into Aspire’s Reports feature, but early work has found one area where it has made a big difference: commissions to sales reps.

“I didn't want to do commission (before Aspire) because it was so hard to track and an endless pain,” he said. “Now I made a report and hired people on commission, and it's just as clean and easy as can be.

“Once a job's done, I can run this report and here's his commissions for this month.”

Meeting customer expectations is simplified

Aspire also solved McAllister’s challenges with communication and what he called a disconnect between the administration and operations. The sales team would hand off information that operations needed, but sometimes without data. That even led to missing billings, McAllister said.

With Aspire, the information sharing is built into the system.

“It's the same thing every time,” he said. “Ops know their hours immediately. They know the equipment they need to get going; they know the start date. It's repeated in the same way each time. And now ops can look on their own in the system, and if they have questions, they know who to go to.

“It's more the standardization there, I think, that helped with communication.”

He also finds he has better control over sales because he can input his benchmarks.

“I spend a lot of time writing up what each service is,” McAllister said. “Some of the previous problems were not allowing operations to meet the expectations of the customer within the limits they'd been given. Some of it was operations complaining they didn't know the customer expected this to be done during the day and not at night or these days of the week.

“Now, when that schedule's already in there, they just go to their schedule, they look at it, and it tells them everything they need.”