Redefining the Future of Janitorial Operations

INTRO/OUTRO [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the cleaning in motion show, a podcast interviewing successful cleaning business owners to hear what they're doing that works and what they've tried that's failed, all to help you grow your business. And now on to the show.

Samuel Klein [00:00:26]:
Welcome to the Cleaning in Motion show and the go to podcast for insights into commercial cleaning and facility management industries. Today, we're thrilled to have a special guest, Gerald Fong, a visionary and 2nd time founder who played a pivotal role in Meta, Facebook, or Instagram, you know, spearheading over 500,000,000 in revenue growth through innovative product engineering initiative. His early exposure to the world of facility management through his mother, a property manager, lay the foundation for his keen understanding of the industry. And in this episode, we'll be diving into Gerald's journey exploring innovative strides he's making with BrightGo, his current company. It's a modern janitorial operating system designed to revolutionize the way we think about cleaning and facility management. So stay tuned to hear Gerald's story. He will give us a lot of insights into how to scale your business, how to retain client, how to retain customers, and definitely open our eyes to new solutions and technologies that are out there that most of us in the cleaning space are not leveraging. So welcome to the Cleaning in Motion show, Gerald.

Samuel Klein [00:01:47]:
Hopefully, that intro represents who you are. But, no, I would love to to start by telling us a little bit who is. Tell us a little bit about your background to becoming a CEO of BrightGo, And, Yeah. Welcome to the show.

Gerald Fong [00:02:05]:
Thanks, Sam, for the warm welcome.

Gerald Fong [00:02:08]:
Let's see. Yeah. So my background, my story began when I was in highschool. My mom was a property manager, so after she picked me up from school she will visit

Gerald Fong [00:02:16]:
different sites. So I I got some exposure of what it looked like in, in the field. A lot of my career, I'd been in the technology and software industry. So led very, very talented engineering teams. I also had built a previous company before. And my my view from a lot of what's happening in Silicon Valley is that they tend to build really good software, but they tend to build it for people who might not need it as much. And so what got me really interested in this field was seeing the the software technology that janitorial companies were using. It's really powerful.

Gerald Fong [00:02:48]:
It does a lot of things. But when we spent a lot of time with more and more owners, we started to realize that, okay. It's not very easy to use. It's not as powerful as they'd like, and so that's why we ended up building this business.

Samuel Klein [00:03:00]:
No. That's great. It's it's good to know that, there is someone in Silicon Valley paying attention to this this huge world of facility management, you know, which, there is so much opportunities for everyone to take to improve the industry and and to take it back to to to where it should be in terms of technology, you know, and that I think there is a lot of improvement in every area. So I would love to for you, if you can, introduce a little bit, what is BrightGo, and, what motivate you to to create this company? And explain to our listeners, what what problems are you solving.

Gerald Fong [00:03:43]:
The way this company started originally was, we were going out to ISSA different conferences and meeting different building service contractors, different owners. And at 1st, we're like, wow. There are so many great software options. You guys must have amazing operations. You must always know where your team is. You must everybody must show up on time. You know? We're like, it must be so good. And we we asked a bunch of owners.

Gerald Fong [00:04:06]:
And, you know, at first, the boots, they all look great. And we talked to the owners, and we we interviewed them over drinks, and they started to say, well, you know, it doesn't do this. It doesn't do that. It's really hard to use. There's this problem. There's that problem. And so we started to get this picture around the cracks, the issues that people were having in spite of all of the great options right now. And so what we did was we met a few of these owners, and we said, hey.

Gerald Fong [00:04:27]:
We're really good from technology, from software. I I previously have, you know, worked at Meta. I was leading a significant team there. My CTO, Harvard graduate, top, was previously president of Harvard Computer Society, led the engineering team for a 150 person company. Like, we could build better software for you if you'd like. And so we teamed up with a few of those companies, and we focused a lot on the core operational pieces. For example, time and attendance, making sure your people actually showed up, making sure it's easy to use, making sure you can run payroll easily, these key pieces, and it's expanding now to all of operations. And, the fall you know, following year, we came back.

Gerald Fong [00:05:04]:
But instead of, you know, just walking around, we had a booth. We raised $3,000,000. We had our customers standing in our booth sharing the experiences working with us. And so that's sort of the kind of how how it went from 1 to the next. But yeah.

Samuel Klein [00:05:19]:
No. That that is great, and and we'll we'll love to hear more about the your customer's experience and how they improve it. No? But, before we jump there, based on your research, when you start getting involved in the space and and start working on your product, What are the biggest challenges that you saw cleaning companies facing? No? And and in your opinion, what what are those right now in today's industry, and how are you planning to address those, or or how are you currently addressing those?

Gerald Fong [00:05:54]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So running a cleaning business is not easy. There's a lot of things about that that can go wrong. If we just start at the basics, it's around knowing whether your people showed up. So for example, if you were to ask most owners that, they'll say, yeah. My people are showing you.

Gerald Fong [00:06:13]:
But then if you ask them, for example, do you ever get a call from a property manager where the property manager says, hey. Your person left early last night. You know, they they they're supposed to stay for this many hours, and they were only there for half the hours. The owners would say, yeah. That happens. And so a lot of the industries around you know, cleaning is very, it's very interesting to manage because you don't wanna some cleaners are really efficient, and they clean really fast. Right? And so they they get in and get up quickly. But when you start to see that people in the shifts are leaving, you know, halfway through the shifts, that starts to tell you that maybe the quality is dropping.

Gerald Fong [00:06:48]:
Maybe we should start to do an inspection. Maybe we should start to understand it. And so for an owner to instead of reacting to a property manager calling them saying, hey. Your service was not good last night. How would you like to be proactive to know, okay. There are these trends that are happening in what's happening in the field and have insights and then to take action ahead of time. And so that that's basically what we're what we noticed was what was happening in the industry. And, also, the devil's in the details.

Gerald Fong [00:07:16]:
If we talk a little bit about payroll for a second, when you ask a lot of owners, hey. How do you guys pay people? How do you guys know they're on-site? People will say something like, oh, we have a geofence clock in and clock out system. That's what a lot of people say they have. And then you ask them, what percentage of your clock in and clock outs were edited? You know, they they they there's they should have a geofence punch, you know, clock in, clock out, but what percentages were modified by a supervisor or somebody said, hey. The thing wasn't working, etcetera. And we found out that the edit rate in this industry is probably about 20 to 30%. And so you you could have the best system in the world, but if 20 to 30% of your your punches are edited, then you don't really have a system that's actually geofenced. And And so we started to realize and it's it's for a lot of reasons.

Gerald Fong [00:08:02]:
A lot of a lot of, you know, geo geolocation is not easy. Building an easy software is hard. And so for a software to actually get you to 95% plus, that's actually geostamped, and to know exactly when your cleaners are leaving, coming so you can then be proactive, That hasn't really happened in the industry so far.

Samuel Klein [00:08:21]:
Nice. So, basically, what you're providing is a solution to manage the workforce, in a way that it's more accurate. And it's not only trusting what they're saying, but it's also proving, you know, with the technology that they were at the location, that they work for x amount of hours. So if the complaint comes, from the client, you have some data to back it up and to at least try to understand what happened. Correct?

Gerald Fong [00:08:56]:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Samuel Klein [00:08:58]:
Cool. And and what insights have you noticed, when people start using a solution like this? Like, what happened? If if I'm a cleaning company, I have a 100 plus cleaners, I start using your solution, what can I expect? How can I improve my company, my retention?

Gerald Fong [00:09:21]:
So the first thing that improves is, well so there's a very a lot of numerical improvements that I can talk to, but I wanna talk about emotionally how it feels. The the emotional feeling that you'll have is that for for example, our 1st client, they're a 300 our 1st customer was a 300 person janitorial company, so it's pretty decent size. We wanted to work with companies that are representative of companies that have scale and that have have to deal with what's happening in the industry at you know, to some scale. And the biggest difference was a pretty it's like an anecdote, which is basically saying, I used to get these phone calls where people would say, hey. Your person left early. Your person wasn't on-site. And now they don't get those calls anymore. And so now when they sit down for dinner at 6 PM, which is when some of the starts are starting to ship you know, some of the ships are starting to start, they can just check their know exactly where they are, No guessing.

Gerald Fong [00:10:08]:
No this. No that. They know everything's like, they're on top of their business. And so it's this feeling of the way our customers would describe it. It's a feeling of being in control or being proactive as opposed to being reactive. Right? You never wanna be on the backfoot. We've even heard stories from owners where, their might say, hey. We need more time.

Gerald Fong [00:10:28]:
We don't have enough time to clean this building. And then they go to the property manager and say, hey. We need more time. Then the property manager runs the swipe data, you know, because property managers have security cameras. They have swipe data. They have all that. And they say, you're asking for more time, but your cleaners are only here for half the time. Imagine how awkward that is.

Gerald Fong [00:10:48]:
But that's what's happening in the industry a lot because people don't actually have an understanding. And now by all means, cleaner it's a hard work, hard job, and I guess I'm only speaking towards maybe that 5 or 10% that might be making as a as an owner your job more difficult, but the other 90% plus are doing a great job. But it's just around understanding that how do you manage your team. It's a hard job. So people do wanna leave early when people can. They have personal lives they wanna take care of. So so I I respect it. I understand it.

Gerald Fong [00:11:12]:
But I think it's just around how do you run a good business and and threaten that needle. So

Samuel Klein [00:11:17]:
yeah. No. That that's good. That's definitely a great insight. But and and how do you control quality? Like, is there any solution in in BrightGo that that for those that, maybe I don't need an hour to clean, and I I clean in 30 minutes. You know? Which happens as well, and they argue. We have clients that have those challenges, and they argue that they clean everything great, and they didn't need the hour, you know, but they're also giving the hour to the client. Any idea how to deal with that situation, which is very common?

Gerald Fong [00:11:51]:
Yeah. So I always say the way that a building should an owner should think about the business is they shouldn't be selling it purely by hour. Right? Because if a cleaner does a great job, you don't wanna punish the cleaner. That's not the right way to do it. However, the owner should know when a cleaner is starting to spend less time than the week before. Because, magically, people don't become twice or 3 times better in 1 week. Right? I think that's the thing that they should understand, and they can choose whether to do an inspection, whether whether to have a conversation. So we don't we we're not somebody who said, oh, this has to happen or this has to happen.

Gerald Fong [00:12:23]:
It's more like, oh, as the owner, you'd like to know what's actually happening in your business, and then you can then choose to decide whether you wanna, you know, have the conversation, whether you wanna do an extra inspection, or you wanted to take certain action. And so it's more around knowing. Because the the thing that I hear from a lot of owners is that property managers know more about their cleaners than they know themselves, because the property manager is the building. And so it's this awkward dynamic where they're paying you, but they know what's actually happening. And they're telling you, and you're on the back foot. So it's more around knowing what's happening and being able to take remedies. And, of course, if you have the best cleaner who's able to clean in half the time and and and you know that and you know that if any other cleaner were to be there, they'd take them 3 times a time, then you you you you say to the to property entry, we do an excellent job. Look at the look.

Gerald Fong [00:13:11]:
You know, proof is in the pudding. But if you know that the cleaner usually takes a certain amount of time and suddenly it's cut in half, you you might wanna think about that. Because sometimes what's happening is they're bringing a 2nd person. Right? They're bringing a 3rd person maybe to try to get the job cleaner and get out faster. And that is usually in pure violation of a lot of different rules and regulations, and the property manager is not happy with that. So it starts to just give you understanding of what's actually happening on the ground. That's the key thing. And, again, this is to reward good cleaners.

Gerald Fong [00:13:39]:
Good cleaners, this won't affect them at all. It's more around if there's a sort of behavior that will then lead to your, losing your accounts. You wanna know ahead of time instead of knowing at the last 2nd. Does that does that make sense? It's a bit of a nuance there, but this sort of stuff that we've been learning as we work really close with these businesses.

Samuel Klein [00:13:54]:
No. And I it makes sense. As, right now, I think we're focusing a lot the conversation, which, unfortunately, it's a big big, pain point on on, cleaners that, they don't do the job the way that they should. No? And, at the end of the day, you then end up costing the account to to to the owner, which is painful because, I can tell you from the marketing experience that acquiring cleaning contract these days is not easy. There is a lot of competitors. And I think I read it in your website that says that, and I didn't know, but it makes sense that the janitorial industry, it's the number 1 employer in the United States. Like, they employ around 6,000,000 people are are are employed thanks to the industry or 6 something along those lines. Not sure if what's your website or no?

Gerald Fong [00:14:48]:
That might be a different there's probably a few numbers that are thrown around, but I I know one number. I think it's the, 5th largest, job in in America. So it's it's it's a large job, and it's, it's underserved. That's the high level.

Samuel Klein [00:15:00]:
Exactly. That's the that's the point. So I think having a solution that will help with retention, which, is a huge pain point that we see in the industry. Again, talking from a marketing perspective, like, acquiring a customer can be so expensive, and you have to go through a process of brand awareness, of sales cycle. You close a client, and then that client should be with you for 3, 5 plus years. Now and the only way to have that type of retention is to have processes in place. And, that's what got my attention from your solution is that it it's part of that process that everybody needs when you get to a certain point and that you need to scale that will help you, again, not only with retention, but it will also help you with guiding your team to do a better job, well, as you said, with the payroll so you can be a little bit more accurate. So what other areas, you see Britego improving or helping customers.

Samuel Klein [00:16:03]:
I think I also read something in their website that that it can be so you give a lot of data, you know, and a lot of information to the owner that they can potentially even use it for customer acquisition, from sales, for proof of concept. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Gerald Fong [00:16:19]:
Yeah. Yeah. So our our vision is to be, you know, all in one to do a lot of these pieces. Right now, we're focused on the operation side. So it's really around how do you keep your clients? How do you retain your clients? Right? And and so it touches these main points, which is did your people show up? Are you paying them the right amount? And then it goes to other areas like, how are you doing your inspections? Are you missing your inspections? Like, which which buildings have you not inspected in a while? And from a viewpoint of a COO or, for example, an owner, you wanna ask yourself, which of my buildings are green? They're good. Which are yellow, and which are red. You you'd like to know that right now. Right? You might have a portfolio of, say, 200 buildings, a 100 buildings.

Gerald Fong [00:16:58]:
How do you make sure you're spending the right time in the right places? The this is the sort of experience you wanna give to the owners so that they can keep their accounts, and they can spend the time in the most effective way and build processes around all of this. Because what we noticed is that as a cleaner as a as a as a owner scales their business from, say, 20 cleaners to 30 cleaners to 50 cleaners to a100, at first, you know, the owner does everything. They're kind of like the little one scheduling, coordinating, dispatching. They even show up when the ship is, when there's a no show, no call. Right? They're they're that's where they but over time, you have to transform. And so the way that we describe it is that in the beginning, owners can use something called brute force. You can just will it to work. But at a certain point, you're gonna have to create middle management, layers of of people, of processes.

Gerald Fong [00:17:42]:
You're gonna have to create systems. When somebody leaves, how do you make sure all that communication doesn't get dropped? You're gonna have to have a system to keep everything in place and working so you can truly scale to then double or triple or or ten x revenue one day. And so it's about thinking about how do you jump from a unscalable company to one that can truly scale and then grow. That's where we fit into to to the vision of a company and and helping them on all the operation side. Eventually, we'll help with other areas as well, for example, with actually running your pay actually, you know, doing the payroll, actually doing your books, for example, job costing, etcetera. But we really wanna focus and hone on this operating operations part, in this world all in one way.

Gerald Fong [00:18:21]:
Now, Did I answer your question?

Samuel Klein [00:18:23]:
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a much needed solution. You talk a lot about the time theft. No? And I think, people are not aware of, the animal cost that that can represent to your business. I know you have some case studies that that I was watching in your website. Very cool. And and, at the end, of course, you will have time to to mention our listener how they can find you, but explain a little bit how what is time theft? How does it work? How much can that be costing your clients or or the cleaning industry overall? And, again, what can you do about it? And, potentially, how much money can you save at the end of the day? You know?

Gerald Fong [00:19:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. So time theft is basically where when you're paying people, but they're not there for the work that you think you're paying them for. I know I this goes back to the early one, which is, yeah, if they're a really efficient cleaner, they're amazing, then that's fine. Right? You're okay with that. Right? You're paying for the value. But in a lot of other cases, you're paying them to work for 5 hours, but they're only there for 2 hours. And so you might feel like you're getting stolen from.

Gerald Fong [00:19:29]:
Right? You're running a shop, and somebody's maybe stealing from the cashier. Right? That that might be how it feels. And and your your clients know what's happening too because they feel stolen from. Right? I've even heard some property managers sue the cleaning company because they're like, hey. You're charging me for all these hours, but none of it's actually there. So that's what it is in in terms of how you feel. In terms of the numbers, well, let's just do some simple, you know, numbers in terms of what's actually happening. Labor is probably about, what, 60 or 70% of a lot of cleaning companies' costs.

Gerald Fong [00:20:00]:
And when we ran a, you know, study interviewing a lot of businesses, about 10 to 20% of your wages are going to wages that are people aren't even there. So when you just think about your top line, anywhere from 10 to 15% of your top line. So if you're a, you know, $1,000,000 business, a 100 k of it, or if you're a $10,000,000 business, 1,000,000 of it is going to time theft wage theft, time theft. And so that's something that our solution helps with because it helps you understand, okay, what's actually happening in your business, how do you actually understand what's you know, are people actually there or not? And it really irons out those little issues where you know, this is a thing I hear from everybody. We have a clock in clocked out, but 15% of our clock ins are you know, they're edited. Right? So so you actually don't have a clock in clocked out system at that point. And so we help somebody actually get to 99%. Right? Actually have that in place so you truly understand, your your overall business.

Samuel Klein [00:20:55]:
Yeah. Oh, I love it. I I think, people are so busy in the day today. And, based on my experience, everybody is upset on on acquiring new cleaning contracts. Very few are obsessed on retaining the ones that they have, and, very few others are obsessed on how to improve your your margins. You know? Like, how can I make more money? And, sometimes just by solving simple let's call it simple. Hopefully, with your solution, it's more simple. Things like this, you can be, again, adding 10% to your overall revenue.

Samuel Klein [00:21:32]:
You know? So I think, for everyone listening, if you are until here until the interview, pretty sure this is a pain point that you have. The question is how much is costing you and what you plan to do to solve this, this this problem. You know? Yeah. I I was curious, you mentioned that you raised, 3,000,000 notes to to start, growing the company. Congrats on that. I'm, interesting, to hear how do you raise money for a solution in this industry? Because, when I'm with friends, even potential investors, and they ask me what do I do. And I tell them that I focus on helping commercial cleaning companies. It's like the most unsexy answer that you can give.

Samuel Klein [00:22:20]:
No. It's usually, like, the end of the conversation. But, as you know, this industry is amazing. It's 1,000,000,000 of dollars, industry. I I always say that it's the best kept secret in the world because you would never expect that a janitor can, become a millionaire. And there are thousands of case studies that you can definitely look online or I can mention. No? Curious to hear your journey on innovating in this industry and, pitching the idea and raising money. And, if you did maybe to someone that is already familiar with the industry or just investors that, okay.

Samuel Klein [00:23:01]:
What what's happening here? I don't know what you're talking.

Gerald Fong [00:23:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think a big part of it is I have a track record. Right? So this is not my 1st company I built before. This is the 2nd time I've done it around. So I I have investors that have been wanting to give me money. That was just a general topic.

Gerald Fong [00:23:17]:
Right? When I left my when I left Meta, my leadership team just all wanted to give me money. This might be a foreign concept for some people, but for me, they they're like, hey. Whatever Gerald does next, I wanna invest in that. So just for for my background, from where I come from, I have that kind of, that wind coming behind me. But on the other end as well, you know, Silicon Valley is a is this is this kind of like feast and famine. Right? Certain people get so much software. They get inundated with this tool, this tool, this tool, this tool, and so investors know that. And so from their view, if you're building something that's truly valuable and nobody else from Silicon Valley is doing it, that becomes really appealing.

Gerald Fong [00:23:53]:
So another way to look at it is that unsexy can actually be very sexy if approached the right way. Like, we had to do the homework to make sure that we were understanding all the kind of challenges about the industry as well. So that's why we interviewed about 300, you know, different people in the industry in terms of owners, in terms of all these different supervisors, janitors, etcetera, to make sure we started to have a better understanding. But I think it's very attractive for for some people where, okay, there's a space that is underserved, and there's nobody like us. I mean, now that we're in the space, it's it looks quite different now because, like, okay, somebody's actually coming in here building very real strong software to help the space. So that changes up quite a bit. But as a founder, I as an entrepreneur, I wanna go where, you know, my talents are not there at the moment. Right? So if there are a bunch of me twos or, you know, bunch of other people from Silicon Valley in this space, it is it's less appealing to me, but this is a space that doesn't have anybody that that looks like our a business like ours with a talent like ours.

Gerald Fong [00:24:47]:
And so we're really excited, and I think our the owners that we're working with are really appreciating it.

Samuel Klein [00:24:52]:
No. I I agree. And and, definitely, it's a trend that it's very little by little starting in my opinion because I have seen amazing solutions that I I would never expect, to to get into this industry, you know, that still years behind in a lot of areas in terms of technology. So it's amazing that, people like you are noticing that there is an opportunity, but more than that, that there is room to make things better, you know, without, making any commercial cleaning company breaking breaking their bank, you know, with affordable solutions that they can scale and and and make things better. So to wrap it up, Gerald, what final advice would you have for entrepreneurs, or even better, commercial cleaning business owners, or facility management service providers that are are starting out or or are struggling in in in in, taking their company to the next step. Any piece of advice based on your experience?

Gerald Fong [00:26:07]:
Oh, man. There there's so much. There's so much. I I think it's I think it's just a general trend around how you know, to really grow the business, you have to think about processes and systems. I think that's what I hear a lot from the owners that have made it. You know? They're the ones that have, you know, the $20,000,000 businesses, the ones that, you know, are still 1,000,000. It's it's around thinking about it in terms of systems, processes. Like, this bad thing happened today, we can fix it.

Samuel Klein [00:26:32]:
But then it's how do you build a process that never happens again or that you have the right people watching it. Right? So I think that's what it takes. I have a lot of respect, though. It's not an easy job. I don't have all the solutions, of course. But that's, I would say, the the the big jump that I think owners are trying to make, which is like, how do I not be the one who gets called when somebody doesn't show up?

Samuel Klein [00:26:50]:
No. That's great. And I think more people have to focus on operation and not necessarily on on sales and marketing, because it's impossible to scale efficiently, you know, and and make a profit if you don't have the right processes in place. So I appreciate you. Thank you for joining us, Gerald. If for people that are listening and and wanna schedule a demo and wanna see, like, okay. Like, what is this guy talking about? I really you got my attention. I really wanna see what is the solution, what's the best way to get in touch with you or your team and to actually see a demo of the product? Yeah.

Gerald Fong [00:27:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. To see a demo,

Samuel Klein [00:27:28]:
just go to our website, Brightgo.com, and you can click the see a demo, and then, we'll then schedule a time to to chat more. Also, feel free to add me on LinkedIn or other places. We'd love to we'd love meet people directly in the industry even if it's to look at the product or to share your feedback and advice. We're very much open to it at this phase.

Samuel Klein [00:27:45]:
Cool, man. Appreciate you. Thanks for, the sharing your your wisdom, your journey, and, we'll see you very soon again.

INTRO/OUTRO [00:27:55]:
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INTRO/OUTRO [00:28:17]:
time.