On July 27, Sizemore acquired Carlson Building Maintenance, a Minneapolis-based janitorial company serving retail, grocery, and commercial customers across the Midwest. The full announcement from Inspirit Equity is available here.
Acquisition announcements tend to be written for investors. This one is written for the people who actually have to make facility decisions, so we are going to skip the strategic language and get to the practical questions: who is Carlson, what changes, and what does not.
Who Carlson is
Carlson Building Maintenance was founded in Minneapolis in 1959 and cleans more than 250 locations across 10 states, with a customer base weighted toward retail chains, grocery, and commercial properties.
Cleaning a grocery store is a different discipline than cleaning an office park. The work happens overnight, in a narrow window, around food safety rules and refrigeration equipment, against a hard deadline at open. Miss the window and the store opens dirty as customers walk in. Carlson has spent 67 years mastering a category that punishes providers who treat every building the same.
Food processing is already one of the sectors Sizemore serves and there is more overlap between that line of business and the lines Carlson’s serves than you would expect…sanitation protocols, cold chain, refrigeration equipment, and inspection readiness. The gap between a plant floor and a supermarket back room is much more narrow than it looks.
Carlson’s leadership has excelled at these services, and we look forward to giving them the opportunity to grow and execute their vision.
Why now
Sizemore is primarily a company based in the Southeast. We were founded in Augusta, GA in 1955, we are on our third generation of family ownership, and our footprint across janitorial, security, and staffing has been concentrated throughout the Southeast along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
That has been a real constraint in conversations with companies seeking a national provider. When a distribution company or a healthcare system has sites in Georgia and sites in Minnesota, a Southeast provider can only solve part of the problem. They end up managing a portfolio of regional vendors and absorbing the coordination cost: separate contracts, separate invoicing, separate quality standards, separate escalation paths, and no singular point of contact when something goes wrong at 5AM.
Carlson helps close that gap for Sizemore while also bringing us into retail and grocery, two categories we have not served at scale and where Carlson has decades of operating history.
Impact
Geographic coverage: Sizemore customers with Upper Midwest locations now have a path to service consolidation. If you have been carrying a second janitorial vendor to cover Wisconsin, Minnesota or the surrounding states in the Upper Midwest, now is a great time to have a conversation around consolidation.
Retail and grocery capability: If your portfolio includes stores, supermarkets, or mixed retail and commercial properties, we now have the experience and “know how” to get the job done right.
Scale behind the service: Carlson gains access to Sizemore’s infrastructure: our 24/7 National Operations Center, best-in-class workforce management, and the Sizemore Training Academy. Those systems exist because we have spent years building the operational backbone for a labor-intensive business, and they now support Carlson’s operations too.
What does not change:
Carlson operates as a dedicated retail division inside Sizemore. Nick and Kaylee continue to lead it. The leadership team stays. The crews stay. The account managers Carlson customers have worked with for years are the same people they will work with next month.
We structured it this way on purpose. Carlson’s value is in local execution and long-tenured relationships and we want to maintain that.
If you are a Carlson customer, your service does not change. Your point of contact does not change. What you gain is a larger organization standing behind the work.
If you are evaluating providers
The main question for most facility leaders is whether consolidating vendors is worth the transition risk. Usually, the answer depends on how much of your footprint one provider can genuinely cover and whether they can hold quality across all of it. As Sizemore grows, we hope to leverage our capabilities and take the high-quality Sizemore approach to more customers across more geographies. Sizemore’s integrated janitorial, security, and staffing platform enables customers to rely on a single, accountable partner for their facility and workforce needs.
If your locations fall across the Southeast and the Midwest, or if you have retail and grocery sites that your current commercial provider handles as an afterthought, you have an alternative. Talk to our team about your footprint.