Todd Knight came out of Goldman Sachs in 2008 with a managerial track record and zero experience running a P&L. Today his company Blink Facility Solutions clears $14M a year combined across two offices in the Carolinas, with 120 employees, 315 retail bank locations under contract, and a client list where the second-biggest customer has stayed for 17 straight years.
This article is a teardown of how he got there. Pricing methodology. Hiring at scale. Why response time eats clean quality. Why he answers every cold call. And why he tells operators to skip the cleaning franchise model entirely.
It comes from a long-form interview Anton and I did with Todd on the Commercial Cleaning Road Show. Watch the full breakdown above. Below are the operating principles that actually built the business. We also broke down the specifics of his outbound results in our case study with Blink.
From Goldman to a Failed Franchise
Todd grew up on the South Side of Chicago in Beverly. Irish immigrant family, four siblings, twenty-one first cousins. Moved to South Florida as a teenager when his mom took a restaurant job in Palm Beach. Military after high school. TGI Fridays general manager. HSBC mortgage-backed securities. Then Goldman Sachs in their secondary market.
In 2008, when the market fell apart, he wanted out. He went to a franchise show, eventually bought a cleaning franchise from a company out of St. Louis, and it did not work. He will not name the franchisor on the podcast. What he will say: "We separated from them and we opened up Blink Facility Solutions with my partner Jason Pototts who is out of Raleigh."
Two offices: Charlotte (Todd) covering Western Carolina, the Asheville market, and the entire state of South Carolina down to Hilton Head. Raleigh (Jason) covering Eastern Carolina, the Triangle, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Southern Virginia.
That partnership structure is the thing most owners get wrong. Todd had a partner who could own a region the same way he owned his. The geographic split was real, and it scaled.
The RFP That Changed Everything
Todd had an internal marketing guy he describes as "dialing for dollars." That guy came across an RFP for a regional retail bank. Six or seven companies were going to be in the running. Blink got pulled in.
They drove to the bank's corporate office in Raleigh, did a presentation, and won the contract. Three years. Around 55 locations to start.
The honest part: "One of the reasons we won is probably because we underpriced it." They had to live with that. As they grew, they adjusted pricing. Today, that same client has 315 locations cleaned by Blink across North Carolina, South Carolina, Atlanta, and North Georgia. Roughly $2M per year in revenue.
But here is the part most operators miss: that biggest customer is only about 20% of recurring revenue. Blink is not dependent. They have hundreds of other accounts.
If you want to win a multi-site RFP, the playbook is straightforward. Have someone who can prospect into purchasing departments. Get into the room for the presentation, do not just submit a proposal. Accept that you may need to underprice the first one to prove yourself. Then grow the relationship into special services like carpet, stripping or waxing, windows, and water remediation. Blink now does hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in special services for that one client alone.
How Blink Prices Multi-Site Contracts
Todd's pricing methodology is mechanical, not artistic.
Step 1: Get the square footage. Blink does not always visit every site for an RFP. They use Google Earth's measurement tool to grab square footage remotely.
Step 2: Get the flooring mix. Hard floor cleans faster than carpet. Tile or grout cleans slower than VCT.
Step 3: Apply a rate of clean. Todd's example on the show: 4,000 square feet per hour for a slow clean. So a 20,000 square foot building takes 5 hours of labor.
Step 4: Apply labor cost (he is paying $20 to $25 per hour in his markets). Add cleaning supplies. Add insurance. Add profit.
That is it.
The complication: some buildings clean faster or slower than the model. Retail banks stay clean (low traffic, few bathroom users), so the model is reliable. Hospitals, schools, restaurants, and bars are harder. Schools without day porters double the night clean time because the team is picking up everything that accumulated all day.
If you are pricing your own contracts and you do not have a defensible methodology, you are either underpricing (eating margin) or losing bids you should win. Build the model. Start with square footage and rate of clean.
Cleaning Supplies Yes, Paper Supplies No
Cleaning supplies are included in Blink's proposals. Paper supplies (toilet paper, towels) are pass-through with markup if the client wants Blink to handle them, but Todd often steers clients away.
His pitch to clients: "If you buy supplies from me, you are just paying more. I want to be honest with you. We mark wholesale to retail to cover our cost. You can save money by buying direct from a paper distributor."
The distributor relationship that makes this work: Blink uses FSI for the Carolinas, with a fixed-price web portal accessible to all ops managers. Cleaner reports a need to ops, ops orders via the portal, FSI ships next day by truck.
Why fixed price? "Amazon does surge pricing. COVID hits and toilet paper goes from $19 to $2,000 because there is no toilet paper." Surge pricing kills your margin and your forecasting. Fixed-price distributor wins.
In-House Cleaners vs Subcontractors
Blink uses both, but prefers employees. Subcontractors are reserved for skilled work the in-house team cannot cover well, especially window washing. Todd's framing: "If I asked you to wash your windows, as soon as the sun came in the next day, I would see big smears. Window washing is a skill set." Stripping and waxing also goes to subs. Cleaning at remote locations where Blink does not have a regional team also goes to subs.
Clients prefer employees. Many contracts even prohibit subcontractors. So when Blink does sub work, it is usually for niche specialties or distant geographies.
The total in-house headcount: about 120 employees combined Charlotte plus Raleigh.
Pay Above Market, Pay Early, Pay On Time
The operator wage philosophy at Blink is simple: above market, early, and on time.
"On time is the minimum. Early is the standard. Anything beyond that is unacceptable."
Cleaners earn $20 to $25 per hour in Todd's markets in 2026. He gives advances to long-tenured cleaners who need them. He pays on time without exception.
He also calls out the franchise and big-company practice of burying language in subcontractor contracts that says "we do not pay you until our customer pays us." Todd has walked away from his own subcontractor relationships when payment terms got abusive: "Shame on me for not reading that contract. But I am not waiting 90 days to get paid."
If you cannot make payroll without the client check landing first, your business model is broken. Either get capitalized properly or change your terms.
EO and the Mastermind
Todd never went to college. He went military out of high school. He did not have an MBA, had not taken finance courses, and was running a cleaning company without ever having managed daily cash flow.
His move: he joined the Entrepreneur Organization (EO). 250 business owners in the Charlotte chapter. Forums of nine owners that meet four hours a month for structured experience-sharing (no selling, no referrals, no advice-giving by rule). Annual retreats. Access to learning programs at places like Wharton, where Todd did a two-week operations and finance course.
He also ran a janitorial mastermind: seven cleaning company owners from Ohio, Florida, Texas, and California on a monthly call. They eventually disbanded the call when scheduling got hard, but the relationships persist.
Most cleaning operators play poker. They clam up about pricing, about hiring, about clients. Todd does not. He is eating lunch next month with a local cleaning company owner three years into her business who is growing on social. "I want to meet her and see how I can help her."
The four-wall theory: you can only control what is inside your four walls, but sometimes you have to step outside for new information. Other operators see things you do not.
Response Time Beats Clean Quality
This is the principle Todd repeats most often, and it is the one that compounds the most.
"Cleaning can be very speculative. Different people in the same office have different opinions about whether the place is clean. But what is not speculative is response time."
If a client calls or sends a work order, how fast does it get acknowledged? How fast does it get resolved? How fast do they know it has been resolved?
"If you do not clean well and you do not respond, the guess is you suck. If you do not clean well and you respond quickly, it is like, okay, they are competent. We do not need to give keys to a new company."
Todd is on his ops team about response times constantly. If a work order has sat for an hour without acknowledgment, he is pushing. He is the sideline coach.
He also answers every incoming call himself, including cold calls. That is how Anton got him as a client. We cold called him. He answered. He did business with us.
If you run a cleaning company and you are not picking up the phone, you are handing leads to operators like Todd.
What Verticals Are Worth It
Todd's preferred client list:
- Retail banks (low traffic, fewer bathroom users, predictable clean)
- Churches (high integrity, want to treat people well, especially in the South)
- Healthcare (clinics and similar)
- Schools that have day porters (without day porters, his crew walks in to spitballs and a 12-hour clean instead of a 9-hour clean)
Todd's filter for bad accounts:
- Less than 1x per week cleaning frequency (the bathroom always looks dirty, you are always the bad guy)
- Annual cleaning company changes (price-shoppers, not relationship clients)
- "Sandy at the front desk" responsible for facilities (no training, no protection, no advocate when complaints come in)
The best clients have a dedicated facility manager who values cleaning and will defend you when twenty people in the office have twenty different opinions about whether the place is clean.
Don't Be a Cleaning Owner Who Doesn't Clean
Todd's son started in the business at 15 and is 29 now. Todd cleaned buildings personally for years when cleaners did not show up. He still cleans occasionally.
"It gains respect with the cleaner. It makes you understand cleaning is really hard. I cleaned one middle school and looked at my watch and I had 15,000 steps."
His daughter Abigail just landed Blink's first New York City contract. She is the recruiter for the company. The salesperson on this deal was her. She wanted to start the contract Monday. Todd told her to push it back a week. She insisted on Monday. Now she is the cleaner for week one until she hires.
"Welcome to your dad's business."
Where Outbound Fits for Blink
Most of Blink's growth today is organic. Big-name clients refer out. A facility manager leaves one bank and brings Blink to the next bank. Customer growth compounds.
But during slower periods, Todd uses outbound. He has been one of our commercial cleaning clients for that exact reason: small-seeming leads from cold email and cold calling have grown into nine-location franchise deals once Blink got proof of concept with the first owner. One salon turned into nine.
Most operators dismiss small leads. Todd takes the call, qualifies the upside (is this a franchise group? are there other locations? what is the procurement structure?), and converts when the math is right.
Final Advice for Operators Starting Out
Todd's advice for anyone getting into commercial cleaning:
- Be capitalized. Have funds for a 2-year ride-up. Most operators undercapitalize, undercharge, and burn out before the recurring revenue compounds.
- Network with other cleaning companies, not just clients. Most owners hide their pricing and their playbook. The ones who share grow faster.
- Have a sales and marketing plan. Not just a corporation. Most new entrants register an LLC, hope contracts come, and do not have an outbound motion.
- Do not buy a franchise. "Instead of giving a franchise 10 grand, put a marketing plan together for 10 grand. That is a good 3-month draw for a sales guy."
We agree with all four. If you want to scale a commercial cleaning business and you are trying to figure out which outbound channel will move the needle, book a strategy call and we will walk you through what is working in your market.