Tim Lee, the founder of Special Ops Clean Team has had his life defined by two things – family and work ethic. And one stems from the other.
His parents, Noel and Elfi Lee, met when Noel was in the Air Force. Elfi had grown up in Germany during World War II and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1952 when she was 12. She met Noel while he was in the Air Force, stationed at Lincoln Air Force Base in Lincoln, NE during the final stop of his military career. Being in Germany as a child in the ‘40s, Elfi’s family came to lean heavily on each other for support, and she and Noel passed that trait on to their son Tim, who was born the youngest of three children in 1963 in Lincoln.
According to Elfi, Tim was a go-getter from day one, always with two or three jobs going to make a buck when he wasn’t playing with the – she swears she’s not kidding – 45 children on their block who were in the 6th grade or younger. Tim grew to be a very good athlete, playing football, baseball and basketball in high school, and was good enough to walk on to the football team at the University of Nebraska, where he played until an ankle injury ended his hopes of a football career.
He left the University of Nebraska and transferred to Doane College in Lincoln, where he graduated with a business degree and more importantly, met and married his wife, Shelley. After graduation he immediately put his business degree to work when he started his own company, Pro Image, which sold officially licensed logo t-shirts of professional sports teams. Simultaneously he also started his family, which grew to include sons Justin and Garrett, and a daughter, MacKenzie.
He ran Pro Image until 1995 when the Nebraska winters finally wore him down. He looked at a variety of warmer locales and in 1995 he and Shelley chose Arizona, sight unseen and moved to Scottsdale in August. In September of that year, after doing some research to determine what areas of business were underserved in the Valley of the Sun, he started The Perfectionist Cleaning Service, which he still operates today. As The Perfectionist grew, he saw an opportunity in a related field, the moving business, and started The Perfectionist Moving in 2001.
As both companies continued to grow over the next decade Tim began to see a need for a more specialized service in each area – the jobs that were bigger, tougher and more challenging than the standard cleaning or move. There just didn’t seem to be a company in either niche that catered to the biggest, toughest jobs.
Armed with the knowledge that there was an entire market segment out there in each niche that was not being served, he re-branded the moving business in 2012 to Moving Team Six, adding his sons JT and Garrett as partners. And in 2013 he addressed the need in the cleaning industry by founding another new venture, Special Ops Clean Team. Special Ops was created to meet a demand Tim was seeing for a company that specialized in deep cleaning for both residential and commercial clients including move-in and move-out jobs; specialized services for home sale listings that required an extra level of expertise; special event before and after clean-ups; and other jobs that go above and beyond what standard cleaning services could provide. In addition to the superior quality of the cleaning services, Special Ops also provides clients with the convenience (and financial benefit) of calling just one company to serve every one of their cleaning needs, from floors to windows to tile and grout cleaning.
“We heard from so many people that had big cleaning jobs that it was tough enough finding one cleaning company they could trust, let alone four or five different companies,” Lee said. “Our aim with Special Ops Clean Team is to provide all those services in one place, for one fee, and have the job done with the highest quality in the shortest amount of time possible.”
Today, Tim’s vision is expanding. He will soon be providing the opportunity he has found in Special Ops Clean Team to other entrepreneurs in the Valley by franchising his concept and lending his quarter century of experience to help others in the Phoenix metro area build a business for their families.
“I have seen where this concept can go, and I want to help other people reap the benefits of my years of experience in building this business,” he said. “This is a great franchise opportunity in Phoenix for anyone, but it’s an especially good opportunity for a veteran. We can provide them with all the necessary tools