Colby | Custom software for commercial cleaning companies

When spreadsheets or off-the-shelf apps stop fitting, Colby builds the missing piece around your operation. Support stays with us after launch.

START WITH YOUR WEBSITE

Answer a focused interview and get a preliminary bottleneck brief before the first call. Discovery determines what is worth building.

Scroll to see what we’ve built ↓

How an engagement worksThe full three-week process →

013 weeks
Discover
We sit in your operation, on site and on calls. You leave with a map of how the work actually runs, on paper.
02One session
Readout
A build menu priced item by item and ranked by payback. You choose what gets built first, or whether anything does.
03Weekly
Build
Working software in your team's hands every week of the build. No big reveal at the end.
04Ongoing
Run
We host what we ship and answer the phone when it breaks.

Meridian's Tuesday

Every screen here is real work we shipped.

Meridian is a stand-in for the client and the data is reconstructed. The work is real. No screen shows a price.

FIND

Their next customers were in the queue before the competition called.

We wired five cities' permit feeds, the assessor rolls, new business licenses, and three RFP portals into one scored call list.

7:04 AM

New buildings hit their call list before a competitor rang.

Before Dana opens the shop, Colby has already read yesterday's permit feeds from Phoenix, Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, and Chandler.

A certificate of occupancy filed six days ago on a 42,000 square foot medical building in Phoenix sits at the top of Call Ready, scored 88.

The score is a plain sum she can audit: the certificate of occupancy is worth 40 points, the size curve adds more, and a recorded sale plus a new business license on the same parcel push it higher.

The card gives her the reason in one line and the number to dial.

Signals queue. The buckets are Call Ready, Needs Enrichment, and Monitor. The banner reads 3 of 5 counties live because coverage is provisioned one jurisdiction at a time.

88score

Certificate of occupancyCall nowInvestor-owned

Certificate of occupancy 6 days ago. 42,000 sq ft. In your territory (85254). Two corroborating signals.

42,000 sq ft · 85254 · CofO 6d

Dial ↓

82score

Open RFPCall now

In your call queue

9:15 AM

The morning went to calling, because we handled the call rules.

The 42,000 square foot building is investor owned, so common-area cleaning runs through a property manager. Colby resolved the manager to Robert Nakamura at Vantage Point Management in Irvine, California, and put his direct line on the card.

When Dana clicks Call, the callee-state chip reads California, a two-party state, so the line announces that it is recording before Robert picks up.

The prospect below him is a retail center whose manager sits in Honolulu, where it is 6:15 in the morning, so that Dial button stays gray until 8am local.

The quiet-hours rule reads the callee's own time zone from Colby's records instead of the browser's clock.

Power dialer. The recording-consent table covers 51 jurisdictions. A dial outside 8am to 9pm in the callee's time zone is refused before it rings.

Dialer

Robert Nakamura

Vantage Point Management · Irvine, California

California(949) •••-••48

Ready to dial · Pacific time

This line announces it is recording before it connects (California, two-party).

Call-ready queue

Sonoran Ridge OfficesTempe, Arizona

Ready · 9:15am local

Kihei Retail CenterHonolulu, Hawaii

Outside 8am–9pm in the callee's time zone (6:15am in Honolulu).

9:40 AM

Every call's notes were already written up by the time she hung up.

Robert agrees to a walkthrough Thursday at eight. By the time Dana hangs up, Colby has transcribed the call and pulled the parts that matter into the record.

Bid proposals are due August 14, marked at 0.94 confidence against the sentence "we need them in by the 14th."

The building is cleaned by Copper State today, so the incumbent field fills with the exact line Robert said it in.

A task for the August 14 bid drops onto Dana's calendar without her typing anything. Every field carries the quote it came from, so she can check the machine's work in one glance.

Call intelligence. Click any extracted field to jump to the exact line in the transcript it came from.

Extracted fields

Transcript

DanaHi Robert, it's Dana Reyes with Meridian Facility Services. I saw Del Rio Medical Commons just cleared its occupancy inspection.

RobertThat's right. I'm Robert Nakamura, I handle this property for the region out of our Irvine office.

DanaAre you handling the cleaning in house, or contracting it out?

RobertWe contract that out, we don't do it in house.

DanaWho has the contract right now?

RobertCopper State has it right now, but it is up for bid.

DanaWhen do you need proposals?

RobertWe need them in by the 14th.

DanaCan I come walk the building Thursday at eight?

RobertThursday at eight works. Come walk it then.

WIN

From quote to contract, we made winning work faster.

We set the quote math underneath: area by area at 3,500 sq ft an hour, checked against the county assessor before the bid goes out.

11:00 AM

On the lot, the bid walk became a number she could price before they left.

Dana starts a quote for a Chandler dealership she is bidding, Vireo Auto Group. The moment she types the address, Colby fills in what the Maricopa County assessor already holds: 40,000 square feet, built in 2019, owner of record Vireo Holdings LLC.

She measures the actual cleanable space on her tablet and the total comes to 27,200 square feet, because the service bays are concrete and out of scope.

Colby flags the gap in amber: the assessor says 40,000, her areas total 27,200, thirty-two percent lower, with a note to confirm the excluded bays.

At a production rate of 3,500 square feet an hour, the cleaning hours settle on a number she can price against.

Quote builder. Square footage, property class, and year built pull from the shared assessor cache. Measured areas sync back to the client record.

Vireo Auto Group

Bid-walk quote · measured on the field app.

Draft

Property address

1450 W Ray Rd, Chandler, AZ 85224

Maricopa County assessor

Confirm the address to pull the county record.

Measured cleanable areas

Cleanable total27,200 sq ft

Production rate3,500 sq ft / hr

Derived cleaning hours7.8 hrs / visit

Hours and square footage only. No price leaves this screen.

11:30 AM

The follow-up went out the same day, in their own words.

Colby has a follow-up to Robert already drafted, built from the certificate of occupancy that sourced him and the incumbent it heard on the 9:15 call. The draft names the building, references the Thursday walk, and runs 118 words.

A badge shows it passed the voice check: one approved phrase, zero em dashes, under the word cap.

Dana reads it and changes one sentence, then sends it from her Gmail.

The message goes out through her own inbox and the draft record stays a draft in the system, because the only path from draft to sent is a person clicking that button.

Morning review queue. Edit the copy and it re-checks before send. A blocked phrase or an em dash disables the button.

Following up before Thursday's walk

To Robert Nakamura · Vantage Point Management · post-call follow-up

Lint ready

Sourced from: CofO signal, Del Rio Medical CommonsIncumbent: Copper State Cleaning (from the 9:15 call)

Body

Robert, good speaking this morning. I pulled the certificate of occupancy on Del Rio Medical Commons at 7250 East Shea before our call, so the 42,000 square feet and the 2019 build are already on file. The building cleared its final city inspection six days ago, which is usually when common-area cleaning goes out to bid. When we walk Thursday at eight, I want to look at the lobby floor finish and the restroom fixtures, since those two lines drive most of the nightly hours on a medical building this size. You mentioned Copper State handles it now. I will bring you a scope built from what I measure on the site. Thank you for the Thursday slot.

Voice lint118 words · 0 em dashes · 1 approved phrase

DELIVER

New accounts got up and running without the busywork.

We built the eight-step onboarding and the inspection scorecard that grades a clinical clean line by line.

1:45 PM

For new accounts, we cut setup from six systems to one.

A dealership-park quote Dana presented two weeks ago, Cactus Wren Business Park in Mesa, came back signed over lunch. The moment she marks it won, Colby promotes the account to a client and runs the eight-step onboarding without waiting for her.

It opens the financials and assigns an owner, then stops at the address.

The Mesa parcel will not geocode cleanly, so Colby parks that step for a person to confirm rather than dropping a pin at zero, zero on the map. The steps behind it light up in order, down to the kickoff meeting on the calendar and the welcome packet in the client’s inbox.

Resolving the address clears the block and the completion milestone fires; she can open any step after and read exactly what it did.

Client onboarding saga. Eight reversible steps. The geocode step parks a bad address for review instead of dropping a 0,0 pin.

Client onboardingRunning0 of 8 steps

Open the financialsColby opens the client's financial record and cost centers.Running
Assign an account ownerWaiting
Geocode the addressThe Mesa parcel will not geocode cleanly, so Colby parks this step for a person to confirm rather than dropping a pin at 0, 0 on the map.Waiting
Build the inspection profileWaiting
Send the welcome packetWaiting
Schedule the kickoff meetingWaiting
Provision billingWaiting
Mark onboarding completeThe account is marked fully onboarded once the address clears review.Waiting

Colby stops and asks before it acts on anything it cannot verify. The address that would not geocode waits for Dana instead of landing at 0, 0.

2:30 PM

Proof the work got done, without the paperwork.

At Alta Mesa Pediatrics, a clinic Meridian already cleans, the site lead walks the medical scorecard on her phone with no signal in the exam wing.

She rates each line on the Clean Scale and snaps a photo of a restroom.

One high-touch item, the door handles and light switches, comes back Needs attention, which opens a corrective action and holds the deficient count at one.

She re-cleans it and re-rates it Acceptable, dropping the deficient count to zero. Colby recomputes the score on its own server rather than on the phone, and a passing inspection queues a Google review request to the clinic’s contact before she leaves the parking lot.

Field inspection. Five janitorial scorecards ship seeded: office, dealership, school, medical, and HOA common areas. A deficient line opens a corrective action; zero deficiencies passes.

Quality inspection

Server-scored. The office server recomputes the grade

1 open action

Clean Scale score 85 of 100Deficient items: 1 · computed on the office server, not the phone

Clean Scale · Excellent 100 · Acceptable 80 · Needs attention 50 · Unacceptable 0

Restrooms

Fixtures and dispensersPhoto attached

Floors and drains

Floor care

Waiting-room floor

Exam-wing floor

High-touch

Door handles and light switches

Corrective action opened. Re-clean and re-rate to close it.

Check-in counter and pens

Exam wing has no signal. Ratings are captured offline and synced on the way out.

1 deficient item still open. Clear it to pass and queue the review.

GROW

They kept growing without babysitting the tools we built.

We put the guardrails around it: an ad change past 20% of spend waits for Dana, and every copilot write waits for a confirm.

4:30 PM

Their ads kept running without a daily check, on guardrails we set.

Meridian runs Google Search and Local Services Ads, and the agent logs every move in plain English with the reason attached.

This afternoon it paused the keyword “office cleaning jobs” after thirty days with zero leads and added “free” as a negative term. It moved budget toward Local Services calls, where Meridian books more work.

One action waits on Dana: a budget increase that touches more than a fifth of the month’s spend, so it sits behind an Approve button she has to press.

The agent cannot raise its own monthly cap, and if today’s spend ever runs past twice the daily plan it pauses itself.

Ads agent. Meta stays switched off for now. Google Search and Local Services Ads only.

Weekly ads digest

Agent proposals, reasons, and approvals

Paused keyword "office cleaning jobs"Thirty days live, zero leads.2:12 PM
Added "free" as a negative termFilters job-seekers off the search campaign.2:13 PM
Moved budget toward Local Services callsMeridian books more work from the calls than the clicks.3:45 PM
Budget increase on Local ServicesTouches more than a fifth of this month's spend.

Guardrails

Hard limits the agent cannot lift on its own

Monthly cap68% used

Circuit breaker armedPauses the day if spend runs 2x the daily plan.

Meta, not enabled

5:15 PM

Their own records answered questions in seconds.

End of the day, Dana types a plain question: which open bids are due this month that nobody has touched in ten days.

The copilot reads with her exact permissions and it does not send or publish on its own.

The copilot answers with three deals in a table, each row a link straight to the record, including Vireo at August 9 and Del Rio at August 14.

She asks it to draft a follow-up to all three. It hands back three proposal cards that read “Draft email to Robert Nakamura, not done, confirm to create.” She confirms, and three drafts land in her review queue for tomorrow morning.

Copilot. It cites real record ids only, and every write it proposes waits for a person to confirm.

Copilot

Answers cite the records they came from

Dana

Show opportunities with bid dates this month we haven't touched in 10 days

Copilot

Three open bids due this month, last touched more than ten days ago:

Opportunity	Bid due	Untouched
Del Rio Medical Commons	Aug 14	12 days
Vireo Auto Group	Aug 9	11 days
Sonoran Ridge Offices	Aug 21	14 days

What keeps running after the crew leaves

The 2:30 inspection that passed brought in the five-star review on the left, and we drafted the reply in Meridian’s own voice. The sitemap on the right came from Meridian’s intake facts, and a claim they never gave us gets blocked before it ships.

Review inboxConnected

★★★★★Lena Ortiz

Our Tempe clinic has never looked this clean. The overnight crew is thorough and the lobby floors are spotless every single morning.

Passed inspection · Alta Mesa Pediatrics

Draft reply · Meridian voice

Thank you, Lena. The Meridian overnight crew takes real pride in those lobby floors, and we will keep them spotless for your team. We appreciate you taking a minute to write this.

GBP review inbox. Passing the 2:30 inspection prompted this review.

Meridian Facility Services · office and medical cleaning · Scottsdale, Tempe

Draft pagesGenerated pages, pending publish

Core

Home
About
Contact
Reviews

Services

Office cleaning
Medical cleaning

Cities

Scottsdale
Tempe

City and service

Office cleaning in Scottsdale
Office cleaning in Tempe
Medical cleaning in Scottsdale
Medical cleaning in Tempe

Website generator. A claim you did not give it never ships.

One building, one record

Nothing got retyped between screens.

Del Rio Medical Commons entered Colby at 7:04 as a Phoenix permit and left Tuesday with a booked walkthrough and an August 14 bid task on the calendar. The certificate of occupancy, the score of 88, the recorded call, Robert's name, and the drafted email are one record that nobody keyed in twice. The outlined nodes below the line are the rest of that record's path, the part that runs once the August 14 bid comes back: the won quote, the eight-step onboarding, the first passing inspection, and the review request. Every step reads the address the county already gave it.

Solid cards ran Tuesday. Outlined cards run after the August 14 bid comes back.

01Tuesday
Certificate of occupancyFiled 6 days ago on a 42,000 sq ft medical building at 7250 E Shea Blvd, Phoenix.
02Tuesday
Scored 8840 points for the certificate, plus the size curve and two corroborating signals on the same parcel.
03Tuesday
Call ReadyTop of the 7:04 queue, ahead of Needs Enrichment and Monitor.
04Tuesday
Survey bookedRobert Nakamura agreed to a walkthrough Thursday, August 7 at 8am.
05Tuesday
Follow-up draftedA 118-word email built from the certificate and the incumbent, Copper State Cleaning.
06Tuesday
Bid task, August 14Proposals due August 14 dropped onto Dana's calendar from the recorded call.
07After Aug 14
Won quoteThe assessor-prefilled bid comes back signed after the August 14 deadline.
08After Aug 14
OnboardedThe eight-step saga opens the account and geocodes the address the county already holds.
09After Aug 14
Inspection passedThe first clinical-clean scorecard clears with zero deficient lines.
10After Aug 14
Review requestedA passing inspection queues a Google review request to the contact.

After 5:15 PM

A system like this is what a build menu turns into.

Each screen in Meridian's Tuesday is one item from a build menu, priced on its own at the readout and shipped in weekly increments. Colby hosts and runs the result. The three-week discovery finds which item your operation needs first.

Build my bottleneck brief How the engagement works

Case studies

What changed after three builds.

Most of our work is commercial janitorial. Each of these three removed a single bottleneck and carries the before and after: one from a janitorial company, two from service businesses we fixed the same way.

Janitorial2026

Quotes went out the next morning. Now they go out before the rep leaves the lot.

Pricing lived in one Excel file the founder ran, and every walkthrough waited on it overnight. We encoded that pricing model into a quoting app the reps run from inside the building.

Read the case →

Staffing2026

A six-hour Friday reconciliation now takes forty-five minutes.

Timesheets arrived three ways and someone cross-checked them by hand against a rate table that lived in the owner's head. We built the ledger that ingests every source and flags only the exceptions. Invoice errors hit zero inside ninety days.

Read the case →

Asset managers2026

RFP responses open 70 to 85% pre-filled.

Sourcing meant a dozen portals, and drafting meant hunting old Word files with two or three days left before a fifty-page deadline. We built a pooled queue that watches the portals and drafts each response from the firm's own approved language.

Read the case →

The level of detail we build to

Four tables of working detail from the system above: what Find reads to build the call list, what the quote engine checks before a number goes out, what Deliver sets running after a win, and the limits Grow works inside. A discovery readout documents your operation at this same depth before we price a single build.

WHAT WE WIRED FIND TO READ

What the Find engine reads, the signal kinds it recognizes, how it scores them, what qualifies, what it produces in a day, and the dialer guardrails.
Reads	Phoenix PDD and Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler permits; Maricopa Assessor sale affidavits; new business licenses in Mesa, Scottsdale, and Glendale; RFPs from BidNet, SAM.gov, and the AZ Procurement Portal under NAICS 561720
Signal kinds	permit, sale, tenant move-in, property-manager change, RFP, review, growth, custom
Score weights	Certificate of Occupancy 40, temporary CofO 38, open RFP 45, property-manager change 24, a size curve up to 30, and a bonus when one building throws more than one signal
Qualifies	10,000 sq ft or a storefront license, inside your territory ZIP codes
Produces	15 to 25 call-ready triggers a day, sorted into Call Ready, then Needs Enrichment, then Monitor
Dialer guardrail	recording consent set from a 51-jurisdiction table, calling hours checked in the callee's own time zone, DNC and main-line numbers withheld with a reason

The Certificate of Occupancy is the timing bell. A building cleared to occupy needs a cleaner within weeks, and the county publishes the date.

WHAT WE BUILT INTO WIN

The Win pillar's mechanics: six CRM objects, the pipeline stages, the quote engine, the assessor check, human-reviewed email, the dedup thresholds, and the send guardrails.
CRM objects	lead, contact, organization, opportunity, client, subcontractor, kept as six separate records
Pipeline	identified, contacted, survey scheduled, surveyed, quoted, presented, verbal, then won, lost, or ghosted
Quote engine	area-by-area measurement at 3,500 sq ft an hour, plus day porter and project work, unit-tested to the cent
Assessor check	flags any measured total that runs more than 10% off the county's number
Email	Claude drafts from your own call notes and the building's signal, a person reads it and clicks send, and the draft row stays a draft after it goes out
Dedup	messy imports auto-merge only above 0.95 with a matching ZIP; a borderline pair is held for one-click human review
Guardrails	voice lint under 150 words with no em dashes, a required CAN-SPAM footer, one daily send cap per mailbox

The email drafter never sees a margin number. Finance fields are cut from what the model is allowed to read.

WHAT WE SET RUNNING AFTER THE WIN

What the Deliver pillar runs after a quote is won.
Inspection templates	Office, Auto Dealership, School, Medical, and HOA common areas, graded on a Clean Scale (Excellent 100, Acceptable 80, Needs attention 50, Unacceptable 0)
Server-scored	the phone sends raw ratings and the office server re-scores them, so a device cannot report a passing grade the office did not compute
Passing	zero deficient items fires an inspection-passed milestone and queues a review request
Onboarding	an eight-step saga that opens the financials, geocodes the address (parking for review rather than dropping a 0,0 pin), and schedules the kickoff
Subcontractors	a magic-link portal where a sub e-signs the ICA and uploads a W-9 and a COI; the W-9 is write-only and never read back
Documents	native ES256 e-signature, so a signed agreement seals without a DocuSign account

Winning a quote is what launches all of this. The onboarding, the inspections, and the review request are one chain a person can audit step by step.

WHAT WE KEEP RUNNING UNDER GROW

What the Grow build keeps running for Meridian: the generated website, the reviews loop, the ads guardrails, the copilot tool budget, and the what-works analytics.
Website	home, one page per service, one page per city, one page per city and service, plus about, contact, and reviews, hosted and run by Colby
Fabrication lint	blocks any claim not in your intake data, so an ungrounded "licensed and bonded" never ships, and the reviews page never invents a name
Reviews	requests triggered by a passed inspection, a tenure mark, or a completed onboarding, with AI-drafted responses a person approves before they post
Ads	Google Search and Local Services Ads; a change touching more than 20% of channel spend waits for your approval, and a circuit breaker pauses the day when spend runs 2x the expected pace
Copilot	11 read tools and 9 act tools; every answer cites a real record, and any write is proposed for you to confirm rather than run on its own
Analytics	the ghost rate after a quote is presented, channel attribution with true cost per lead, and an at-risk client list drawn from falling inspection scores

The What-works view surfaces the number most owners cannot see, the share of quotes that go quiet after you present them.

Who does the work

You work with the person who builds it.

Colby is Connor O'Brien's firm. He runs the discovery on site and writes the software that comes out of the readout. During a build you get working software every week, and a direct line that reaches him at connor@getcolby.com.

After launch, Colby hosts and maintains the system under a separate service agreement. When something breaks at 6 a.m., the person who answers is the person who wrote it.

Rather start with your own operation?

Map your bottleneck first.

Some owners want their own worst workflow mapped before we build anything. Tell Colby the thing that hurts most, whether it is quotes stuck in a spreadsheet or leads going cold while a bid gets written. The preliminary brief prepares the first call. If there is a fit, paid discovery maps how the work moves and ends with a prioritized build menu. Software scope and pricing come after that readout.

Prospecting happens in the gaps between running the business, so the follow-up that actually wins accounts never runs.

Your prospecting layer drafts the outreach and keeps the follow-up on a schedule, not on memory.

See the build: Automated prospecting →Explore this workflow

Build my bottleneck brief

Selected work

Where these workflows came from.

One of these traces back to a real Phoenix janitorial operation: the instant quoting app the crew now runs from the lot. The other five come out of the same discovery-and-build method applied to other service operations: a government RFP desk, an outbound sales team, a staffing back office, a facilities dispatcher, and a landscaping crew tracking job costs. Each one is written up with what changed.

01JanitorialSelf-serve quoting, instantReplaced an Excel sheet and a paper intake form with a quoting app the team runs themselves. Specs in, priced quote out, while the rep is still walking the building.Custom build2026↗02Asset managersGovernment RFPs, pooled and auto-draftedAggregated relevant gov RFPs into one queue and auto-filled responses from the firm's own library, turning a manual scavenger hunt into a review-and-send workflow.Pipeline2026↗03OutboundProspect generation + outreach scripting, automatedSourcing and enrichment run on their own, and the message drafts come with them. The rep opens the queue and the cold sequences are already written and scheduled, each one named.Self-running2026↗04StaffingPayroll reconciliation, zero manual mathThree timesheet sources, one weekly ledger. The coordinator reviews exceptions instead of running a six-hour manual cross-check against a rate table only the owner knew.Operations2026↗05FacilitiesWork orders routed, vendors dispatched, SLAs trackedMaintenance requests came in by email, text, and phone. A dispatcher manually looked up the right vendor, dispatched by call, and followed up when jobs went quiet. That routing loop now runs automatically.Operations2026↗06LandscapingJob costs tracked, margin visible per contractThe crew hours existed. The material receipts existed. The equipment log was on the truck. Nobody was connecting them to the contract number before the invoice went out.Operations2026↗

All use cases

Software guides

Comparing the tools first?

Most cleaning companies run a bid app, an inspection app, a time clock, and a payroll system, with one account's data split across all of them. The category guide maps the janitorial software market by the job each tool does, and marks where a custom build earns its place.

Compare janitorial software by category

From the notes