Inside a Bohaus Sprint: A Commercial Cleaning Company

The situation

An owner-led commercial cleaning company serving offices, medical suites, schools and retail spaces on nightly and weekly contracts. The owner sells and manages the accounts, a couple of supervisors oversee the night crews, and the office handles scheduling, payroll and invoicing in a scheduling tool and accounting software.

Work happens after hours, when the client is gone. That is the core problem. The client only sees the result the next morning, and when something is missed, the first sign is a complaint email. Supervisors drive between sites checking work, but they cannot see every room every night.

Sales has its own leak. The owner walks a building, prices it and sends a bid, then follows up when there is time. Many bids are never chased. Contracts renew quietly or end quietly, and the first warning of a lost account is often a cancellation notice.

What the sprint finds

In Discover, we ride with a supervisor on a night shift, read a quarter of client complaints, review the open bid list and look at contract end dates.

Most complaints trace back to the same handful of tasks: trash in a conference room, a restroom restock, a break room counter. Most of them happen on nights when a crew is short or new. The company has a checklist for each site, but it is a laminated sheet on a cart, and nobody can prove what was done.

On the sales side, open bids and contract dates sit in the owner's email and a spreadsheet, with no reminders attached.

In Diagnose, the photo-verified checklist ranks first, because it protects every existing contract every night. The one live system is a site record in the company's existing scheduling tool, with a digital checklist for each visit, and the bid, renewal and upsell workflow wired to the same record.

What it builds

Build ties the client's lifecycle to proof of work.

Bids. Each walkthrough creates a site record with square footage, room types, frequency and notes. AI drafts the scope of work and the proposal from the owner's pricing rules for the owner to review. Sent bids get a follow-up sequence, and the owner sees every open bid by age.

Onboarding. A won bid becomes an active site: checklist, access instructions, alarm codes kept in the secure field, contacts and special requests, set up before the first night.

Nightly checklists. Crews open the site's checklist on a phone, mark each area done and take photos of set points, such as restrooms, lobby and break room. Missed items and skipped photos alert the supervisor during the shift, not the next morning. Supply needs logged by the crew go to the office.

Client updates. Clients can get a short visit summary with photos, and an issue reported by the client becomes a ticket on the site record with a fix confirmed by photo.

Renewals and upsell. Contract end dates trigger renewal reminders well ahead, with a service summary drafted by AI from the site's history: visits completed, issues resolved, photos. The same record suggests add-ons based on the site, such as floor care, window cleaning or day porter service. Sites with rising complaint counts are flagged as retention risks for an owner call.

Hand over

In Hand over, supervisors learn the checklist settings and alerts, and train their crews on the phone checklist on site, in the crews' preferred languages where needed. The office learns site setup and the renewal queue. The playbook covers missed photos, client tickets, new site setup and who owns the system.

A dashboard tracks checklist completion by site and crew, open tickets, bids by stage, renewals due and at-risk sites, with a 30/60/90-day roadmap. Supply ordering by site and route planning for supervisors come next.

What changes

Supervisors catch misses during the shift. Clients see the work instead of just the invoice. Complaints drop because the commonly missed tasks get done and checked. Bids get chased. Renewal conversations start with a record of what the company delivered, and add-on work gets offered to clients who already trust the crew.

The company stops competing only on price, because it can show what it does.

What this means for your business

When your work happens out of sight, proof becomes part of the product.

For a cleaning company, that proof is the photo-verified checklist. For a security patrol firm, the scan log. For a snow removal contractor, the timestamped photo of a cleared lot.

That is a Bohaus Sprint: six weeks, fixed scope, four phases (Discover, Diagnose, Build, Hand over), and one live system inside the tools you already use, with a trained team, a playbook, a dashboard and a 30/60/90-day roadmap.