Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Opportunity.
That’s the way Steven Harper summed up the benefit of adding Aspire software to his commercial cleaning business, Spectrum Building Services, in Los Alamitos, California.
“There’s a lot more opportunity in front of us to get bigger accounts,” said Harper, founder, President and CEO of Spectrum. “We get to compete with companies that are larger than us in most cases.”
And by increasing its business with larger companies, Spectrum has seen impressive growth. Harper said the business was at $7 million when it decided in 2023 to go with Aspire, the cloud-based software for commercial cleaning and landscaping businesses.
“(In 2024) we’re at $11 million to $12 million,” he said.
Harper pointed to AutoNation, a longtime, important client. Since adding Aspire, Spectrum has doubled its revenue with AutoNation.
“Aspire helps mitigate the challenge of growth,” Harper said. “I feel like we have an advantage because we do what we say we’re going to do, and we can show that within Aspire. Having the software and the tools to make that happen has opened up a market for us that we never really explored.”
The path to success
Harper took an interesting path to owning his own business—which included time with the mouse when he worked as Hotels General Manager for DisneyWorld. Harper has an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Cal State-Long Beach and an MBA in Finance from UCLA. His background has been in managing elements of the corporate business world—finance, operations, engineering.
He worked for several Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Boeing, FedEx, and Gateway. Motivated to work for himself, he started Spectrum in December 2001. Managing a staff of 1,500 at Disney helped him learn the importance of processes and systems.
“Disney was great in that they relied on a lot of repeat business, so you had to make it so that people wanted to come back,” he said. “And janitorial is very, very similar in that the heartbeat of this business is doing a good job.
“This is not a complicated business at all, and it doesn't require sales and marketing. It doesn't rely on a whole bunch of stuff, but it does require that you know how to execute well, that you understand that your people are the ones that are delivering the service, and making sure that you have systems and processes and tools in place to sort of make everything happen.”
For Spectrum Building Services, Aspire is a big tool for doing that.
A culture of excellence
Harper prides himself on bringing value to customers and treating the team with respect and dignity. His other job is as President and CEO of CEO Life Lessons, which helps those seeking to learn more about Thought Leadership.
He fervently believes that hiring, training, and retaining the best staff leads to an excellent level of service. The result: a culture of excellence.
For years, Spectrum relied initially on spreadsheets. They tried brands of software, but found it difficult to mine the data the business needed. There were no dashboard metrics that managers could assess, and Harper had to assign one person to do reports. Harper found Aspire, found it integrated with QuickBooks and Inova, and found the data it produced and how available it was to every member of the team.
“It was about making sure that as we're growing and scaling that we had a software that would grow and scale with us in a way that allowed us to empower everyone,” Harper said. “I wanted everyone to be able to work in the system.
“Everyone can work in Aspire, and we can create dashboards for the individual. They can look and see their metrics on a daily and weekly basis.”
Instead of getting data a week removed, Aspire allows Spectrum to view and compile metrics in real-time.
“We have a dashboard of the things that are important,” Harper said. “How many one-on-ones did you do this week? How many complaints did you have this week? How many work tickets are open this week? You go through all the lists of things that you need to be doing as an area manager to make sure that your business is running the right way, and you can manage them and get them done throughout the week. And it's that self-reporting that allows you to fix things along the way.”
Insight, not just data
Spectrum even refines the dashboard to show insight into the data.
“We have a dashboard where it's red, yellow, green,” Harper said. “If it’s green, things are going well. Yellow is you're OK, but a little bit behind. Red means there's something going on. Nobody wants to be red, and pretty much everybody wants to be green.”
Harper has found the information to be a team motivator.
“And honestly, everyone's bonuses are tied to those metrics,” he said. “So the area managers get bonuses up to 15% of their pay based on how well their metrics are for the quarter.”
Spectrum works with a wide variety of clients, from religious institutions to post-construction cleanup to apartment communities to retail to educational institutions. It provides services that include commercial cleaning and window washing to full-service commercial janitorial services.
Aspire has supported all of that work.
“(With Aspire) everything works really well together, and it's a lot easier for us,” Harper said. “There's a lot less friction for us to get things done.”