The 2025 1-800 Sweeper Summit in Las Vegas last week rendered a vast wealth of actionable information for powersweeping business owners. One of the most popular topics of the roundtable event was “Starting, Transitioning, or Expanding into New or Adjacent Service Markets.” This roundtable discussion was facilitated by Craig Diebert, owner of Select Sweeping, Fresno CA. Here, Craig generously shares with NAS readers the highlights of the discussion to help encourage operators to implement proven approaches to boosting performance and growing their sweeping businesses:
Sweeper Summit Roundtable on Transforming Your Powersweeping Business
At the roundtable session, we started off with basic ideas, thoughts on what sweeping companies get into when working to transform their businesses into stronger competitors. Everyone then participated in asking questions and/or sharing information about how they’ve expanded their businesses. They talked about what they’ve done that has worked best for them.
Growth by Building on Existing Strengths
Key points that came out of the discussion included focusing on expanding your business by building on existing strengths. For example, leveraging the customer base, the existing routes, the available equipment, and the honed skills of the current staff. There was also emphasis on the importance of targeting your growth direction on following current customers’ needs and expressed demands. The suggestion seems intuitive, but is often overlooked as a growth strategy. It’s simply to think about what your customers are asking from you, and direct efforts toward delivering on what they want.
Preventing Excessive Risk for Growth
There was also strong emphasis in the group discussion on the need for sweeping company owners to be careful to evaluate the potential liabilities inherent in pursuing new paths, trying new things in expansion activities. All agreed on the critical importance of understanding the scope of the growth activities and clearly defining that scope for the team and customers. That helps ensure that the business owner is not opening up too much, i.e., not exposing the company to undue risk.
Protecting Your Core Business During Expansion
The overarching point of this part of the roundtable discussion was to advance on growth initiatives while carefully protecting your core business — to prevent distraction from your bread-and-butter revenue generators. By now, most long-time owners in the industry have received their knowledge of this fundamental from others’ experience, or they’ve learned it the hard way. For the uninitiated, grasping this priority is often the difference between optimizing growth and offsetting gains by inadvertently losing too much of what they’ve already achieved in building a business, by letting everyday responsibilities for maintaining what they’ve built be neglected during an aggressive growth phase.
Assigning a Champion
This was one of the most exciting ideas that came up during the roundtable — assigning a champion, finding an internal leader to help with the adoption of the new expansion plan. This was perceived by all as a major advantage for company owners who have a talented pro to lead the charge.
Capitalizing on Seasonal Downturns as Growth Windows
Other subtopics of the roundtable discussion included realizing growth by figuring out ways to smooth seasonal disruptions in income flows by maximizing use of downtime in winter climates. The discussion turned to transitioning into different types of sweeping. For example, adding municipal street or HOA sweeping, or milling cleanup, and/or adjacent types of revenue lines. [Other options, of course, may include adding related services or rental products.]
Big Learning Opportunities for 2025 Sweeper Summit Attendees
This invaluable roundtable explored how sweeping contractors can start new operations, transition into different types of sweeping, or expand into adjacent service markets while balancing investment, market opportunity, and operational readiness to make informed business decisions that support growth and stability.
On the broader view of the roundtable event, there were a total of 5 tables. The discussion of transforming sweeping businesses was conducted at one table, with the other four tables set up for discussions of other important topics for company owners.
All together, there was a great amount of outstanding knowledge offered to help business owners transform average or ailing sweeping services into strong competitors in their markets and to adopt solutions to many other key challenges for operators in the industry.
For information about the 2026 Sweeper Summit, check the NAPSA website at https://www.sweepersummit.com/
For info about Select Sweeping, Fresno CA, you can call (559) 344-8002, email office@selectsweeping.com, or visit selectsweeping.com.