How Route the Services platform CEO Ricardo Regalado grew Route the Services platform to $1.1M revenue and 212 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is ricardo regalado he's a passionate entrepreneur who's driven by commer by empowering the commercial cleaning industry his purpose is to motivate inspire his peers family and colleagues with positivity shares genius he is ricky the cleaner and he's focused on building right now a company called get getroute.com helping folks it's really a multi-vendor marketplace focusing on the vendors ricardo you ready to take us to the top that's it let's do it okay so super niche space which by the way i love but for people that are not familiar with this cleaning space tell us exactly what space you're playing in yeah so you know when you think of cleaning there's two sides to it uh there's a residential side which everybody thinks you know come to my house clean be a housekeeper uh but the space i'm really focusing on is commercial cleaning so think of you're at the office you're at a restaurant you're at a health care hospital those folks that are cleaning the space uh nine times out of ten are outsourced and they're being uh the services are being done by a vendor and so are you a marketplace to connect the two are you selling service or software to the cleaners yes so we we are today a sas product right so we're b2b so we are a product that is sales tools for the commercial cleaning vendor uh but by doing that we've gotten some great engagement where it's like hey let's take it a step further where we could be a suite of tools and then add to that to that offering because uh people people need it people want it there's not no one-stop shop software uh right now in our space so nathan's cleaning services i do 20 office building in atlanta every single month i might use you to manage cleaning schedules of those 20 office buildings so uh yes and no so think of this think of nathan's cleaning service is looking for work nathan's cleaning service is getting receiving leads from google somebody's found you right where we come in is we from that step forward is we we are a walk-through tool we're arriving on site and we've digitized the pen and paper process so instead of capturing notes and taking photos with your camera phone and then all that being done again in the office you have an app now that we we capture the photos you take the square feet measurements you write all the hot points and it's in the app itself and then at the office if you wanted to that gets pushed through the web so anybody in the office could actually work on the bid that you just did a walkthrough for uh in chicago and you could be in philadelphia so just be clear you don't have employees all around the world but i can upload my photos when i'm walking through atlanta of the office building to your application to store them and organize them correct you got it i see so and that's the first step nathan so that's the walkthrough in our in our industry the walkthrough is the foundation of everything then you get to bidding and estimating calculating your price point and then you get to the proposal you know and every step all that data is getting pushed and so why are you better than ex i imagine people use like probably excel for this like why are you better than excel yeah so excel is is great to come up with that price right they've got the pivot tables the formulas but what we've done is we've digitized that walkthrough because what people have done is they've taken those notes and try go back to the office upload it on excel and then calculate right where us capturing the photos in the square footage and taking those notes now what a client calls back for carpet cleaning when a client calls back for window washing when they call back for adding three days of service those photos are always there as a portrait of the space so what do people pay you for this so we got two products right now it's a 50 a month starter plan and then 130 a month growth plan for those of the because the industry's fragmented 90 is operating at under a million in revenue the rest are the big boys right abm aramark sodexo uh where we're not focused on those we're focused on the small mom-and-pop shops to help really just drive the economy raise the threshold and the bottom line pricing because that's what we're solving is uh how do you say just improving the way it's priced because that is what's wrong with our industry is under bidding and how many of these mom and pop sort of cleaning services pay for your services today pay for your software today yeah so we launched about 12 months ago we got 250 companies uh we have companies in canada we have companies in australia south south africa using the product and that's what's exciting is it's a global solution the way you do a walk through here and bid and do a proposal is the same way you do it across across the world so can i take 250 times 50 bucks a month you're doing about 13 000 a month right now in revenue we're almost there uh paying paying customers it's about 212 215 right now yeah so we do free trial right now you get a 30 day free trial and we try to convert those into you know paying customers but that's why now the marketplace sounds so great because you know supply ordering um the ability to order supplies right the ability to order a work use a workforce management tool where we don't do time in attendance uh we don't do quality control but companies need that so it's like we built a great program that can really integrate with anybody let's bring those all together and really give these small business owners the power of data and technology so launched in 2020 you know 212 customers 50 bucks a month about 10 500 a month in revenue scaling from there have you bootstrapped or raised bootstrapped i love that got one angel investor how much did they put in yeah well actually two i'm sorry one just just put another 25k so i have two at 25k okay eddie lou eddie lou here in chicago and chris deutsch here in chicago okay so 50 grand and how much equity do you give them oh it's a safe note so so so we had a safe note going right now um it's eddie's got a little bit more he's been an advisor and he's pretty much been with me since since we started kind of guiding me through the through the waters of vc and fundraising because man i i never raised money before i i own the cleaning business and i i've grown that to a 10 million revenue business and i never asked for money there right but with technology now i see why people raise but then i see how people get down the rabbit hole of raising too because it's almost like a necessity but we've we've got to the point where we know the investors that we want to team up with um and and i appreciated of that you know because it's is it safe is it safe capped or is it uncapped it's kept would you cap it out of curiosity yeah no we kept it at 4 million and how did you go for that number we we had a we had our first attempt at fundraising uh and we went the vc round right nathan something i learned too early right like that was pre-revenue we should have gone that route but it helped me open the doors to speak to a lot of people where now they're keeping in touch now when we go back and we've gotten to the mri that chicago midwest wants you to be at uh it's gonna be an easier conversation mm-hmm you built a cleaning when did you launch your cleaning company not the sauce seven years ago and you grew it from nothing to 10 million a year in revenue in 2020 yeah yeah i mean is that profitable how much do you make on 10 million yeah i mean it's it's very profitable it's what it's how i funded the route the the software how much have you put into the software we average about eight to twelve percent net margins right now yeah is that her gross is more about you know 30 34 but it's very competitive so that depends on if it's a multi-site location if it's a one-off location so those can vary how much from your cleaning business cash-wise did you pump into the software product to build it out so we put about seven hundred thousand in that's how much i bootstrapped okay and are you full owner of the cleaning company the cleaning company is my wife and my cousin and i uh so it's family business that's why i'm able to focus on route today is dude i got when i say family i've got 17 family members between my wife's side and my side and they're they're killing it though they they rot they're rocking it out they're letting me focus on the software product because they see that as as the vision uh or it's just just the potential of what this all could turn into and it all came from cleaning man well and so why not go build the largest cleaning company in the world use your cash flow to buy their competitors monopolize the market price control versus saying you know what let's get going on the software thing let's put in 700 can build it i get i get that question a lot nathan because it's like rick you're you know because we're already you know in our space we're we're already in the top you know five top three percent because again not many companies reach this this level what is the url of your cleaning company it's uh rosellato r-o-z-a-l-a-d-o dot com rosellato.com that's my cousin's that same and my last name together so it's i mean i in in one short answer nathan i'd say i i've i've gotten lucky with this company and it's been lucrative for me and i'm just a big big person i've given back my father my late...