Morris Rosenberg did not begin with a platform. He began with glass. In 1909, the young San Francisco entrepreneur reportedly spent $4.50 on a bucket, sponge and mop, then went looking for merchants whose windows needed washing. He turned a $3.50 profit on the first day. The arithmetic was small enough for a pocket; the idea was large enough to last a century. Every occupied building produces an endless list of chores, failures and anxieties. Someone has to own them.
That window-cleaning route became American Building Maintenance, then ABM Industries, a New York Stock Exchange company with more than 100,000 employees and $8.7 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue. ABM says its people care for more than 6 billion square feet each day across 19 industries. The footprint includes offices, airports, schools, hospitals, factories, warehouses, data centers, chip plants and sports venues. Its work ranges from emptying bins to maintaining battery systems that stand between a data center and darkness.
This is the strange appeal of facilities management: success is mostly an absence. No overflowing restroom. No stranded passenger. No sweating office. No unplanned outage. When the work is excellent, the public is free to look elsewhere.
A company built beneath other companies
ABM is not one product so much as a stack of obligations. A client can hire it for a single service - janitorial work, parking, HVAC, electrical maintenance, landscaping or passenger assistance - or bundle several functions into an integrated contract. Its ABM Performance Solutions model promises one contract, one invoice and one accountable partner. The pitch is operational compression: fewer vendors, shared processes and a single party responsible for outcomes.
The customers are organizations for which a building is not merely an address. It is a production system. In a school, cleanliness and air quality affect attendance and concentration. In a semiconductor fab, microscopic contamination can ruin valuable output. In a stadium, tens of thousands of people arrive within a narrow window, test every surface, and leave the crew to reset the place for tomorrow. In an airport, a delayed wheelchair or cabin-cleaning team can become a delayed aircraft.
The carpet gets the compliments. The electrical redundancy keeps the building out of the news.
ABM’s business model follows the work. Recurring service contracts provide a base of repeat revenue. Larger technical jobs - energy retrofits, electrical projects, microgrids, EV charging systems and infrastructure upgrades - add project revenue. A nationwide account can begin with one function and expand as ABM sells adjacent capabilities. The company’s 2025 new-sales bookings reached a record $1.9 billion.
“Where others see a facility, we see possibility.”ABM’s current operating proposition
The new fight is over the building’s truth
For decades, facility work was documented in clipboards, radio calls and monthly reports. That made performance difficult to prove. A client could see the invoice, but not always the chain of decisions behind it. ABM Connect is the company’s answer. The platform combines information from people, tasks, occupancy, assets, comfort sensors, finances and building systems to create a live view of operations.
In an airport, live flight information can help route wheelchair attendants and cleaning crews where they will be needed next. In an office, occupancy signals can shift cleaning from a fixed route to actual demand. For engineers, asset data can flag a developing problem before it becomes a repair call. ABM says the system integrates AI, IoT sensors and robotics; in April 2026, ABM Connect received an Edison Award for commercial technology.
The distinction matters because facilities companies compete from several directions. ISS, Sodexo, Aramark and Mitie offer broad outsourced services. CBRE, JLL and Cushman & Wakefield arrive through real-estate relationships and advisory work. Johnson Controls and other equipment specialists understand the machines producing much of the data. Local contractors can be cheaper and deeply familiar with one market. ABM’s answer is to combine a large self-performing workforce, U.S. coverage, specialist engineering and a common intelligence layer.
The fastest growth came from the places where delay is expensive and technical skill travels well.
Moving toward higher-consequence work
The portfolio is moving beyond traditional cleaning without abandoning it. ABM’s Technical Solutions segment grew organic revenue 10 percent in fiscal 2025, helped by microgrid activity. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026, the segment grew 27 percent, with demand for battery energy storage and data-center services. Aviation grew 20 percent in that quarter as new contracts ramped up. These operations reward staffing discipline, but also engineering knowledge, regulatory fluency and an appetite for 24-hour responsibility.
The $275 million purchase of WGNSTAR, completed in February 2026, makes the direction plain. WGNSTAR brought more than 1,300 employees, semiconductor workforce programs and equipment support in the United States and Ireland. ABM estimated that the combined semiconductor portfolio would produce about $325 million in annualized revenue. The bet is on chip-factory expansion and the need for a provider that can span cleanrooms, critical power, specialist labor and production tools.
Energy is another route into that deeper relationship. A building owner may want lower utility bills; a fleet operator needs chargers that work before the first shift; a data center needs batteries and backup power that behave correctly during the worst minute of the year. ABM can assess the site, design and build electrical infrastructure, install storage or charging equipment, coordinate with utilities, and remain for monitoring and maintenance. Its RavenVolt operation adds fleet-charging software and a round-the-clock network operations center. This is useful because electrification problems rarely belong to one box. Hardware selection, grid capacity, construction, charging schedules and repair response interact. A single accountable operator can reduce those handoffs, while performance contracts can connect the cost of an upgrade to the savings it is expected to produce.
The strength
ABM can put cleaners, engineers, energy advisers and infrastructure specialists behind one account, then use a shared data layer to show what happened.
The constraint
Labor-intensive contracts carry thin margins. Wage pressure, turnover, insurance costs and poor contract pricing can erase the benefit of scale quickly.
There is no escaping the human core. A sensor can report a spill; somebody still has to clean it. Software can predict a failing chiller; somebody still has to arrive with the right certification and part. ABM’s size is useful only if thousands of local actions feel consistent to a national client. That makes recruiting, training, safety, frontline management and retention as consequential as the dashboard.
The stadium test
Sports venues make ABM’s proposition unusually visible. In March 2026, the Philadelphia Phillies hired the company for integrated engineering, maintenance and cleaning at Citizens Bank Park, including ABM Performance Solutions. By June, ABM announced a janitorial partnership covering Truist Park’s 1.1 million-square-foot campus, its tenth Major League Baseball team relationship.
The Atlanta operation uses live translation and workforce-location tools to coordinate crews across games, concerts and as many as 150 to 200 events a year. It is a neat miniature of the whole company: many people, one deadline, a physical environment under stress and data trying to make the handoffs less fragile. The fan buys a ticket to watch baseball. ABM is paid to make sure the building does not become the story.
That role has a long memory. ABM worked at Disneyland when it opened in 1955. At the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, 17 ABM employees were killed. Window washer Jan Demczur used his squeegee to help free people trapped in an elevator; the tool and his uniform later entered the Smithsonian collection. The story is inseparable from tragedy, but it also reveals something about facilities workers: they know the hidden parts of a place because they spend their lives inside them.
Where ABM fits now
ABM sits between the local contractor and the global real-estate adviser. It is broad enough to manage an entire portfolio, specialized enough to work inside critical environments, and increasingly determined to quantify both. More than half the Fortune 500 already uses the company. The strategic question is whether ABM can turn that access into higher-value technical and data relationships without losing control of the labor-intensive services that created the access.
The financial picture contains both promise and warning. Fiscal second-quarter 2026 revenue reached a record $2.3 billion, up 8.4 percent, while adjusted EBITDA rose to $131.7 million. Net income was $43.1 million, or 1.9 percent of revenue. The gap between enormous sales and modest profit explains the urgency behind better pricing, denser service bundles, energy projects, technical acquisitions and software that can demonstrate value before renewal season becomes a contest over hourly rates.
Rosenberg’s original business was easy to understand: dirty window, clean window, payment. ABM’s modern version is harder to see. It sells readiness, continuity, comfort and evidence - the confidence that a complicated place will behave as intended, and the data to explain why. The bucket remains. Around it now sit batteries, cleanrooms, chargers, sensors and 117 years of accumulated routes through buildings most of us only pass through.
The most successful facility is forgettable: clean, cool, powered and open. ABM makes its living manufacturing that absence of drama.YesPress