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Josh Melton lost 25% of Athens Cleaning’s monthly revenue in six weeks.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2018, a quarter of the business’ monthly revenue disappeared.
“The best thing that ever happened to my company was losing 25% of our revenue in a six-week period.”
— Josh Melton, The Growth Lab Podcast, 20:52
The loss forced Josh to answer questions he had been avoiding.
Who should Athens Cleaning serve?
What work fitted the business it wanted to become?
What type of team member fitted that work?
What should Athens become known for?
The business needed direction. It needed a niche.
Different sectors. Same model.
Today, Athens Cleaning has built a reputation for cleaning bank branches and doctors’ surgeries.
On paper, those are separate markets.
One is financial services. The other is healthcare.
Strip away the labels, and the work looks very similar.
Athens prefers small, professional premises that one cleaner can service in two to three hours. The work happens several times per week in environments that are already clean and need to stay that way.
Clients value consistency, communication, and a professional service.
Josh recruits full-time professionals who want extra income: bank staff, office managers, teachers and others accustomed to professional environments.
They finish their main job, then complete a short evening clean several times per week.
The staffing model fits the sites.
The sites fit the staffing model.
Two sectors. One repeatable operating model.
Sector labels hide the work
Sector labels are useful for positioning.
A cleaning business can say it specialises in offices, healthcare, education, housing, or retail. That makes the target market easier to describe.
It doesn’t tell you:
how the service is bought;
how frequently it’s required;
how the contract must be staffed;
what reporting and compliance are expected;
what creates risk for the customer; or
whether the work can be delivered repeatedly at the right margin.
Cleaning a doctor's surgery is not the same as cleaning a hospital.
Both are healthcare environments with very different delivery models.
The opposite can also be true.
Customers in different sectors can share the same buying behaviour, site characteristics, staffing requirements, and service expectations.
That’s the connection between Athens Cleaning’s banks and doctors’ surgeries.
Three filters, not one
Three different decisions often get collapsed into the word “niche”.
A niche is the customer environment or recurring problem a business chooses to understand.
An ideal client profile describes the organisation the business is best suited to serve. It includes size, geography, contract value, buying process, decision-maker, and commercial priorities.
An operating profile describes the type of work the business can deliver repeatedly through its existing system. It covers staffing, supervision, geography, service frequency, reporting, compliance, margin, and management demands.
The three should reinforce each other.
Instead of starting with: Which sectors should we target?
Start with: What must be true about a contract for it to strengthen our operating model—and where else do those conditions exist?
An ideal client is not simply willing to buy.
It fits the business you are trying to build.
Flexible market. Fixed model.
Athens can serve two sectors because both fit one operating profile.
In theory, it could accept work from a third sector if the contract used the same:
staffing model;
service frequency;
site characteristics;
supervision structure;
reporting requirements;
geographic footprint; and
contract economics.
The boundary should not be: Is this a bank or a doctor’s surgery?
It should be: Can we deliver this work through the operating system we are building?
Minor adaptation is normal. No two clients are identical.
Rebuilding recruitment, supervision, technology, reporting, and service delivery around one customer is something else.
Serving several sectors is fine. Accumulating several operating models is not.
Every exception creates another process to manage. A different site may need a different recruitment pool. A new service frequency can change supervision. Bespoke reporting may need different technology.
Each opportunity can look attractive on its own while making the business harder to operate as a whole.
Be flexible about the client label.
Be disciplined about the work underneath it.
Replace the right revenue
The natural response to losing 25% of monthly revenue is: How quickly can we replace the turnover?
Josh’s experience suggests a better question: What kind of revenue should replace it?
Athens could have chased every available contract, entered unrelated markets, widened its geography, and accepted incompatible service requirements.
The business might have recovered the lost turnover while becoming harder to operate.
With a clearer definition of the customer, the work, and the team, replacement contracts reinforced the model rather than pull it apart.
The niche described the ideal customer, but not the only customer.
Any customer outside that ideal still needed to fit the operating profile.
Focus compounds
Athens told people what it wanted to become known for.
“We just started telling people, ‘We clean banks and doctors’ offices.’ We became known as a company that cleans banks and doctors’ offices.”
That message was specific enough to remember.
Professional contacts understood who to introduce. Bank managers knew other bank managers. Existing experience applied to the next prospect. Recruitment focused on people suited to predictable part-time work in professional environments.
Each similar account added relevant knowledge, language, proof, recruitment signals, and process.
A contract stopped being an isolated win. It made the next similar contract easier to mobilise.
Josh said Athens subsequently grew to more than three times its December 2018 size.
It would be too simplistic to credit niche selection alone. He also changed the mission, values, recruitment, and management.
But the market focus connected the customer, the employee, and the operating system.
This distinction has helped me clarify Growth Lab Capital's approach.
The preferred market is professionally managed, high-density residential property:
housing associations;
purpose-built student accommodation;
build-to-rent;
retirement living; and
co-living.
On the surface, these are five separate sectors.
They have different regulations, ownership structures, procurement routes, and resident expectations.
They also share a recognisable operating environment.
Residents live in buildings at scale. Communal areas shape their daily experience. Professional management is accountable for their condition.
Cleaning, waste, and grounds services recur. Reporting and evidence matter. Procurement happens across portfolios, not one site at a time.
Five sectors. Potentially one operating profile.
This profile can concentrate market knowledge, case studies, regulatory understanding, and service capability.
It also filters opportunities outside the target list.
Before accepting a contract, ask:
Can we staff it through the existing recruitment model?
Can we supervise it through the existing structure?
Does it fit the geographic footprint?
Can we manage it through the same reporting and compliance systems?
Does it meet the required margin and payment terms?
The question is not whether the sector appears on a target list.
It's whether the work strengthens the operating system or requires another one.
Deep means repeatable
Going deep and narrow doesn’t mean refusing every opportunity outside a single sector.
It can mean choosing:
one recognisable customer environment;
one set of recurring problems;
one narrow delivery architecture; and
one body of knowledge that grows with every contract.
A business becomes more specialised when every new client makes the next similar client easier to serve.
It becomes operationally broad when every contract requires another system.
This still needs proving
I’ve yet to test this approach inside a Growth Lab Capital acquisition.
The residential focus still needs testing through customer conversations, contract economics, geographic density, mobilisation, payment terms, retention, and delivery.
A customer may appear to fit the operating profile and prove otherwise once the commercial details become clear.
An opportunity outside the preferred market may fit better than its sector label suggests.
Real contracts will determine where the approach holds and where it needs to change.
But the principle is clear enough to test now.
A niche is not just the market you sell to.
It is the type of work your business can deliver repeatedly, profitably, and without reinventing itself for every customer.
Does your niche follow a sector label, or does it follow the way the work behaves?
If you run a cleaning or Soft FM business, reply with the type of contract your company serves best—and why it fits your operating model.
I read every response.
Growth Lab Capital is actively looking at Soft FM businesses across London, the Home Counties, the Midlands, and the South East.
If you have built a Soft FM business around a clear delivery model and are thinking about what comes next—even if it is a few years away—I am happy to have a conversation.
No broker. No pressure. BOOK A TIME HERE
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