The Camera Doesn’t Lie

Francis and Rocio George say their use of body cameras is unusual in the cleaning industry, and a strong selling point.

It’s called time theft.

That’s a common problem in service industries, and it essentially refers to workers not spending the time they promised on a job.

Thanks to a proprietary technology called QCam, Skyview Cleaners is cutting down on wage theft — and creating the type of trust with clients that its owners, married couple Francis and Rocio George, believe sets their Springfield-based business apart.

“We’re actually incorporating technology into a legacy industry,” said Francis, who came out of the IT world and was looking for something different after an industry contraction back in 2022. “I have a couple of friends that used to be tech sales guys just like me. And all of a sudden, I see their LinkedIn update — one’s running a porta-potty company, one has a lawnmowing company. All they’re really doing is taking a legacy industry and making it more efficient with tech.”

In Skyview’s case, QCam is a body camera mounted to the worker’s belt when he or she visits a residential or commercial property on a contracted cleaning visit. This footage is shared with clients so they can see the work — and how long was spent completing it.

“In janitorial and cleaning, there aren’t very many tech-forward people, and that gave us a market opportunity,” Francis said. “We don’t consider ourselves in the cleaning business — we’re in the quality control business. And we needed some system to ensure quality.”

The second phase will be live-streaming jobs for clients, and the third will involve an AI assist to identify anomalies for someone watching several different feeds come in.

“For most clients, you’re doing the same thing week over week,” Francis explained. “So we can basically standardize some sort of a time metric, and an alert can go off to the internal quality control manager if the clean significantly diverts from that.”

Rocio said one of the main complaints from customers in the maintenance business is that cleaners don’t always do the job they promised.

“There is a gap in the industry. There is no quality control. We promise these things to the clients, but then, how do we make sure our employees do their job when no one is watching them?

“Right now, we’re just a janitorial company implementing a little bit of tech to differentiate ourselves and compete better, but I do have a vision for the future where this type of technology becomes commonplace.”

“That’s why we implement the QCam. If the client has any complaint at all, we invite them to look at the footage and see,” she went on. “It’s basically to ensure quality control. We also implement this only if the client gives us permission. It’s opt-in; we don’t just record the whole thing without our client’s permission. And we only share the videos with the client.”

Francis said he has not come across another cleaning company in the region that uses cameras like Skyview does, but that may not be the case in the future.

“Right now, we’re just a janitorial company implementing a little bit of tech to differentiate ourselves and compete better, but I do have a vision for the future where this type of technology becomes commonplace.”

Early Challenges

When the couple met five years ago, they were living in New York; Francis was working at tech startups, while Rocio, a native of Paraguay, was studying English. They moved to Western Mass. when she was accepted at Mount Holyoke College, where she studied psychology and recently earned her degree.

“I was working remotely, doing tech sales, so it was an easy move,” Francis recalled. But his career was derailed by industry contraction and, in his case, working for an enterprise that got put out of business by ChatGPT.

“It sucked at the time, but it became a cool story later on,” he said. But not without significant challenges.

First, he worked with a friend selling solar installations door-to-door, using his severance from the IT world and unemployment funds to get the commission-only solar business going. But it failed “catastrophically,” he said.

“When that blew up, we were looking down the barrel of a loaded gun — overdrawn bank account, no money, a baby on the way, rushing to get on EBT and cash assistance.”

That was only last year. Rocio was still studying full-time — and also, eventually, adjusting to life as a new mom — and didn’t have a work permit yet. “I was in the middle of my status being changed from international student to getting my green card, so I couldn’t work.”

It took an emotional toll, Francis said. “I was dealing with all of the shame that comes with being a failed provider, at least in my eyes, and she’s trying to pull me out of that. Meanwhile, she’s dealing with the sheer terror of her provider not being able to provide, so we were both trying to console each other.”

But they had an idea. Rocio’s brother was in the cleaning business in California, so Francis, after studying the potential of such an enterprise, started going door-to-door, picking up the first few commercial and residential clients in what would become Skyview Cleaning.

“The whole past year was just a journey of building up enough income to to get off EBT and cash assistance and all the stuff that kept us afloat. I’m pretty thankful we’re in a state like this where we had access to that stuff,” he said, adding that a microgrant through the Latino Economic Development Corp. in Springfield was a lifesaver, as was a significant contract with Wyckoff Country Club. “That really saved us during a questionable period.”

Looking Ahead

While they also clean residential properties, the couple’s main niche is small (6,000 square feet and under) commercial properties.

“That’s a healthy zone for sure,” Francis said. “With any large commercial and residential, it’s a pretty aggressive race to the bottom. You’re quickly getting to these razor-thin margins.

“We have significantly better margins, and part of the reason is because, with QCam, we’re minimizing risk,” he continued. “For small or medium-sized businesses who are going to drop a couple grand a month on cleaning, they can’t really risk that not being done. A restaurant owner can’t arrive in the morning and have three hours of cleaning work that wasn’t done.”

As noted earlier, he believes wearable tech like QCam will become more commonplace in a number of industries.

“I think cameras in public, with phones everywhere, have culturally engineered the acceptance of being filmed, just by virtue of going outside,” he noted. “I think this is going to be one of the industries that adopts what we’re doing now, especially as companies have to crack down on time theft.

“I mean, when you look at the stats, billions are lost in the U.S. alone because of time theft. And with corporate America tightening the belt, they’re really going to have to figure out how to recapture some of that and make sure employees are out there doing what they say they’re going to do.”

While the Georges work in the field alongside three employees, they envision a time when they can grow the client base and employee roster and take on much less of the physical work themselves. But for now, they’re happy with their early trajectory.

“We did have a really rough start — having a baby while I was still in school, when we didn’t have money,” Rocio said. “But I feel it’s a blessing that we went through all that because we get to appreciate what we have, and we get to work together and create something unique.”

It’s a lesson in resilience anyone can emulate, she added. “No matter how hard your situation is, if you really want to change your circumstances, you can do it. When we didn’t have money last year, it was really hard, and I would never want to go back to that time in my life, but here we are, stronger than ever. We’re visionaries, we’re entrepreneurs, and I’m really grateful for what we’re creating.”