My Story

I received my Mechanical Engineering degree from the University Of South Florida and interned with Anheuser Busch at the brewery at Busch Gardens doing PLC programming for their automated brewing systems as well as with Tampa Electric Company's performance group doing boiler tube tests and turbine efficiency testing at the coal fired power plant in Apollo Beach, Florida.  After school I got my first job with the Trane Air Conditioning Company's commercial sales office here in Tampa.  I worked there for 15 years.  I worked as an sales engineer, worked with service dispatching and management for our nearly 100 technicians, and even did some work out in the field for service and retrofit projects.  I then did engineering plan-and-spec take-offs for large commercial projects (including all of the HVAC equipment that was installed at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg when it was built in 2011).  We did retrofit and service work for major commercial properties all up and down the west coast of Florida (From Tampa to Fort Myers).  From chilled water plants serving all of downtown Tampa to rooftop units on strip malls, this was a big operation were I was able to learn a boat load of information on how management, operations, and marketing all integrated with the very technical work of HVAC. 

One of the major turning points while at Trane was when I was tasked with working closely with the software and automation engineers from the Microsoft Dynamix 365 team that came in to our office to convert the old DOS-based platform we were still using to a more modern, connected, and customized system (the Dynamix 365 platform).  Our office paid over a million dollars when it was all said and done to convert to Dynamix 365.  On multiple occasions the Microsoft software engineers had to come back in to tweak and change small parts of our complex system that wasn't working exactly the way we wanted.  This is where I learned how to begin to integrate operations, with sales, customer service, marketing, management, finance, and operations and all of the tiny details required to streamline an operation like that to work efficiently and without disruption.  What I learned was that while the software engineers were working in system generalities, our company had very specific things just for us and how we did things, and specifically for where we were located.  So many factors come into play that you don't even realize when you start to really get down to the nuts and bolts of an operation and how its systems work.  But seeing this first-hand gave me great clarity on how it all needs to come together.  

While I was working at Trane I was also helping my Dad with his carpet cleaning business that he started just as I was starting college.  I remember doing all of the technical and marketing work for him early on.  This was grass roots work with using the old Go Daddy website builder and marketing consisted of creating ads for a local newspaper using Microsoft Publisher.  Looking back at that software and website builder versus what we have today is mind blowing.  Regardless, learning how a small business operates from a stat-up as a single owner operator like my Dad and being able to compare that to what I was then doing with Dynamix 365 systems with the Trane Company allowed me great insight into the similarities and differences between these two very different scales of service businesses. Being able to work in these things independently have helped me greatly into crafting my own business systems today. 

After my 15 years at Trane, I took the reins of my Dad's company Babysoft Carpet Cleaning and went full-time doing it all.  In the field, in the office, marketing, sales, you name it.  The whole time I was crafting my business systems.  Creating the pillars and tasks to help keep everything running smoothly, but to also keep from losing my mind.  There is so much you need to know, and so many things are up in the air at one time, not having a system to maintain control can quickly cause things to start spinning out of control.  It's just too much to keep in your head at all times and it goes completely against the whole purpose of scaling your business.  The goal is to put it all in a system so you can start delegating the work to other people to the point where you no longer need to be working "in" the business at all.  

I've been with Babysoft Carpet Cleaning now for the last 12 years and in that time I also got my Florida Air Conditioning Class-A contractors license and started up Spartan Air Conditioning for residential & commercial A/C service.  Over the last 10 years I have been putting more and more time developing the systems you see here with Clean Step Systems.  Testing out different software platforms to determine what would work best for the person who maybe hadn't even started their company yet or was still attempting to scale up their business to becoming totally turnkey.  A software platform that would be easy to use, have tons of flexibility, and that worked effectively on desktop and mobile devices for field techs and workers.  Well, it's done and we're finally here and I hope you can join me and my community here at Clean Step Systems to get your journey moving forward for your dreams of starting and scaling your own business, or to be honest, if you just want to be a solo owner/operator and make good money on your own and not deal with employees, you can do that too.  I did it for a while as well here lately and it definitely has its advantages.  It's all here to help you get there.  And more than that, beyond just your business, we'll focus on some important things to focus on while you're building everything and what comes afterward, with you and the world around you, and how to continue to make the places we live and work a sanctuary of good will, peace, and caring for everyone.  Let's get it done!