Anago Cleaning: How a Family Business Became a $100M Franchise Machine

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Adam Povlitz. He is the CEO and president of Anago Cleaning Systems, a top rated franchise brand that has been innovating in commercial cleaning since 1989. Based out of Pompano Beach, Florida,

Anago works with entrepreneurs across the US and Canada, offering turnkey solutions in a recession resistant industry. Their focus on transparency, preventive analytics and cutting edge technology aims to elevate client experiences while empowering franchises to thrive. Adam has been at the forefront of leading Anago through this tech driven era. He became CEO in 2018.

and has since become an official member of the Forbes Business Council, sharing insights on franchising and entrepreneurship. He also contributes regularly to Entrepreneur Magazine. Adam’s passion for fostering entrepreneurship has guided Anago’s mission of providing financial freedom to business owners. Through his leadership, the company has claimed multiple awards and recognition throughout the industry for its steady growth and innovation. Now, before we get into all that good stuff,

Today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdVac Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications. It works great for high turnover and part-time workers too. And here’s the fun part. The program actually puts more money into your employees’ pockets and the companies too.

One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the CEO of Anago Cleaning Systems, Adam Powelets. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Adam Povlitz (02:15)
Thanks for having me and appreciate the introduction. You forgot that I make a mean chicken frangace as well.

Anthony Codispoti (02:21)
I don’t even

know what that is. Tell me about it.

Adam Povlitz (02:24)
I’m just goofing. ⁓ I blush when I get the introduction sometimes on these things. All good. Yeah, right.

Anthony Codispoti (02:25)
Ha

And I understand that you can juggle three

firing ⁓ pins at the same time. ⁓ We’ll make sure that we redo the intro and include all those extras. All right. So let’s get a little bit serious, but not too serious. So your father founded Anago in 1989. What was his inspiration for doing so?

Adam Povlitz (02:43)
Yeah.

So he actually was always in the building maintenance space. He actually started in restaurant management, which is sort of a weird spot. in, know, showing the age, he was at Ponderosa Steakhouse up in Michigan. That was where I’m originally from. And he told me he was fascinated by how much profit they were making literally doling out the little butter chips and knowing how much each unit of a butter chip.

Anthony Codispoti (03:11)
I remember it.

Adam Povlitz (03:26)
costs. And then he got into some light building maintenance with ⁓ one of his brothers. And then it turned into they actually created a local, like traditional style cleaning business in Michigan and operated that for many years. ⁓ We moved down to South Florida to take care of my grandmother. And ⁓ he got into the franchising space with one of our competitors, did it for three months and goes, I think I can do this better. And

quite literally left the job and founded Antigo not that long after.

Anthony Codispoti (04:00)
what was it specifically at that time? I’m sure it’s evolved quite a bit, but what specifically at that time did he think he could do better?

Adam Povlitz (04:07)
I think it was about the back then it was telemarketing. ⁓ So it was, you know, it’s B2B business. And so it used to be, you know, dialing off the yellow pages or the white pages and working your way through. he had a, he felt like he had a better mousetrap in order to attract clients. But he loved the franchise model because in traditional cleaning, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re selling all day, you’re working on, you know, invoicing customers, customer service, and then someone’s got to go out.

at night and clean and so it turns into this like 24-7 thing and with franchising you’re able to separate it. So it’s one level of franchise that does the sales marketing and a different level of franchise that does, that keeps the buildings clean, customers happy. So it’s a very cool separation of duties that I think, he goes, I think I can do, I can sell more clients and I don’t gotta go out and personally clean them. Like hallelujah, I think I might have found the holy grail.

Anthony Codispoti (05:04)
So yeah, explain to us sort of this multi-tier franchise concept, because it’s different than what we might see and what probably most people are familiar with, like in the restaurant space.

Adam Povlitz (05:14)
Yeah, yeah, no, it is. It’s definitely is an odd one. So most people are familiar with what we would call like a two tier franchise. So McDonald’s, corporate offices, and then the people who own the restaurants. ⁓ Our model is a three tier franchise model. So I’m, I’m CEO of the corporate office, we sell what’s called a master franchise who would own like a large metro area. So think your major

major cities around the US and Canada, Atlanta, Dallas, Philly, whatever. And then within that territory, they are acting like, it’s actually called a sub-franchisor. So think of it as like a mini-franchisor in their territory. And they’re selling unit franchises in that territory who perform the services. So let me flip it upside down to kind of clarify everything for your listeners. So if you think, if I say commercial cleaning,

the first image that comes into your head is going to be the guy with a mop and a bucket or vacuum or whatever. And that is the unit franchise owner and their team, right? So they, what their job is simply to do is keep the buildings clean, get the chemicals in the equipment, make sure you know how to use everything, keep the customers happy. That is it. The question is, well, where did he get that customer to begin with? And ultimately what we find is

in the same vein of like how restaurant, the restaurant industry, there’s a huge difference between being a good cook and being a good restaurant owner. The business side of restaurant touring is extremely complicated. Turns out the business side of commercial cleaning is a lot more complicated than just keeping the buildings clean. And so what our model does is it creates a synergy where you have the unit franchise who does all of the cleaning and and you know, local customer service. Then you have the master franchise.

who does absolutely zero cleaning and all their focus is on is they’re the sales marketing, they have the sales guys, the website, the PPC, ⁓ and then they’re doing the back office administration. So it creates this synergy where everyone’s saving on overhead because the unit franchise, all they gotta do is clean, they don’t have to have sales people or marketing budget, and the master franchise is only doing sales and marketing and doesn’t have to have cleaners on staff.

Anthony Codispoti (07:32)
So you get to really laser focus on what your strengths are. So let me see if I understand this. corporate office, you’re selling off the different franchise opportunities in these master franchise opportunities in different territories across the country. And then those franchisees, they end up being the sales and marketing arm. They’re the one going out and finding the clients. They’re handling the customer service. They’re handling the billing, all that sort of back office stuff. And at the same time, they’re

recruiting the frontline people, what do you call that third tier, the, mini franchisees, the unit franchisees, they’re recruiting them to be the ones that actually do the cleaning. Right. Okay. And so, how many master, ⁓ franchisees do you guys have current?

Adam Povlitz (08:07)
The unit franchisee.

We have 48 master franchises across US and Canada.

Anthony Codispoti (08:27)
Okay. And so that’s quite a few, but ⁓ you guys are still looking to grow still lots of territories available.

Adam Povlitz (08:35)
Yeah, you know, it’s funny because the territories that come up, you know, it’s always based on the quality of the candidate we can find. And so, you know, we have territories that we’ve sold that I would have never thought I would have sold. And then there’s territories, you know, like we sold, we’re in Winnipeg, Canada. You have to plug your car in like five months of the year so the battery doesn’t freeze on you in Winnipeg, Canada.

and the owners up there are doing a phenomenal job. That wasn’t on my bingo card that year when we sold it. ⁓ But then we have lot of great territories in the Midwest that are wide open. Chicago, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Kansas City. I don’t know why I have this weird, gaping hole in the Midwest, but it’s phenomenal. Prime territories are available still in that area.

Anthony Codispoti (09:25)
And so what is it that you’re providing

to your master franchisees? What are they getting out of the opportunity?

Adam Povlitz (09:31)
So to start, right, they’re getting all of our training. actually come to our office for a few weeks to get the full in-depth training on all our sales processes, ⁓ customer service processes. We’re giving them access to all our CRMs. have a full-blown marketing system and platform that we use that tracks everything, builds for everything. ⁓ And then in addition to that, we obviously have national

vendor relationships, really great rates and prices on everything. And then we ⁓ show them how to essentially be business coaches for the unit franchisees that they sell within their territory. So it very much turns into business in a box almost by the time they’re done with the initial training and have gone through all of the learning of how all the software and everything works.

Anthony Codispoti (10:24)
And so how long does that initial training take? Like, let’s say that I ink a deal with you today, hand over my check. How long is it before I’m actually able to hit my feet on the ground and start running with this?

Adam Povlitz (10:37)
So from check to open, it’s about, call it 90 days. ⁓ You don’t need to like renovate a space to like a custom space like a restaurant might, right? You don’t have to put the golden arches in or anything like that. ⁓ You’re just renting some office space. But mostly it’s it’s preliminary setup stuff during that period. Get your LLC set up, get an office space rented. We actually help you negotiate all of that. ⁓

you know, get computer equipment, get some logos on the wall. It’s nothing crazy, but it just, lot of times the things that take the longest, right, is you go to negotiate an office lease and they go, great, and we’ll get you in December 1st, you know, and, and so, you know, there’s just a lot of weight in between. But then once, once you come here for training, and again, it’s, I think it’s like 10 days that’s, that’s spread over two weeks. ⁓ you go back to your territory and you hit the ground running, like you’re running, you you have appointments that you can run.

Or if you hired a salesperson in the earlier phases, you’re there running the appointments and you’re already building your book of business as soon as you get home.

Anthony Codispoti (11:41)
Do I need an office? Can I do this out of my home?

Adam Povlitz (11:43)
Yeah, because you

want the office because you are still meeting with those unit franchise prospects and you want to have them to have somewhere. I don’t know if it looks as legit if you’re meeting with them at a Starbucks. It doesn’t have to be big. Usually we say it’s like 1,000, 1,500 square feet. It’s just like a two-room office that’s usually sufficient to start.

Anthony Codispoti (11:57)
Fair enough. Okay.

And are you teaching me how to teach my, ⁓ I’m sorry, I forget the name again. What do I call them? The mini French.

Adam Povlitz (12:13)
You can say,

yeah, can say janitorial franchise.

Anthony Codispoti (12:15)
the janitorial

franchise. Are you teaching me how to teach them to clean or is it presumed that they know how to clean because like it’s not rocket science? I don’t know. Like, do you guys have special techniques or special equipment or special chemicals? Okay.

Adam Povlitz (12:31)
All of the above, yes.

So it is, you’re right, it’s not rocket science. I would say the initial training that we focus on in that first couple of weeks is really less about the cleaning and more about the sales and marketing side of it. ⁓ Because you’re right, cleaning’s not rocket science. Yes, there are ways to do things that are more efficient than others and we train on that. You one of the jokes I always make is how many hands do you use to clean a toilet?

And the average person says, you know, one, just kind of, I don’t want to touch anything. Well, in commercial cleaning, time is money, right? So it’s no, we’re going to get two hands and, there’s a way to do it when you have 15 toilets or whatever in a building to clean time is money. And you don’t want to sit there at one hand in those things. There’s a way to do it faster. There’s ways to do, you know, anything faster. The, the, the, uh, you know, there’s, there’s

how chemicals get mixed. There’s a certain way to do it where you’re not wasting money. A lot of people beyond overuse how much chemical, right? You go home and you spray your kitchen counter and you soak it with Windex or something. That’s not how it’s done in the commercial space. So it’s not rocket science, but it’s probably not what the average person is used to doing.

Anthony Codispoti (13:44)
There are techniques and efficiencies to be found there. And that’s what you’re helping to teach people. And in the early days, you mentioned, you know, when your dad started the company, it was telemarketing. That was sort of your primary sales mechanism today. And you referenced this, you know, a lot of it’s got to be, you know, pay per click. I don’t know. Maybe there’s some search engine optimization or, folks, I don’t know, you’re doing other things like flyers in the mail, knocking on people’s doors. Like what’s the…

sales and marketing coaching that you’re providing.

Adam Povlitz (14:16)
So it’s it’s it really is a huge mix of things. There still is telemarketing It’s still it still works not like it used to but it still works. It’s you know, necessary evil You know, we all get we all get the you know, eight million phone calls and everything like that You know to decline decline, but you know, it still works every once in a while at least in the b2b space Yeah, PPC paper click is huge. That’s that’s definitely a huge space of your budget search engine optimization

And then you have to do a lot of top of funnel, right? So creating brand awareness, so you’re using YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. You know, never, no one’s going on Facebook to pick their next cleaning company. But if, but if you haven’t heard of me when I do call or you do type, it’s time for you to type in and you know, who’s going to clean my office next. It’s good for you to have known my name from one of those ads. Yeah, we and then of course, the classic stuff, right? There’s, there’s door hangers and flyers to hand out and

If a salesperson is in a business plaza, of course we say, go check out three or four more other offices while you’re dropping off a proposal for another one. So it really is all of the above that has to be done.

Anthony Codispoti (15:27)
What do you think is the single most effective sales technique right now?

Adam Povlitz (15:31)
In terms of lead lead creation SEO, foreign away SEO. ⁓ PBC PBC is sort of like, you know, like a shot in the arm, like it works while you’re spending the money. ⁓ But then as soon as you you try to go I’m going to lower my budget or man, it’s a little expensive, you know, leads immediately dry up because your weight, you’re spending everything on ⁓ on those paid leads. SEO is like

a healthy diet and go into the gym three, four times a week. You know what mean? It takes time. It’s not the cheapest thing. Sometimes it’s a little bit painful, ⁓ but you build it up over time. And if you can get into one of those top, you know, one, two, three, four, maybe even five slots when someone’s searching the keywords you want, you know, you’re going to be found and it’s going to create tons of revenue.

Anthony Codispoti (16:22)
So do each of the individual master franchisees have their own dedicated domain or is it like a sub domain of Anna?

Adam Povlitz (16:30)
So it’s a sub-domain, ⁓ but if you were interacting from wherever USA, ⁓ it’s designed where it feels like you’re on their local Southern California site or their Utah site or whatever. ⁓ And it’s pages all about Utah and Provo and Salt Lake City. so it’s hyper-localized, but it is part of our larger domain strategy.

Anthony Codispoti (16:59)
You guys are leaning on ⁓ technology quite a bit, at least in the marketing aspect of things. Does tech show up in other aspects of your business as well?

Adam Povlitz (17:10)
So we’re, I would consider us the technology leader in the space. have ⁓ proprietary technology that we created. It’s called CleanCom. ⁓ Now, and while we’re the tech leader in the space, we’re kind of lame at naming conventions. So you’re gonna hear, you’re gonna hear, you know, clean communication, clean com. ⁓ But the, apologies, I sit next to the busiest fire station in Pompano Beach. And so.

It’s if I’m on if I’m on a call, it’s gonna go. Yeah, exactly. When we moved in, we would like to really brought them cookies were like, hi, just in case anything happens, we want to know you know that we care about you and your friends. ⁓ But with clean calm, so what we did with clean calm is ⁓ we realized that in cleaning there are there are only

Anthony Codispoti (17:41)
They’re going to help some people go, go fast, go get them, go help them.

Adam Povlitz (18:04)
two experiences you can have, unlike other industries where you can have three. So, in a restaurant example, you can have one of three experience. You can have a delight experience, great food, great service, we should go back, this is amazing. A bad experience, right? Waiter was a jerk, food was cold, we’re never going there and we’re gonna put a one-star review on Yelp about it. ⁓ Or that sort of middle of the road, it was unremarkable.

you know, whatever experience with cleaning, we don’t have the delight experience. Nobody gets to their office in the morning goes, my goodness, this place is so clean. I’m going to get my janitor a birthday present. It just, it doesn’t happen. Right? You either get to work and you go, well, I to get to work and you don’t think about it. And you sit at your computer and you go, or you get to work and you go, why is my trashcan still full or why is it smell over in the bathroom or you know, whatever.

So you have this sort of, you have this neutral experience or a bad experience.

Anthony Codispoti (19:08)
When you’re doing your

job well, nobody notices you.

Adam Povlitz (19:11)
Exactly,

exactly. And so, you know, the old adage, you know, about, you know, know, having, you know, a bad experience is the best opportunity to make a friend, right? You hear that with like, you know, you know, if you get a bad Google review, make sure you answer it quickly and address their issues and maybe they’ll give you a good review. We realized that that, you know, if we’re only going to hear bad news and never good news, then we need to capitalize on that. And so what clean com does

is it allows the customer to take out their phone, take a picture of whatever the dirt is, whatever the room is, whatever is not quite to their liking, take a picture of it, mark what room it’s in, leave us a message, it sends it to the janitorial franchise owner that manages their building. ⁓ They have a two hour ⁓ mandatory response time, so you will be responded to within two hours. ⁓

And then it has built in Google Translate. it’s, you you can type in your native language, they can type in their native language. It’s all private, right? You’re not exchanging cell phone numbers. It’s all kind of encapsulated in our platform. And then it has preventive analytics built in on the back end on our side. So if say, we see that this particular franchisee has had three complaints on bathrooms in the last couple of months, the master franchisee in that territory can pull him in and say, hey man, let’s…

let’s actually do a retraining on the proper procedures to ensure you’re catching everything so that we minimize future complaints for you. So basically, once you’ve switched to Antigo, you’re good to know that whether it’s that franchisee or that service or that retraining, you’re not going to have the same complaint for long.

Anthony Codispoti (20:56)
So that platform that you just described there, ⁓ CleanCom, right? With the great branding on it. ⁓ How does the, the office person know to use that platform as the way to communicate that something is dirty or is it, it your, your client? They’re the one that would, cause like I’m in an office building here and they contract their cleaning out to somebody. I wouldn’t know, you know, how to get in touch with the cleaning people. So.

Is it like the the building managers that would be the ones that would communicate that?

Adam Povlitz (21:31)
Right. It’s whoever the building manager or whoever signs the contract would then designate, hey, these are the people I want to be able to report. Yeah, if you turned it into something where every single person could report, it would just be chaos, right? Like, this room is like this and that room is like that and everybody has their different standard of clean. ⁓ But ultimately, it’s like, okay, who do you want to be the person? And usually, right, it’s like an office manager or a building manager that would be the person that you would normally go to.

⁓ Except normally that building manager or office manager, the way they would report your issue, what would they do? They’d make a phone call, maybe leave a message. A lot of the old school ways, right? They have like a binder and you leave a note in the binder. And then it’s like, hey, do you speak Spanish? Because I don’t speak Spanish. Can you leave a note for me because I want him to take out this trash? And so it just turns into this like very archaic kind of mess of communication that could easily be streamlined. And so that’s what we did. We streamlined.

Anthony Codispoti (22:31)
That’s pretty cool. Any other ways that you guys are leveraging tech?

Adam Povlitz (22:36)
So I mean, it all builds off of there. now ⁓ we took that a step further. So what’s in development is an e-learning platform so that now ⁓ we can leverage a little bit of AI along with those issue reporting. So if someone say, same scenario, the three issues in the restrooms, it automatically cues our learning platform. They have to watch a video on how to properly service the restrooms, take a quiz to be recertified.

and then it notifies the client like, your franchisee has been recertified and will address your issues. And then I’ve invested way more than I’d like to admit on a new CRM that we’re in beta tests right now and about to launch at the beginning of the year. In franchising, what you find is we’re a 37-year-old franchise model. The older the franchise model, a lot of times the software was done

in a vacuum. it’s, we need to get more customers. We need some software for it. Well, now we know now we got to build those customers. Okay, let’s go get some software to do that. And there’s like multiple systems that don’t speak and it creates this like double triple entry scenario that just ends up being such a such a time suck. ⁓ So we created what we’re calling the Antigua clean suite. And what that does is it’s a fully integrated, literally from like lead

to meeting with the client, to proposal, any follow-ups, sale, selling of the unit franchise, brokering the cleaning contract to the unit franchise so that they can go clean, bill the customer, collect the money, and remit the balance to the unit franchisee. Zero double entry, zero printed paper unless requested by customer.

Anthony Codispoti (24:24)
That’s really cool. I, I wouldn’t have thought, excuse me, that a no offense that a cleaning company would be, I don’t know this cutting edge when it comes to tech. you, is this common or you guys a bit more of a disruptor in this space?

Adam Povlitz (24:26)
Yeah, I’m really excited about that one.

I’m a huge nerd. It’s not common. you know, that’s honestly that’s what’s excited me, you know, over my tenure at Anego is how can we, you know, it’s not rocket science, but there’s definitely a way if you say, okay, let me go all the way down to, you know, the base tasks that have to be done. There are a lot of ways in this industry to make the wheel rounder, or at least smooth out the wheel.

And so that’s what we’re trying to do.

Anthony Codispoti (25:15)
Let’s talk about your tenure there because initially you didn’t plan to join the family business. You worked in corporate finance, you did investment banking, you were at IBM for a period of time. Can you walk me through that experience and how it influenced your decision to join the family business?

Adam Povlitz (25:42)
Yeah, so yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I had zero desire to join the family business. My background was in finance. I did some investment banking. I was at IBM. I was in corporate finance. I was there during 2008, 2009, it was, was, IBM was doing a big round of layoffs. I wasn’t one of the people laid off. I was one of the analysts.

and I was given employee numbers and exit packages and salary packages. I didn’t know who it was and I was giving the analysis on who was getting the golden parachutes and who was not getting parachutes. And I’m mid-20s at this point and you go, man, like, you know, it just left a sick feeling in my stomach. And you go, like, I could easily have been, you know,

you know, I’m 41 now. I could easily have been a 41 year old at IBM and some 25 year old kids deciding my fate. And you go, I just, didn’t sit well with me. I happened to be down for the holidays. And my dad goes, Hey, I think I got to tiger by the tail with this whole anigo thing. You got to come check it out. And it was about six months later that I ended up joining.

Anthony Codispoti (26:56)
Okay, and it’s just been up and to the right ever since then or maybe a few hiccups along the way.

Adam Povlitz (27:00)
I mean, was, yeah,

lots of of bumps initially, right? He, he might my training program literally was his exact words, because he was a he was a, you old timey how he spoke, he would say, you’ve left your highfalutin finance job, and your first job at Antigo, you’re going to be a telemarketer, was a telemarketer by day, and a franchisees assistant cleaning a daycare at night. ⁓ So for you know, I leave, I leave corporate finance.

and I’m emptying 55 gallon drum garbage bags full with diapers. But I did everything. I that was the point, right? So I did, I cleaned, I telemarketed, I did the outside sales, I did customer service, a ⁓ little bit of accounting, but my background was finance, so I didn’t really need to get into that too far. But I did literally everything before I even moved to the corporate office. ⁓

because I had to know it. know, so if I’m going to give people advice on how to run their business and they’ve been doing it for 10, 15 years and I’ve been doing it for two, who the heck am I and why do I know anything? And so that’s, that’s the approach we took. And it was great. I, you know, you know, we, actually require when we have, when we sell a new master franchise, even though they’re the sales guy, ⁓ we actually, as part of the training, we actually take them out a few nights. We make them clean our office, take out all the trash, strip and wax a floor.

⁓ Just because you need to see how much work it takes, how hard it is, because if you know how to do it, then you know how to price it appropriately as well.

Anthony Codispoti (28:36)
interesting. Now, another one of those hiccups, I understand big hiccup was COVID. Big, big challenge for you guys. You found yourself speaking to your entire network, your entire system, at least twice a week. And a lot of strain, a lot of stress during that period of time. After the pandemic, you found yourself at a crossroads. Do I step back, you know, kind of burned out at this point? Or do I double down?

What drove you to the ladder to invest heavily in the business and how has that paid off?

Adam Povlitz (29:13)
Yeah, that was that was quite a quite a time. ⁓ We went from, again, commercial cleaning pre-COVID was something where it was very much like an afterthought. was a budget item to minimize. And then during COVID, you turn around and all of a sudden we had to become disinfection experts quite literally in about eight weeks. ⁓ You know, had to learn, learn how it all works, learn the equipment, learn the chemicals.

put together a full blown operating manual on it and then a marketing program behind it to be able to make sure people were still working and, you know, the hospitals and schools and whatever that remained open that they were able to get the cleaning that they needed. And so coming out of that and talking with everybody, I mean, I would get home and I’ll remind you, I was a genius for this because I sold my house literally right before COVID and I’m renovating the house that I’m.

I moved in temporarily with my mother-in-law, my wife and my then 18-month-old. And I wouldn’t get home until 9, 10 o’clock at night. Because I was the only one who was going to the office. My mother-in-law, she doesn’t even have an office area. So I was going to the office by myself just in t-shirt and basketball shorts. I’d get home 9, 10 o’clock at night, be fried, and get up the next day and start again.

And it was rewarding, but it was exhausting. And so you come out of that and you go, all right, what do I want to do with my life? this what I want to do? And honestly, I mean, and I’ve told our franchisees this even, I had the two options in front of me of either A, the business makes good money, I could make a good living, I could hire someone to manage the day to day for me.

and ride off into the sunset or, and I guess I’m a glutton for punishment, I go, I can really see how I can take this thing to the next level. And maybe it’s just how I’m wired. My wife says, I ever, I would never be able to retire because I just am always, I have a, I think what she says, I have a hard time just being, I’m very good at doing though.

And so, so for me, I look at it and I go, man, I really see a path forward on this thing. And so we created a, at the time it was a five prong plan. We were billing as a system somewhere in the neighborhood of like mid 60 millions in system wide revenue. And I said, I want to be a hundred million dollar brand and I want to do it in two years. ⁓ and we did it in 19 months and, and, and then you really start going like, well, like what, what can I do from here?

And so stupid me, I stuck my neck out again a couple of years ago and I said, now we’re going to be a $300 million brand by the end of 2028. And we added multiple layers to the plan and major investments in technology. I’ve hired three C-suite people since then and a few VP and director level people and just going all in on it because I think the opportunity is just absolutely massive.

Anthony Codispoti (32:30)
I’m gonna guess, you know, to get that growth, obviously it really helps to differentiate yourself from the other cleaning franchises out there by having this tech stack that you’ve been describing. But now you gotta go out and, you know, to get that revenue number, you really have to sell more master franchises. Is part of that C-suite dedicated to the marketing and sales side of things or how are you guys gonna expand your reach?

Adam Povlitz (32:56)
So yeah, there’s two in terms of the sales side. There’s a lot of pieces to it, but in terms of just direct sales side, ⁓ two of the key components, one is, absolutely. The more flags there are on the map, obviously the more areas of the country that are generating revenue that otherwise would not be. So yes, absolutely have to be adding more master franchises. And then the second piece is, so in our space, your average client is,

you know, think very local, right? Your average client for an Antigo franchisee is gonna be your local doctor’s office, your local, you know, insurance agents, your local schools. And to get from, you know, 100 million to 300 million, it takes a lot of little schools and doctor’s offices to get there. And so we said, how do we get there with, you know, bigger steps?

And so one of our chief strategy officer, his whole charge is going after regional and national accounts. So now working out, going after some of the big players. when the Amazon ⁓ data center needs cleaning or the UPS shipping facility needs cleaning, making sure we’re part of those RFPs and lending those bids. And that’s doing exceptional. mean, it went from

a non-existent business three years, well, not even three years ago to this year, it’ll probably be doing call it 16 million or so. ⁓ And that’s on a hockey stick curve because it was like 2 million the first year to 16. you know what mean? So that’s an area that was untapped for us. And so it’s seeing all of, ⁓ it’s adding more markets.

and then ultimately going after verticals that we otherwise had never tapped before. And it’s like two avenues that we’re approaching to really try to kickstart this thing and get there. we’ll finish this year about halfway there.

Anthony Codispoti (35:05)
Wow. So it’s not just about, as you put it, more flags, more franchise, master franchisee. That’s part of it. But also how can you help build up each of those master franchisees by going after some of these national accounts and helping to coach them and helping to find them opportunities in areas that didn’t exist before. so let’s talk for a second about what you’re looking for in a master franchisee, whether that’s prior work experience or personality traits.

Adam Povlitz (35:15)
Exactly.

So, I mean, it is very much a ⁓ sales and marketing type business. So, from a business work experience, I think we’re looking for someone who’s either run or been a senior executive in ⁓ usually some sort of sales or marketing organization understands whether it be retail or restaurants, doesn’t matter, we’re agnostic to the industry.

but someone who understands that at the end of the day, this whole thing gets fueled by how much paper you put on the street. And paper on the street is derived from how many leads you’re trying to get. ⁓ So I would say on that side, it’s someone who’s a senior level executive, VP, director, CEO, whatever it may be. ⁓ And if you have some sort of sales in your background, all the better. ⁓ From a personality trait, it really is

It’s someone who’s hungry, you know, it’s extremely driven. The old African proverb, right, where it’s that every morning the lion wakes up and has to outrun the slowest gazelle or he doesn’t eat and the gazelle wakes up and he has to outrun the fastest lion or he gets eaten. But everybody wakes up running. That is the personality we want in a master franchisee. Someone who, you this is not a if you build it, they will come, you know, kind of franchise. This is a get up every morning and go, OK.

What can I go after? Let’s meet with the sales team. How’s everyone’s leads doing? What do we got? How can I help you? Let’s get going. Let’s get driving. ⁓ That type of personality really does well.

Anthony Codispoti (37:15)
Radical transparency, important philosophy for you. Why, Adam?

Adam Povlitz (37:21)
So I think in our industry, most commercial cleaning is done at night. And so what ends up happening is there’s this disconnect between what the customer perceives and what is actually happening at night. And that can be to the good or the bad, right? I’m sure there’s been times where someone is not doing a good job cleaning and ⁓ the customer doesn’t see it and they get away with it. ⁓ And on the other hand, you have times where the customer is seeing something

that to them is a big deal, but to the person who’s cleaning, it’s like, it’s a paperclip on the floor, get over it. There’s always this ⁓ disconnect. And so what we felt was important was ⁓ if we were able to present to the customer what we feel is doing well and what we feel has room for an improvement. And so what we’re working on right now in our tech stack is called the Customer Health Portal.

And so it’s you’re able as a customer, once this is all launched to log in, see what your health grade is, like a letter grade kind of rating. ⁓ And maybe you’re a B plus and not an A, and we’re going to tell you what areas your franchise owner and their team need improvement on, what we’re doing to help get them better at it, give you options if there’s something you want to change or something like that. And just being upfront with it, because if you’re trying to

build a long-term relationship with a customer and keep them for five, 10, 15 years versus, I think the industry average is like two years or something like that. ⁓ You’re not gonna ⁓ build a 10-year relationship off BSing each other. You’re gonna build it off just being upfront and honest of like, here’s who we are, here’s where occasionally we’re going to fall short, but here’s what we’re gonna do to rectify it.

Anthony Codispoti (39:10)
And Adam, I know that you’re real big on fostering entrepreneurship, right? You want to provide your master franchisees with financial freedom. It always helps if there’s a specific story to share where it helps to illustrate how that’s actually played out for somebody.

Adam Povlitz (39:32)
Yeah, yeah. I think a couple of things. think on the master franchise level, I mean, we have great stories, right? And you find people who come from all walks of life. The best stories on those are usually ones where someone was laid off. And hey, I’m laid off. I’m 47 years old, 57 years old.

what do I do with the skill set that I have and where do I go? And you find out that like you don’t have to know anything about cleaning to run a master franchise. You just need to know how to lead a business and coach people and manage. And on the unit level franchise, these are my favorite far and away because you get the story of someone who starts, you a lot of times our most common franchise at the janitorial level that’s sold is like,

couple thousand dollars a month in revenue is all they’re looking for. It’s a side hustle is how they start to keep their day job. They’re looking for some extra cash. And then you find out you get a phone call or an email of, hey, just wanted to let you know I was able to, you know, put the down payment on that house because of this antigo thing. I was able to put my daughter through college because of this, you know, this whole this little side hustle that turned into quite a business. ⁓ And then my favorite is a lady out of the Philadelphia area.

We just sent her about a year ago, we just sent her a plaque. Her janitorial franchise did a million dollars in revenue. She started with a $4,000 a month revenue package. She did a million dollars. Like talk about living the American dream. You know, I just wanted to make a couple extra bucks, you know, pay for a house or something like that. And now I think she employs, you know, 20 something people. think two of her kids work for her. You know, I mean, it’s,

Those are the stories where you’re like, wow, like, okay, this is why we get out of bed every day.

Anthony Codispoti (41:27)
That’s impressive. We were talking quite a bit about your technology, but ⁓ did we talk specifically about preventive analytics or did we kind of talk around that a little?

Adam Povlitz (41:39)
So it’s sort of what’s built into the CleanCom platform where it’s able to sense when the reporting of someone has had multiple issues in an area, then we’re able to address that proactively rather than waiting for a client to cancel because they’re fed up with the same bad service.

Anthony Codispoti (41:47)
Got it.

⁓ I know that sustainable eco-friendly practices are important to you, Adam. What’s an example of how you’ve introduced that and how do you balance that push for green solutions with the demands for large scale commercial cleaning at an affordable rate?

Adam Povlitz (42:17)
So I mean, think everything is going that way in general. And so it’s more incumbent upon us to ensure that the chemicals and equipment are sustainable to begin with. Let’s look at it from a selfish perspective. It’s better for me to have sustainable equipment and chemicals because ultimately over the long term, if I can use things multiple times, it’s going to cost my franchisees less. And so if I can make my franchisees more money.

and keep the buildings just as clean as we always could. And ultimately keep more chemicals out of the air and out of the harsh chemicals off of people’s skin that they touch with every day. I mean, it’s win-win-win. So for us, it’s just something that we build into our practices from day one. it’s not, if a customer says, want you to use this, we want you to bleach on this particular thing, like we’ll use it.

But that’s not if you don’t ask for, you know, any kind of harsh chemical, we’re using green chemicals from the beginning.

Anthony Codispoti (43:18)
What’s an example of a green chemical? Like how would you replace a bleach?

Adam Povlitz (43:23)
So in that case, I couldn’t think of the name of the exact chemical off the top of my head, but it is. It’s just different things that are less harsh. Obviously, the fumes on bleach isn’t good for you. It’s caustic to the surface. And so there’s things that can clean just as intensely, but aren’t going to leave the residue, the ammonia in the air for people to breathe. And so it’s just easier on the.

on the surface and on the air.

Anthony Codispoti (43:54)
Gotcha, okay. And we mentioned in the intro that you’re a member of the Forbes Business Council and you contribute to Entrepreneur Magazine. So you’re giving advice to other leaders through that work. What’s one piece of unconventional wisdom that has helped to guide your success at Anago?

Adam Povlitz (44:18)
Good question. One of the things that I’ve really been focused on lately is, ⁓ and I don’t have a sound bite way to say it for you, but it really is get out of your own way. ⁓ One thing that I think we all learn as we’re climbing the corporate ladder, right? You go from the entry level employee to the mid level person to manager or whatever, and the reason you get promoted,

is because you’re doing things, you’re learning the system of whatever business you’re in, and you’re doing it your way. And so now more and more decisions come to you because they like how your way works out. And so you get promoted and you get more people under you and you keep doing it your way. And then you find out as CEO, ⁓ you’ve just become the bottleneck because quite literally everything is being funneled through you. ⁓ And that’s a hard lesson to go, okay, I’ve been doing this for, you know.

for at the time when I was made CEO was 2018. So I’d been with the Antigo for nine years and my way worked. And and so now to go wait a minute. I need to be able to hire people who are smarter than me and get out of the way. I actually you know like I said I hired a COO a chief marketing officer chief strategy officer and IT director. I mean I went hog wild and there’s been nothing better for my own.

Frankly, first for my own sanity, right? Just because it was like the burnout speed I was going at. And second, because now it allows me really, like I have, I do time blocking. have somebody, a buddy of mine taught me that, where I have a couple hours in the morning. If you want a meeting with me, I don’t take meetings before 10 a.m., period. From eight to 10, call it, that’s my time, where I literally block it off. I read it in a book, it’s called High Value Activity. It just says HVA on my calendar.

And so that’s my time where maybe I’m reading the latest trade publication on the industry. Maybe I’m watching a podcast of somebody. Maybe I’m researching something that intrigued me or, you know, looking at some conference that I had thought about. And that’s really where the ideas come from so that we can ultimately cast the vision and decide the direction for the brand is taking that, that, that, you know, quote unquote, quiet time to really think about like, where are we headed and why? ⁓

And if all the decisions flow through you and all roads lead to Rome, ⁓ there’s just no time for that. And then you find out you kneecapped your own business.

Anthony Codispoti (46:52)
Yeah.

mentioned podcasts, do you have a favorite that you like to listen to or maybe a favorite book that our listeners might get benefit from?

Adam Povlitz (47:05)
⁓ man, I am, I am all over the map with that. I listen to everything. I mean, I go, ⁓ you know, I just some business podcasts. I don’t, I, it’s usually on shuffle, frankly, on my, on my Spotify, ⁓ business books that were, were huge for me. I have, I can definitely say two that were massively impactful for me. one was called leaders eat last by Simon Sinek. ⁓ love all his works, read, read all of his books.

But leaders, he last was was powerful to me because ⁓ what he’s essentially saying is if you look at in terms of your own company, right, your own organization and you go, look, we all have we all go out of here and we go into our normal the rest of our lives, right? We have our families and our and our kids and and we all have our own personal things going on. And, you know, some of those are good and some of those aren’t so good. And you go, OK, as a corporate organization.

If there are more things that I can take care of for someone who works for me that when they’re dealing with it outside of work, then when they are at work, they just can focus on work and they’re not stressed about like, ⁓ do I have, can I pay this bill or do I have the proper health insurance or, know, am I saving enough to retire? And so it’s investing in our people to make it so where like just the less they have to worry about outside of work, the more when they’re here, it’s like, I can just focus on work. ⁓

That that was a huge one for me. And then the second one was called who it’s by Jeff smart. ⁓ W, W, H, O, not World Health Organization. ⁓ Who is great, who is so everyone’s probably heard of who not how, where it talks about, you know, bringing on the right people and putting them on the right seat on the bus. And, and that’s how you drive an organization forward. What who does is it actually gives a ⁓ essentially like a blueprint on like

Anthony Codispoti (48:41)
They say I haven’t heard of this one before.

Adam Povlitz (49:00)
Okay, you’re looking for this role. Here’s how for any role. ⁓ Here’s how you put the job description together. Here’s how you put the job ad together. Here is the questions you should ask at the various phases of interviewing. ⁓ And, you know, before that book, it’s funny because it was I learned that book was actually from the pastor at my church. was he was there like the top 10 fastest growing churches in America.

And when he hires people, they’re all been home runs. And I’m going like, how do you do it? And I go, no, granted, you know, you have a different mission than me cleaning toilets here. So maybe people are a little bit more impassioned for you. But how do you do it? He tells me the book, shame on me. I put it in my Amazon cart and left it there for like six months. ⁓ But I finally read the book. And this was my new this is right when like the iPhone came out with the thing where like the the OCR text reader.

So you could like snap a picture of a book and then it would grab the text. And so I’m reading it and literally every page I’m like, that’s good. Turn the page. that’s good too. Like just, you know, so I created like my own cheat sheet and I, to this day, I read that five, five years ago ish to this day, I use that interview process for every single interview that I’m personally a part of. actually, so, so one of the things it does is it talks about essentially like,

Anthony Codispoti (50:19)
Give us a nugget from it. Give us one nugget.

Adam Povlitz (50:26)
you people, people want to, know, when you when you’re trying to fill a position, you want to fill it now. And so you end up interviewing a few people and maybe you do, you know, you interview five people. And what do do, you kind of go like, that one feels good. And there’s no rhyme or reason for it other than like, you got a good gut feeling on it. And how many of us, know, have gotten, you know, and now, and I’ll imagine, right, you were dating like that, right? And you go, you go on five dates, and you go, that’s the one I’m gonna marry.

You know, like no way, there’s no way to do that. You know, so you go, okay, first, I would rather take significantly longer in the interview process and really get to know a person because it is a marriage when you when someone comes to work for you, you want them to be, you know, working, you know, nobody stays at one career forever very often, though we have had two people now and then ago that have been we just celebrated the guy who had been us for the 30 years. ⁓ for me, that’s a that’s a rarity. You know what mean? Most people stay for

Anthony Codispoti (51:18)
Wow.

Adam Povlitz (51:24)
you know, five years or something like that. And but but that’s a marriage, right? It’s five years. I guess this might be as long as the marriage is last these days. I hate to say that. But yeah, hopefully not. But you go, I’m going to be with this person for five years. I better make sure I like them. I like their work ethic. I like how they think. And so you spend a lot more time on the interview process for these folks than and I tell them that in advance, hey, my interview process takes a lot longer. You’re going to meet with a lot of different people.

Anthony Codispoti (51:33)
Hopefully not, hopefully not.

Adam Povlitz (51:53)
It’s not just a one and done. And so my process probably takes four or five interviews versus one due to that book.

Anthony Codispoti (52:04)
four or five interviews. I don’t know that this would be possible in your situation, but something that I’ve employed over the years is, yeah, I kind of narrow it down to a handful of folks that look like they have the skills and the personality from what I can tell. And then I’ll actually hire each of them to do a smaller task. I’ll pay them for it. Because I want to see what the quality and the output of their work is.

⁓ If they come back with any questions, if they’re late on it. Have you ever tried anything like that? I don’t know if it would be easy to do for the types of positions that you’re filming.

Adam Povlitz (52:41)
Some of them I have, ⁓ know, we’ve ⁓ when we hired someone for social media years ago, it was like, hey, look at our existing social media and put together like, you know, a handful of posts and some imagery and what would you put together and when would you schedule them for and what would you say on each post and we wanted to see how they think. ⁓ I’ve been hiring, you know, like I said, for more senior leadership. And so it’s like hard to, you know,

you know, hey, you’re not my chief marketing officer yet, but put together next year’s strategy for marketing. Like, it’s hard to get because otherwise it’s just smaller tasks that you can’t really, you know, really base on it. What I find valuable. Another one, I’m 100 % I do every single employee, I do reference checks, every single one. And I tell them that and I go and I don’t want your friend. I don’t want a co worker. I want your boss, whoever your boss was at each of these positions.

My intention fully is to call them and ask them for, you know, get some information. And you find out, I think what you find out is pattern and practice. That’s what the value of this strategy is. Because now you’re going through their entire resume from every single job they’ve had that they put on the resume. Takes a while, takes, sometimes, you know, one of the rounds of interviews is like two hours. And you ask the same series of questions on each one.

And then ultimately, you kind of build a, you know, a pattern on this person, were they were they always really successful? And then and then someone who they used to work with pulled them to their next job because they’re like, I got to have Anthony on my team. He’s the best. they get pulled to the next job. Or, you know, you hear someone gets laid off. And that’s I mean, it’s look, it happens to the best of us is unfortunate. But then you find out that their last four jobs they were laid off from and you go, hmm.

maybe they weren’t, they probably weren’t a top performer if they got laid off four times in a row. And so it just allows you to establish a little bit more depth about a person when you go through the full career history and then ask the, you know, the old bosses, how did they do? What did they have any things back then that they could improve on? And, and if everyone tells them, you know, they’re great or, know, Hey, there were nine, I don’t give tens because nobody’s perfect. Cool. ⁓

But if everyone’s going, yeah, he was a six, and you go, Yeah, exactly. That’s what the kids say. I just learned that six, seven, I don’t even know what it means. But I’m like, okay, I think I know.

Anthony Codispoti (55:10)
It’s not the kind of organization that you’re building. You don’t want sixes. Yeah. ⁓

⁓ and I’m laughing because I have kids in the same age bracket

and I also don’t know what it means, but six, seven is a strange part of their vernacular today. Yeah. ⁓ yeah. And there’s a small subset of the listeners that’ll get that too. ⁓ all right, Adam, time for the big serious challenge in your life that you’ve overcome. What was that? How’d you get through it? What’d learn?

Adam Povlitz (55:27)
It’s not a good thing.

Yeah.

So in my time at Antigo, one of the big challenges was we had one of the, it was actually the Philadelphia market, the former owner, he was dealing with, he had an early onset dementia. And so just things were starting to go sour in his market. And long story short, I mean, it just,

Things went sour fast and I don’t like to terminate franchise agreements or anything like that. literally in our system, I tell people, really one of the only things you can do to lose your franchise is don’t pay your franchisees. If you screw over the little guy, we’re not cool. Just that simple. And I don’t wanna say he screwed into me over or anything like that, but it just went sour fast and I don’t necessarily think it was his fault.

But it was all of sudden we were thrust into a multi-million dollar market in a state where everything was sort of a hot mess. Attorneys were involved. We had to fly in, take everything over. ⁓ And it got to a point where, ⁓ I mean, was, God, I wasn’t sleeping during that period. And I was losing weight, not sleeping, not eating. ⁓ And it got to this place where

⁓ There wasn’t any money. The money that was collected for the franchisees was gone. And we had to make the decision of, we pay these franchisees out of pocket? And I made the call. said, all right, we’re going to do it. And we couldn’t afford it. We had to use a line of credit to do it at the time. ⁓ It was, we got to get these people paid. We got to get this figured out. I mean, I can’t tell you how many things were just going sour in that market.

And you’re having to separate the man from the disease. And you’re going, as an individual, this guy was a good person and really was in the business for over a decade. ⁓ But this disease is absolutely devastating. And we can hate the disease and still love the individual. It’s almost like the, what is it, love the sinner, hate the sin kind of a thing. And so just having to walk that tightrope.

and then ultimately get these folks paid. ⁓ And then figuring out now where the hell are we going to get the money to make sure we can pay that back because it wasn’t coming from anywhere. ⁓ Ultimately, ⁓ it worked out. And I ended up reselling it about a year later. And that is actually now the largest market in the system ⁓ and has grown probably 6x since that resale. So it was one of those things where

Anthony Codispoti (58:40)
Wow.

Adam Povlitz (58:44)
I think my lesson was sometimes the right move feels extremely hard and the wrong thing to do feels extremely easy to do, still do the right thing. It’s never going to cost you more ⁓ than doing the wrong thing, even if it feels like in the short term it’s the faster decision. Do the right thing.

Anthony Codispoti (59:09)
You could have

very easily rationalized not paying those janitorial franchisees, right? The agreement that was had was not directly between you and them. These are the little guys. These are the guys that, you know, they need the money, especially. It wasn’t like you were sitting on a pile of cash, though, mean, like you said, you had to take out a line of credit. I mean, you weren’t just going into your pocket. You were going into debt.

to pay these folks, but having that long-term vision and I’m going to use the word heart, that heart to do the right thing, that moral compass. ⁓ I think it’s great now that there’s some distance between that because you can look back and say, you know, I was able to resell that in a year and now it’s the largest market. It’s six X’d. And so that’s so helpful for people to hear that.

What’s really hard to do, like using your words, it was so hard to do the right thing in the moment, but looking in the rear view mirror, it’s paid dividends and then some. No, I think that’s phenomenal. ⁓ I’ve just got one more question for you, Adam, but before I ask it, I wanna do three things. ⁓ First of all, if anyone wants to get in touch with Adam directly, you can visit his LinkedIn page, and we’ll have a link in the show notes, but.

Adam Pavlitz, last name is spelled P-O-V-L-I-T-Z. And then look for Onago Cleaning, A-N-A-G-O Cleaning. And also you can go directly to their website, onagocleaning.com, A-N-A-G-O cleaning.com, onagocleaning.com. And I’m guessing that they can find information about the franchise opportunity there as well. Is that correct? Okay.

Adam Povlitz (1:00:52)
Exactly.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:54)
Also, as a reminder, if you want to get more employees access to benefits that won’t hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for the company, reach out to us at adbackbenefits.com. Finally, if you’ll take just a moment to leave us a comment or review on your favorite podcast app, you will hold a special plate in my heart forever. Thank you. And so last question for you, Adam, you and I reconnect one year from today and you’re celebrating something big. What’s that big thing you hope to be celebrating one year from now?

Adam Povlitz (1:01:24)
⁓ man. ⁓

You know, I really hope that some of the software that we’re talking about, you saw me get all geeked up and probably a little red and going like, yeah, about the Antigo Clean Suite software, this has been three years in development. And so it’s finally coming to a head. And to be able to…

I feel like it’s going to be like a rocket launch, right? Once we’re able to move everyone to this platform, it’s tested, it’s tried, it’s true. I mean, I think there’s, there’s, do you call them? Where it’s like the, know, like the, guess it’s like a bottleneck to some degree where you go, okay, if I can get this thing done, it opens up these 10, 20 different things. We have so many things that in terms of the automations and the, the, ⁓ the CRM data that are going to make everything that much more powerful.

and it’s all just getting funneled through this one as soon as this thing launches. So I’m hoping to say it’s live, we’re on it, it’s amazing. ⁓ I think it’s gonna be game changing. And then it’ll be, and now we’re finally in just ongoing development versus the full transition and launch and all that craziness, which is just pure chaos right now. ⁓

They regret putting me on copy on one of the distros for the technology because I always have them like, what about this though? And like, can we make it do that? And what if it did this and this, you know? So yeah. But I wanted to, you know, I want it to be amazing. I’m excited. So I think, you know, if that’s where we get next year, then it would have been a year.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:54)
Right.

Scope creep.

That’s awesome. Well, Adam from Onago Cleaning, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Adam Povlitz (1:03:19)
My pleasure, thank you for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (1:03:21)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.