- March 29, 2025
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Alejandro Florez, 28, the owner of a commercial cleaning company in Bradenton, recently bought a Sarasota cleaning business that used to employ his parents. His mother and father, who had worked as cleaners while he was growing up, are now supervisors for his companies.
Florez founded Cleaning Pros of America when he was 20, about a decade after his family moved to the United States from Colombia. There, his parents, Vicky and Luis, had also been entrepreneurs. They owned an export business that dealt in things like copper wires, but had to move due to drug cartels taking over, according to Florez.
His family came to Florida in 2006 when he was 10 years old after his uncle, who lived locally, told them about the Sarasota-Bradenton area. It was attractive to them in part due to its proximity to Shriners Hospital in Tampa, where Florez could receive treatment for spina bifida, a condition he has had since birth. His parents were employed by a commercial cleaning company and frequently took their son with them on jobs.
“I helped out, you know, taking the trash here and there,” Florez says.
His parents had been cleaning the building where the Sarasota Herald-Tribune was located when, in 2014, the management switched to a franchise service to cut costs, Florez recalls.
“My parents just were not treated the same from the get-go,” he says. The new owners “wanted to cut their pay drastically from what the paper had been paying them.”
Ever since then, Florez had the idea of opening a cleaning company with a mission “to create a better workplace for cleaners,” he says. “That's at the forefront of what I do — taking care of our staff so that they take care of our customers, and it just creates a cycle.”
His experience moving to the United States and starting from scratch has also fueled his desire to help others.
"The industry is full of first and second-generation immigrants trying to make things work," Florez says. "And that's a very big passion of mine. I'm in that struggle. I'm a first-generation immigrant trying to figure it out."
Florez, who previously worked as a bank teller and restaurant server, says he always had the idea that he wanted “to do something of my own.”
"This business has kind of been my my college and grad school, so I'm still learning a lot," Florez says.
In 2017, he came up with the concept for Cleaning Pros of America to help his parents, who were cleaning houses at the time, which he says is more physically taxing than commercial cleaning.
After he registered the name with the state, the commercial cleaning company was born. In 2018, Florez won a $5,000 business pitch competition from the University of South Florida that he says enabled the company to purchase its first commercial van and get it wrapped.
“The bigger name got us into doors,” Florez says of Cleaning Pros of America. “We’re still swinging upwards a bit.”
Many of the company’s clients are local, regional and national builders, according to Florez, whose staff handles post-construction cleaning.
However, as the construction industry experienced some turbulence, Florez says, he began wanting to diversify.
“We had seen construction slowing down and getting a little bit bumpy about a year ago, and we wanted to hedge some of our risk, because that … had grown to be over half of our business,” Florez says.
An equity investor in New York helped scout for opportunities and presented a profile he thought could be a good fit. The business was called At Your Service, a commercial cleaning operation in Sarasota.
It matched what Florez was looking for — a business with more steady commercial clients — and he realized his parents had briefly worked for the company years ago.
Cleaning Pros of America closed on the purchase of At Your Service on Jan. 31, according to Florez, who took over effective Feb. 1. In the next 18 months, Florez says he plans to rebrand At Your Service — which must maintain its name as part of the acquisition deal — as a part of Cleaning Pros of America.
At Your Service is based on Lime Avenue in Sarasota, while Cleaning Pros of America has an office on Sixth Avenue East in Bradenton.
“Two years ago … we were working in a parking lot out of our trucks,” Florez says, sitting at a desk in the Lime Avenue location. “I now have two offices.”
Combined, Cleaning Pros of America and At Your Service do just under $3 million in revenue a year, according to Florez, who aims to grow in the region with at least one more acquisition further south toward Fort Myers.
“This transaction came at a really good time,” Florez says. “Our focus is more on the janitorial side as things have been slowing down with construction.”
At Your Service counts Charlotte County Parks and Recreation among its biggest clients, he says. Together, the two businesses have about 95 customers, including some with multiple locations. Next, the plan is to add to the roster with commercial and medical parks as well as daycares and offices.
“As more offices get filled back up, we want to be there,” Florez says. “We’re changing our focus” to medium to large facilities that need cleanings three times a week. This provides stability and makes jobs easier to staff because employees want to work jobs that provide more hours, according to Florez.
In addition, he says, "This gives us that stability of the monthly recurring revenue" that was not coming from jobs in the construction industry.
One thing that was “a little bit unexpected” with the acquisition, Florez says, was the need for a culture shift at the new business.
Staff with At Your Service had been used to interfacing with customers only if there was a complaint, according to Florez, who called the approach “hands off.”
He sees communication with clients as key in what makes his company stand apart. From day one, Florez adds, he scheduled visits with At Your Service clients to find out how he could improve.
“Obviously, we do quality control to make sure that everything is going right, but our differentiator is that relationship with the customer,” Florez says of Cleaning Pros of America. Communication with customers helps reduce friction, Florez says.
“We want to not call them customers but partners,” Florez adds. “Keeping up facilities … is a big task for everybody involved. So if we can be an extra set of eyes, security-wise, maintenance-wise and cleaning-wise,” that is what his staff aims to do.
Currently he is piloting a program at Cleaning Pros of America in which workers provide report cards for clients, with before and after images and videos of areas they have cleaned as well as notes about anything else that is important. Over time, the report cards will be implemented across both companies.
“We’re making sure that we’re integrating things while we’re small, so that as we grow, we just expand that culture,” Florez says. “Our philosophy of operations is that we’re very involved.”
The changes at the newly acquired business have been mostly welcome by staff and clients, Florez says.
“If management and ownership is hands off, they don't feel supported,” he says of his staff, which numbers nearly 50 between the two companies. “A lot of the team members are excited for that extra support that they're going to be getting, because it makes them feel like they're not in it alone.”
His sister, Adriana Florez, who is the COO of Cleaning Pros of America, agrees that employees and clients appreciate having active management.
“Before it’s like they were little islands,” she says of the workers. “Now they feel supported, and they understand that they’re part of a team.”
The service Cleaning Pros of America provides goes beyond what one might expect from a cleaning business, Adriana Florez says, and that is part of what makes relationships so critical.
“We're not only cleaning, you know — we're looking after our clients,” Adriana Florez says. “They’re trusting us with their buildings.”
In addition to “making the place beautiful, nice and clean,” she adds, “we are like that extra set of eyes” keeping track of maintenance issues or identifying products that could provide savings. “We’re always trying to see what we could do that’s a little bit more for them.”
