As a Commercial Cleaning company based in Rochester NY, we have the opportunity to interact with a lot of businesses. Offices, Call Centers, Light manufacturing, Medical buildings and more. Construction Cleanups are a particular area of service, too. Each of these scenarios poses a unique challenge all by themselves. Then you can mix in the variables like:

• Are they near a body of water or a busy road?
• Is the parking lot paved?
• What types of soils are most commonly seen here?

It’s a lot to record and address during a commercial cleaning service. And yes, our service side is still growing. So too is our Consulting side. Why? Because we train our competition.

 

WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT YOUR COMPETITION?

Yes, that’s correct. I train my competition. Now allow me to be clarify. Not every cleaning company will invest in official training for their employees. Let that sink in a bit. It’s one of the reasons we’re so busy. To be even MORE clear, that may be one of the reasons we worry so little about training other cleaning companies. There’s an unfortunately limited number of cleaning companies that invest in initial and continued training.

Many will “skate-through” with as little information and training as it takes to complete the work. This is often a recipe for sick building syndrome and one of the primary reasons I train my competition. The slow buildup of soils and biofilms accumulate until someone gets sick. Often this process is slow and “low grade” enough to pass undetected. People become ill all the time. But in many cases, its our opinion that they often don’t have to.

 

We INVEST IN TRAINING in our cleaning staff to ensure a few things.

1. We are cleaning for health, not appearance
2. Frontline cleaning staff remain personally safe while handing cleansing chemistry and performing their jobs
3. Client spaces are handled and cleaned safely and effectively

Our Consulting side works with other cleaning companies, and client-companies who have inside cleaning teams. If that’s you, welcome to DOC’S. There’s more work available for commercial cleaning than we could ever accomplish. that’s why we don’t shy away from training my competition. If you’re ready to learn how we can help your company or team become demonstrably better cleaners, contact us here. Training is available in-person all across our region and in many parts of the continental US.

This Week’s Podcast transcript can be found below.

Ray
Joel, we’re back, and we are talking about walkthroughs. Now, I understand that a customer, or more likely a bean counter, caught this as a problem and decided they didn’t want to pay you for an in-person professional site inspection because it was termed wrong (on the invoice).

Joel
Yeah, let’s call it that.

Ray
We got that corrected. They’re all set. The bean counters are happy. Let’s go clean stuff. How are you going to advise folks on the inspections?

Joel
You know what? I just talked to Adon Rigg on another podcast recently. (Love you, Adon). Love you, too, Aiden. I love And I go to a job site for that walkthrough, and I’m handed a scope of work. This is what we expect. And I look at it just like a lot of people do. And there’s, my opinion, there’s three ways that building walkthroughs happen for building service contractor. Contractor one takes a quick glance at the list, looks at the building, and decides what they’re going to charge them regardless of anything. Building service contractor number two actually takes and reads every line of the scope of work and just nods and says, “Oh, empty trash. Replace liners, replace paper towels, so disinfect toilets.” And they’re reading down-How many times a week are we here? Yeah, how many times a week? And they’re looking and they’re saying, Oh, okay, it’s all basic stuff that’s not that bad. And then they walk through the building and they go back and they put a quote together.

Ray
If they’re doing that, do they give the obligatory (mmm, ahhh), when they turn corners?

Joel
Sometimes it’s that, but it’s also they’re trying to show the prospect that, Hey, I really care about your building, and This is great. Not to say they don’t. Exactly. And it’s not to say that they don’t. But the third contractor, and the one that I would hope that most of us are, and hopefully this will help as well as I’m going to be doing some webinars with Adon Rigg and Lead Freak about the Walkthrough. When somebody hands you that scope of work, one of the first questions out of my mouth is, “How many years have you been using this scope of work? How many contractors have you had that have worked from this scope of work? Oh, we’ve been using this scope for 20 years and we’ve had probably 30 cleaning companies come through in that 20 years.” So my question back is then why are we working from this scope of work?

Ray
I would think even without technology changes, a building itself ages.

Joel
It ages. You own a company. Is your company doing the same things it did a year ago? (Lord, no.) So, there’s probably different soil, there’s different traffic patterns, there’s different uses of space and everything else. You have to have, and this goes back to another podcast we had about a living document. You’ve got to be able to look at things and judge what is it that you really need to do. Maybe it’s a good guideline to start with. But now you open up the conversation. What’s the end goal of that particular company? What is it that they need? I talked to one manufacturer who had the same company for, I think it was five to seven years at one point, and they gave us the opportunity to bid on it. I’m going, Why are you looking? They’re like, Well, we’re not happy with the level of cleaning. There’s too much dust in here. I’m looking at the scope of work, and the dusting is once a month. (Once a month?) Once a month. And I go, Well, they’re still working from this. This is your current contract. They go, yes, but it’s so dusty. Well, of course it’s going to be dusty.

Joel
You’ve got once a month dusting. They had once a week vacuuming. And again, the carpet’s a filter and it cold. There’s all kinds of dust and dirt. So, it’s like you got to change the frequencies. And they were a manufacturer that dust made a difference in the quality of the product that they were pushing out. (Okay.) So for them, dust was a critical piece that it had to be removed. You’re not going to walk through with a feather duster. I hope nobody’s using a feather duster, by the way. Because feather dusters just move dust. But you want to use something that’s going to capture and remove the dust from the facility. So even telling your client and spelling it out in the scope of work, how you’re going to go about removing it and how it’s going to be held, captured, and actually removed from their facility. That’s all a key component. And that starts setting you apart and different. And that is your competitive advantage. A lot of people don’t realize that these walkthroughs are a point for you to shine. Show what makes you different than everybody else. Don’t be like the first two contractors. Because all they’re trying to do is look at what’s the lowest they could probably do for it or what can they cut to be able to be a better profit margin instead of really taking the time to learn the client, what are the real needs, and making sure that the scope of work matches up with the real needs of that company.

Joel
(Sure.) We rewrote that scope of work. They then took that scope of work and gave it to their other contractor and asked them to see what they could do with that scope of work. Now, sure, I was hurt by that, but they had loyalty to their previous company.

Ray
What did the previous company do? If you don’t mind my asking.

Joel
The previous company said that that scope was too aggressive. That it would never… They wouldn’t even entertain doing what I was suggesting because it would cause a huge increase to the price to the client. All right, there was an increase in the price to the client. But I ended up getting the work, and it’s been a very favorable reception of us coming in. Not initially, because they were upset after the other vendor had built relationships with all the people in there, we were not received so well on the front end of the contract. But after they saw the difference that we were making on a daily and a weekly and a monthly basis, it’s been a very healthy long-term contract for us.

Ray
So let me ask one closing question on this episode. (Sure.) This one (episode) isn’t about a consulting client directly. It’s about an experience you had. Why are you sharing this? Because you’re training your competition.

Joel
We talked about this offline. Why am I helping my competition? Well, let’s be 100 % honest. I cannot clean everything in the small city that I’m in. And Rochester’s got about a million people in the Greater Monroe County area, and we have a lot of business here. I cannot, personally, as my company, clean all of it. But what I can do raise the bar so that we’re all looking at work the same way and trying to raise the bar collectively because we’re in an industry that is usually given a black eye to. And we’re looked down upon as though we’re just a commodity. And we’re not. We’re human beings. We have feelings. And we, ultimately, most of us, really want to do a good job and help our clients stay healthier and safer.

Ray
Joel, thank you.

Joel
You’re welcome.