At the 2025 Sweeper Summit & Expo in Las Vegas, various round-table sessions were conducted to informally discuss a range of topics of deep interest to powersweeping business operators. One of the most popular topics of this year’s Summit was how to transform sales leads into long-term customers. The discussion was led by Giovanni Recalde, Owner, Atlantic Sweeping & Cleaning, Inc., Alexandria, VA, and Derek Rayburn, Owner, Scenic City Studios, Chattanooga, TN.
Recalde and Rayburn
These two outstanding professionals energized the lead development session at the Sweeper Summit, which generated a hail of exciting ideas for attendees and explanations of methods for converting leads to sales and building strong long-term business relationships with new customers.
Giovanni Recalde
Giovanni has grown a spectacular eastern-region powersweeping and exterior maintenance company. His father, Alonzo, an Ecuadorian immigrant, started the company back in 1977, after college, while working as a parking attendant. He asked his employer if he could add nights to his schedule to clean the dirty parking lots. From that humble start, he grew a thriving business with about 10 sweeper trucks. Giovanni, now just 38 years old, had already founded and grown a successful investment firm before he assumed control of his father’s company in 2011. In just 14 years, he has grown Atlantic Sweeping to about 51 trucks, including 36 sweeper trucks.
Derek Rayburn
Through over 40 years of service, Derek has built an extraordinarily effective web development and web hosting firm. The Scenic City team’s areas of expertise include specialization in web marketing management for construction, powersweeping, and exterior maintenance businesses. Rayburn’s world-class team performs website design, social media, blog and other content writing, SEO, advertising, reporting, and all other facets of their online presence. The agency has a long list of widely recognized clients, including numerous very successful powersweeping businesses throughout the United States.
Converting Leads Into Loyal Customers
Highlights from the NAPSA Round Table Session at the 2025 Sweeper Summit featured guidance on proven strategies and methods for converting leads to sales, including advice on a number of relevant subtopics. A few of the major themes that came up included:
Lead Tracking Methods Vary Widely
Part of the discussion at the Summit focused on the fact that many powersweeping companies are using a mix of spreadsheets and full CRMs for managing customer relationships. Derek explained that, per participants’ reports, “While smaller companies tended to rely on spreadsheets, some large operations still preferred them.” His practical interpretation of this informally acquired data is that it has "highlighted the industry’s broad range of operational structures.”
Atlantic Sweeping, Giovanni’s company, is a technologically mature operation with advanced systems for all facets of customer communications and account management. That especially qualified him to share knowledge of the benefits of such modernization with attendees of the round table session.
Derek’s analysis above concluded that there is a lot of room for advancement of customer account management systems across the industry. Following that determination, the need it highlights invites future Summit discussions on such critical subtopics as systems for sustained lead nurturing, sales pipeline management, customer relationship management (CRM), and the full range of account management initiatives, customer communications, and other actions to be managed throughout the customer lifecycle.
Interest in AI Tools
Derek noted, “Some owners expressed curiosity about how AI might support their business development—especially in handling repetitive tasks, improving follow-up, and ensuring no leads fall through the cracks.” Giovanni, reflecting on his own tech strategies, told NAS in a previous in-depth interview within the past 12 months, “I don’t want to say it’s perfect, but we’ve been striving even more this year to build a team for the long-term future and have been putting the right resources into place to do that.
We are continuously enhancing our marketing through our website. Our logo is also featured prominently on our trucks, and we have a range of branded items, like clothing with our logo, pens, notepads, etc. Our new marketing professional is managing our social media presence, including on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms.”
Universal Recognition of Missed Opportunities
Almost everyone acknowledged that a portion of leads, in every company, goes unanswered. Improving follow-up processes was consistently recognized as just as important as generating the leads themselves. To further extend this concept to opportunities that present themselves through current customers’ real-time problems on the ground, Giovanni told us in a 2024 interview,
“We recognized a need for quality highway construction sweeping and kind of steered the company toward growth in that direction. For him, it’s about “customers’ confidence in our level of commitment to solving their problem(s)…What matters is how you resolve the customer’s problem. We’re a problem-solving business.”
Relationship-Building Efforts Matter
Ideas discussed at the round table discussion even included simple, but well-proven, and too often overlooked approaches like sending thank-you cards. Derek recounted that those, as well as Christmas cards, mid-year appreciation gifts, and educational brochures were all mentioned as value-added means of connecting with customers. He said that several business owners in attendance talked about how “these personal touches helped property managers better communicate value to their own clients and decision-makers.”
As to core principles for customer relationship building, Giovanni expressed to NAS his team’s commitment to actively managing relationships with Atlantic’s customers, “We want the customer interactions to have that small-company, personalized feel for all involved, but we also prioritize efficiency.”
He has further emphasized to us that “reinstilling in our team every year that we care about people, by showing them appreciation, is essential to employee satisfaction rates.” He has also stressed the importance of understanding the direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
Reflections on the Round Table
In our interview with Giovanni in 2024, he credited the Sweeper Summit with contributing to his business’s growth. He also shared with us his key recommendation for new business owners in the industry:
“My advice is to keep in mind that you don’t know it all and never stop learning. Keep your ears open for advice on operations and follow up with good work. That is the key to success. It may not all happen right away, but learning and improving will prepare you for your future, when you do encounter those opportunities to realize new growth for your business.”
In 2025, Derek looks back at the Sweeper Summit round table session he co-chaired as a group of “open and productive discussions with dozens of sweeping business owners. Overall, the conversations were extremely valuable, and it was encouraging to see owners actively looking for solutions that improve both operations and customer relationships.”
For information about Atlantic Sweeping & Cleaning, Inc., Alexandria, VA, you can call (703) 684-1095 or, visit atlanticsweeping.com. For information about Scenic City Studios, Chattanooga, TN, you can call (423) 401-8394, or visit sceniccitystudios.com.