How a London commercial cleaning firm tripled headcount without adding a single admin
Clearway grew from 8 to 24 cleaners and 3.1x'd MRR in three years — all on the same two-person office team. Here's the operational backbone that made it possible.
Clearway Commercial provides nightly contract cleaning to 60+ office buildings across central London, including several listed corporate HQs and three serviced-office groups. When co-founders David Okafor and Helen Tran took over the business in 2022, headcount had been stuck at 8 cleaners for nearly two years — not because demand was missing, but because their operational ceiling had been hit.
The ceiling: manual scheduling and paper invoicing
Clearway's old system was a mix of WhatsApp groups, a shared Google calendar, and Excel invoices emailed manually each month. Every new building meant 6–10 hours of admin a week — onboarding the team, scheduling shift patterns, raising invoices, and reconciling timesheets. At 8 cleaners they were doing 60 hours of admin a week between two people. There was simply no spare capacity to grow.
What was breaking
- Shift swaps happened in WhatsApp and got lost — buildings occasionally went uncleaned.
- Timesheet errors led to underpayments and a quietly building staff retention problem.
- Invoices took 4–6 days to raise and went out monthly, hammering cash flow.
- No view of which contracts were actually profitable.
The switch: contract-first operations in Workatool
David and Helen migrated to Workatool in early 2023, treating each office building as a recurring contract with a defined shift pattern, a dedicated team, and a fixed monthly invoice. The platform took over the parts of the job that didn't need a human.
Clock-in moved to the Workatool mobile app, with GPS verification and photo proof-of-completion automatically attached to each shift. Invoices generated themselves on the first of each month and were sent — with backup timesheets attached — without anyone touching a keyboard.
The first month after switching, I spent more time visiting buildings than managing the office. That hadn't happened in two years.
The result: 3.1x MRR on a flat admin overhead
Three years on, Clearway runs 24 cleaners across 60+ buildings with the same two-person office team. Monthly recurring revenue has grown 3.1x to £180k, gross margin is up 4 percentage points (thanks to live profit-per-contract visibility), and staff retention is the highest it's ever been.
Critically, David and Helen now spend their working time on new contract pitches and team coaching — the work that actually grows the business — instead of chasing timesheets and stamping invoices.
The lesson for other commercial operators
Scale in commercial cleaning isn't won by hiring more admin — it's won by automating the recurring spine of the operation. Every new contract should add revenue without adding admin hours. Workatool's recurring-contract model is what makes that maths work.