About Cleaning Exits
Cleaning Exits exists because the market for small cleaning businesses is opaque by default. Listings go stale and stay up. The same business gets relisted three times under three different brokers. Asking prices float free of any multiple anyone can defend. Buyers waste months chasing deals that closed last spring.
We started by building the data layer instead of the storefront. Every listing on this site is pulled directly from broker sources, checked for freshness, scored, and dated. When a listing goes quiet, we say so. When we can't verify something, we don't print it.
How we think about a deal
We create competition to drive the price up, and we protect both the buyer and the seller. Those two things sound like they're in tension. They aren't. A deal that falls apart in diligence is worse for everyone than a deal that was priced honestly on day one.
Who's behind it
Jeff Sosville
Jeff started brokering ATMs in 2013 and spent the next decade building that business into the dominant player in its category — 200+ closed transactions, north of $100M in total value. He got there the boring way: systematic outreach, showing up at every trade show, and knowing more about what things actually sold for than anyone else in the room.
That last part turned into the thesis for everything since. Jeff taught himself Python, React, and Postgres so he could build the data infrastructure behind Cleaning Exits rather than rent it — the scrapers, the freshness monitoring, the relist detection, and the listing quality scoring that runs under every page on this site. He focuses on the platform and the data. Find a fragmented, opaque market, build the definitive record of what's really happening in it, and the transactions follow.
John Sosville
John came up in Main Street M&A and has spent more than a decade on the transaction side of owner-operated businesses — the sub-$10M deals that private equity ignores and most brokers handle badly. He's represented sellers across service, route, and equipment-based businesses, and he's sat on the buy side often enough to know exactly which questions a seller hopes nobody asks.
His work here is the transaction itself: pricing a business against what comparable companies actually closed at rather than what they were listed for, structuring around the earn-outs and seller notes that get deals financed, running the diligence process so it doesn't stall at week six, and managing the human parts — the key employee who needs to stay, the owner who isn't as ready to leave as he says he is. He's turned down more listings than he's taken. A business that isn't ready to sell is a business that will sit on the market for a year and close for less.
What we don't do
- —We don't sell buyer leads. Your information doesn't get resold to a list of brokers who'll call you for a year.
- —We don't pad the listing count. If a business is under contract or the listing has gone stale, it gets marked, not buried.
- —We don't charge buyers. Our compensation comes from the sell side, so the guidance costs you nothing.
Want to talk?
Buying, selling, or just want to know what your business is actually worth — we'll give you a real answer.