The Hidden Challenges of Commercial Cleaning | Greg Sack

Yeah, I mean, so they're partners of mine now, but the original story was two of the guys were in their backyard having a little bit of a barbecue and the lawn service showed up.

And this is in the middle of the winter in Charleston, South Carolina.

And this guy's going back and forth in his lawn.

And he's like, they're sitting there drinking beers going, he's not doing anything like no lawn is being cut.

He's just going through the motions.

And, you know, Brian, who's the owner is like, I'm paying for this.

I'm actually paying somebody back.

to do this.

So the original concept of pinch was actually lawn care.

And then as soon as they went to, to like kind of research what the MVP product was going to look like, you're like, why don't we do house cleaning as well? And so that's really how it kind of came about is that he was sick of paying for a lawn service all year long, you know, long when he's like during the winter months, I should just, you know, use an app to be like, Hey, I need a lawn service this week because it's starting to get a little long, but it might be a month from now when I'll need it again.

you know, rather than every single week.

So that's how it originated.

But again, when I came in, we looked at like, okay, lawn care is very difficult because you're dealing with weather elements on top of just the challenges of a dual-sided marketplace, right? Like we're trying to find the customer and we're trying to find the provider and we have to marry them together, both on price, service expectations, et cetera.

And And it's hard because a lot of times, you know, we'd have customers, hey, you know, where's my lawn guy, you know, and we'd contact the lawn guy and he's like, oh, it's raining.

And we're like, well, where are you? And he's 45 minutes away.

It's like, yeah, well, it's raining where you are.

It's not raining where your customer is that you're supposed to be on the lawn.

So anyhow, that's really the original.

One of the partners was in real estate and that's kind of how the whole cleaning aspect came about is as a real estate agent, he's like, man, I can't tell you how many times I've signed a contract on a Thursday and I wanted to get an open house on Friday and the house was just a disaster.

And like trying to make 10 phone calls to find a cleaning team that could do the work on Friday morning so it could be ready by Friday evening That was the concept.

And that's kind of where the name Pinch came about.

It's like when you're in a pinch, how do you get that team right away? But, you know, what was interesting to us is when you have the masses, we average nine seconds for a job to get picked up.

So we were providing what we deemed as kind of a discounted service, but still kind of market rates for residential cleaning.

And we'd post it, say, in Charleston, and it was like, boom.

And you can see, boom, boom, boom.