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Unlike other pavement maintenance businesses which involve putting something down on a pavement, the sweeping business involves removing something from a pavement. So where other businesses can factor the amount and cost of materials in their bids and budgets, contract sweepers can't do that.

Carl Barton understands that, which is why the current North American Power Sweeping Association president guides, tracks, and drives his Memphis, TN, sweeping business on a minute-by-minute basis. And while virtually all sweeping companies track their time in some way or another - even broadly determining how many accounts a truck can handle on a route is managing the minutes - Barton's Aardvark Sweeping Service pays close attention to the time, knowing that effective use of driver minutes leads to profitability and growth.

"When I bought my first truck I read the literature and it said that to be successful you need to spend 75% of the time behind the wheel," Barton says. "That's 45 minutes of billable time every hour so that was my initial target."

As he got more involved with the business he started paying very close attention to the numbers - all the numbers. He tracked truck by truck, driver by driver, property by property, eventually coming up with both a cost per truck and a cost per driver. Eventually Barton figured out how much it was costing Aardvark to sweep each parking lot, and he learned something.

"We discovered that the trucks and men bringing in a decent profit were the drivers who were doing at least 420 minutes of sweeping per night. So we tried to replicate that throughout the company."