Nancy Galván started Unica Enterprises in 2007 with a business plan, a pile of debt and no clients. Nearly two decades later, the Dallas-based facilities services company employs more than 185 people and serves DFW Airport, local municipalities and federal agencies across North Texas. At the 2026 ISSA VEO Conference in Dallas, where Galván was ...
Debbie Sardone never set out to build a business. Early in her marriage, she and her husband were poor enough to qualify for government assistance, though pride kept them from accepting it. He worked three jobs and eventually went back to the police department for a steady paycheck. She started cleaning houses out of the ...
Frontline turnover in commercial cleaning runs at an estimated 200% a year, and each departure costs roughly $3,500 to replace. Labor is already the largest expense for a building service contractor. Channing Johnson, president of KB Building Services in Nebraska, considers turnover the industry's biggest problem and one it rarely puts enough effort into solving. ...
Plenty of cleaning business owners take pride in owing nothing. They’ve paid off the trucks and equipment, and nobody at a bank has a say in how the company runs. Steve Mastin, chief financial officer of 4M Building Holdings in St. Louis, knows owners like that. He described a friend, a local businessman who pays ...
New AI tools show up faster than most cleaning companies can evaluate them. The harder question, according to two speakers at the 2026 ISSA VEO Conference in Dallas, is whether the people expected to use those tools will trust them long enough to make a difference. That question drives “Leading with AI and Humanity in ...
Juan Carlos Cerda has lived in the United States since he was three. He grew up in Dallas, graduated from Yale University and now serves as the Texas state director for the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC), a bipartisan group of more than 2,000 CEOs and employers pushing for immigration reform. He is also a ...
The cleaning and facility solutions industry, represented by ISSA, which we are proud to be a member of, is never short on conversations about labor. We talk about recruiting, turnover, attendance, training, safety, reliability, and retention, while wondering where to find people who will show up, follow the process, care about quality, and take pride ...
Allan Industries is testing what automation looks like on the ground floor of a union town. At a newly built commercial property on Market Street in Philadelphia, autonomous vacuums and a robotic scrubber now work alongside the company’s union cleaning crews, taking over the long hallways and open lobbies that used to eat up hours ...
A surface can look clean and still carry significant bioload. The new Bioload Exposure Metric Index (BEMI) aims to standardize ATP sampling and move surface hygiene toward a measurable cleanliness score. If we can't measure clean, how do we know we've achieved it? When we clean a surface, we physically remove unwanted substances, whereas sanitizers ...
From smart dispensers and connected equipment to occupancy sensors and predictive maintenance, the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming cleaning from a reactive task into a data-driven operation. Real-time insights help facility managers optimize labor, improve service quality, reduce waste, and respond to issues before they become complaints. As connected technologies become more accessible, cleaning ...
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