It started because the software did not fit.
New Leaf Cleaning opened in St. Petersburg, Florida, with W-2 employees from the first day — no contractors, no shortcuts on how people get paid. That one decision made almost every off-the-shelf tool wrong immediately.
The scheduling apps could do weekly and monthly, but not the last Friday of every month, which is what a real client actually asked for. The quoting tools wanted a flat rate; the pricing is per square foot, and it has to be the same number no matter who picks up the phone. The invoicing tools were happy to send an invoice tomorrow; the job is finished now, and tomorrow is how you end up chasing money in March.
Then there was Florida. Nonresidential interior cleaning is taxable here. Houses are not. Carpet is not. Exterior is not. County surtax stacks on top and changes across a line you cross twice a day. Not one tool we looked at knew any of that, which meant a person had to know all of it, every time, forever.
Every one of those is a small thing. Twenty small things is a second job you did not agree to.
So it got built, one Tuesday at a time.
Not as a roadmap. As repairs. Something broke on a Tuesday — a crew rolling to a job with no signed agreement, a shift that ended at 01:30 and got counted as two days, a payroll run that needed an hour of arithmetic — and then it did not break again.
That is why the details are strange in the right places. The verbal acknowledgment path exists because a crew was already in the van and the client was never going to click a link, and the choice was between a rule nobody follows and a record of what actually happened. The midnight-crossing shift exists because a janitorial contract does not care what day it is. The cash-and-Zelle ledger exists because that is how people genuinely get paid sometimes, and pretending otherwise just moves the mess somewhere you cannot see it.
Then other owners started asking.
Cleaning company owners talk to each other. They asked what we were using, and the honest answer was “something we made,” which is an annoying answer to give someone drowning in the same spreadsheets.
So Broomstack is being opened up — carefully, and with the demo first, because the setup is real work and the fit is not universal. It is built for cleaning. If you do lawn care and HVAC too, this is not your tool, and we will say that on the call rather than after you have paid.
What that means for you.
The company that made it is still the first company to hit every bug. Nothing ships that has not already had to work on a real morning with a real crew waiting in a driveway. When you tell us something is wrong, you are not filing a ticket into a void — you are describing a problem we probably had last month.
And the things we will not do are as fixed as the things we will. Your clients are yours, not entries in a marketplace. Your technicians are not a per-seat line item — charging you extra for hiring is a tax on doing the right thing. We are not going to build the fourth-best version of lawn care software in order to grow faster.
The standard is simple: if it would not survive a real Tuesday, it does not ship.