When Aaron Hyatt and Vonte Shippen set out to start a company, they ruled out the trades that sell a single job. “Not looking for the one-time services like roofing or plumbing or stuff like that,” Hyatt says.
They wanted a service for the community that customers would book on a schedule. In other words, what Hyatt says some would call “the boring businesses.” His version is simpler. “We just want something that we can consistently serve the people,” he says.
Cleaning fit. Cadabra Cleaning started in Central Pennsylvania in 2023 and works for homes and businesses around Centre County, including State College and Bellefonte. The partners met in 2017 while studying at Penn State and Syracuse. By the company’s own account, they started with one car and ran things out of their homes.
In 2026 Hyatt brought the company to Texas and set up in Irving. Ownership follows the state line. “In Pennsylvania, it’s Vonte and I, but here in Texas, it’s just me 100%,” he says. He credits the northern staff for the move. “We got a lot of team members up north, which is why we were able to expand down here to Texas,” he says.
The same preference for repeat work shapes the jobs he likes best. Given the choice, he leans a little toward commercial clients, “just ‘cause it’s more long-term,” though residential cleaning is a big part of the business too. Most of the commercial side is janitorial: common areas cleaned on daily and weekly schedules. Cadabra’s service pages list offices, medical facilities, apartment complexes and student housing among the buildings it takes on.
Homes get a team of three. Hyatt points out that some companies send a single cleaner. On commercial jobs, crew size depends on the building. The crews use a color-coded system to avoid cross-contamination, and Hyatt says the products are eco-friendly. The company notes that tougher jobs, such as ovens, can call for something stronger. Crews arrive in a branded company car and clean top-down and left to right. One Irving-area customer was surprised to find in a Google review’s worth of praise that the crew had cleaned inside the washing machine.
A recurring schedule only works if the cleaners keep it. “We’ve never canceled on a customer or anything like that, ever in all of our time,” Hyatt says. He traces that to how he and Shippen run the company. “The same way that we care about our employees, we care about our clients,” he says.
The employees come first in his telling. “We pay our employees a living wage, something that they can really live off of,” he says. A good work environment, he adds, “makes them want to do a better job with the cleans.”
From Irving, the Texas crews cover Dallas County and go north to Frisco and Plano, about 25 miles out. “We’re not just in Irving,” Hyatt says. “We’re all around Dallas.”
Growing has limits for him. A sale will be “no time soon,” he says, and he would rather keep the company a little smaller and independent. “We definitely don’t want to franchise,” he says. “We don’t want to saturate the brand at all.”