On a Thursday night in October 2013, Simon Brooks packed his belongings and drove west toward Silicon Valley, thinking he was on his way to creating the next Scrabble app, a word game he called Gadzookery.
He had little to lose. Brooks owed more on his house in Louisville, Ky., than it was worth. His marriage was over and he had been working in restaurants and bars for two years, ever since the financial crisis forced him to leave his job as a mortgage broker.
"I put my dogs and my bags in the car and drove to the Dojo," Brooks said.
He was referring to Hacker Dojo in Silicon Valley, a community space for technology startups whose members -- fees generally start at $125 a month -- have round-the-clock access.
The hacker space proved to be the key to his new enterprise -- just not in the way he had imagined.
Brooks arrived with $12,000 and a rough version of his educational word game. He hoped to assemble a team at the Dojo to help him rebuild it but, once there, he found neither the developers he needed nor a room to rent. He wound up in motels instead.
Four months later, he was out of money and living in his 1999 Lexus. When the Dojo's manager asked for a volunteer to clean the restrooms and kitchen every afternoon in exchange for free membership, Brooks raised his hand.
Without realizing it, he had taken the first step toward creating his startup: a cleaning company that relies on analytics to improve efficiency and set prices.
Larry Maloney, a founding member of Hacker Dojo, said people were dissatisfied with the quality of the work done by the cleaners before Brooks volunteered.
Normally, said Maloney, the Dojo smelled a bit sour, largely because of developers working late into the night. "After Simon," he said, "it smelled squeaky clean."
That was no easy feat. The Dojo is a sprawling space of more than 16,000 square feet. It never closes and typically has at least 300 visitors each day.
After eight months, the management got rid of the small company that did its cleaning and began paying Brooks $400 a month for his services.
Eight months after that -- having spent about two years trying to create the Gadzookery app -- Brooks took a hard look at the commercial cleaning market.
"It was a $51 billion industry," consisting mostly of small companies, he said. Brooks saw an opportunity. Hacker Dojo's management agreed to give him a one-month advance to buy the equipment and supplies he needed to start, and in 2015 he started Squiffy Clean.
There are about 100,000 companies in the commercial cleaning business in the country today, said John Barrett, executive director of ISSA, a trade association for the global cleaning industry. The 50 largest companies account for about 30 percent of the revenue, according to an industry report published by Dun & Bradstreet, leaving the other companies plenty of room to capture customers.
More than 90 percent of janitorial-services companies are sole proprietorships, according to a report from the industry research firm IBISWorld. But the greatest turnover is at the startup level, Barrett said.
"The churn is unbelievable," he said.
So far Brooks has avoided that churn. Six months after he began, he was earning enough to move his business out of Hacker Dojo and into an office in Palo Alto.
His company is unusually high-tech for the industry. It collects more than 700 points of data, like the time it takes to mop a square foot, and uses the information to improve and refine its cleaning methods, and to set prices.
"We have a client with an 8,000-square-foot building and we dove into the data and made changes to how the cleaning is done, such as combining certain tasks or changing the order in which they are done, and saved $600 in monthly labor costs," Brooks said. "Margins in the industry are so low that we have to shave off every bit of labor we can."
Most small cleaning companies charge by the number of labor hours, but Squiffy Clean created an algorithm that sets prices based on the data it collects about cleaning sites.
The company also is developing technology to prevent fraudulent workers' compensation claims. It will use data to help determine whether an incident occurred.
Barrett at ISSA said although large companies in the contract cleaning business use high-tech methods, it is far less common among smaller services.
Compared with other office-cleaning companies, Squiffy Clean generally pays a higher hourly wage -- about $17. The median hourly wage in the industry is $11.27, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Squiffy Clean also gives cleaners equity in the company and makes their safety a top priority.
Starting any business, regardless of the technology, is difficult -- and even more so when the founder is homeless. But Brooks was physically and mentally healthy and had the support of Maloney and others at Hacker Dojo.
In March, Brooks raised $10,000 in loans through the peer-to-peer lending platform Kiva. Squiffy Clean also has a presence on the startup investment platform AngelList and is in talks with potential investors.
Still, finding reliable cleaners when the company had no track record was difficult.
The commercial cleaning industry also has a reputation for being unsafe for women, leaving those who work in empty office buildings at night vulnerable to sexual assault and rape. The PBS show Frontline aired a three-part documentary in 2015, Rape on the Night Shift, after 21 women sued ABM, the nation's largest janitorial services company, for failing to protect them from sexual assault by male co-workers and supervisors.
To address those concerns, all of Squiffy Clean's night crews clean in teams of at least four. There are no on-site supervisors and there is never a lone woman on the team, Brooks said.
Although all 18 of the company's workers are independent contractors, Brooks said he plans to eventually make them employees.
Today Squiffy Clean, still in its pilot phase, serves the Bay Area from San Jose to Palo Alto. The company has five initial customers. Its newly revamped website gives potential customers a guaranteed price quote in 15 seconds, Brooks said.
One of Squiffy Clean's first clients was Singularity University, a Silicon Valley think tank and startup accelerator.
"A lot of people view janitorial work as just a way to make money, but Simon embraces it as the very important job it is and takes a very scientific approach to it," said Tom LeGan, the facilities manager at Singularity. "He's also very compassionate about his workers. You don't see that in many corporations, let alone a janitorial services company."
Brooks still faces many of the same difficulties as other Bay Area startups, including a tight labor market.
"We are all trying to attract the best engineers and the cleaning industry is not sexy, so it's tough," he said.
Whatever the challenges, he said his life had been improved by entrepreneurship. He no longer lives in his car and has moved into an old 34-foot recreational vehicle.
When he gets home, he is grateful just to have a shower and a bed. "I've lived in vehicles for so long I've gotten used to it," Brooks said. "And this is a whole lot better than a car."
SundayMonday Business on 09/12/2016