StratusClean
As VP of Marketing, Mike Millett led the repositioning of Stratus Building Solutions into StratusClean. Average Google rating rose from 3.4 to 4.7.
The problem
Stratus Building Solutions was a commercial cleaning company. The market did not read it that way. The name pointed at construction, franchise development or facilities buildouts, so prospects categorised the business incorrectly before any conversation started. Every marketing pound spent had to first undo a wrong assumption the name itself had created.
That is a positioning failure rather than a marketing one, and no amount of campaign work fixes it.
The work, and why it took four years
Mike was VP of Marketing. The scope covered the digital ecosystem and marketing infrastructure, brand positioning, and the process that ended in the rename. He designed the StratusClean identity himself in Adobe Illustrator, the icon, the lettering and the taglines, and a professional designer refined the execution afterwards.
It took four years, 2023 to 2026, and almost none of that was design. It was getting an organisation to accept the change. He pushed for a clearer identity and a lot of people resisted. The turning point was the 2025 annual meeting in Las Vegas, where the rebrand was announced in front of 150 franchise owners: before that a resistant minority could keep slowing it down, and afterwards the company had committed in front of itself and the remaining opposition could no longer stop it. StratusClean went live in April 2026.
That is the part worth taking away. The numbers below are the proof; the four years is the story, and it is the one case here where the obstacle was not the market.
The rename to StratusClean was a clarity decision, not an aesthetic one. The word “Clean” does the categorising work the old name was failing at, in the first second of contact, before anyone reads a sentence.
Marketing a franchise means two audiences at once: the national brand and the individual operators who carry it locally. A rebrand has to survive both.
What happened
- 3.4 → 4.7average Google rating
- ~2×revenue, approximately doubled
- #1 × 4years running at number one on Entrepreneur's Fastest-Growing Franchises list, 2023 to 2026, as Stratus Building Solutions
The 3.4 to 4.7 figure is the average Google star rating. It is not an AI visibility score and it is not a Digilu measurement.
The warning, and what it actually cost
At his second annual meeting, in March 2023, in front of a room of franchise owners, Mike said AI was coming and that the entire foundation of Google SEO and Google Ads was going to die. He got in trouble for frightening them.
He lost credibility over it. Not for being wrong, which is the version that would flatter him and is not what happened. He lost it because he had no plan. In his words: “I lost credibility because I had no answers. I had no plan. But did anyone? Does anyone still?”
He found the answer afterwards and it was the unglamorous one: branding, Google reviews, trust. Trust wins. He did that, and it worked.
So this is not a story about being early. It is a story about the gap between seeing a shift and knowing what to do about it, which is the same gap Digilu exists to close, and he has stood on both sides of it.
What it led to
The StratusClean transformation is the foundational example in Elevate or Vanish: markets rarely announce the moment a business becomes outdated. Perception shifts first, expectations change, competitors get easier to understand, and technology changes how businesses are found and evaluated.