The Janitors' Closet

Communicating the floor work

A bit ago, I took a call from a client questioning whether the  that we'd reported at her facility were in fact done.  I double checked the floor crew's overnight check-ins to see if we'd miss-entered the job, but our floor tech's message was clear - he'd been assigned a VCT burnishing and carpet cleaning, and reported them as done.  A quick look at the key safe confirmed that he had been issued those keys and no others, so he couldn't have visited another building by mistake.

I sauntered over to the client and confirmed her suspicions; pretty easy to tell.  I asked her to check her alarm report, just to make absolutely sure.  My tech (not the one in the picture) had been there and out again in under five minutes. About the right amount of time to have not done either job.  

That evening, my operations manager had him sign off the "completed" jobs as usual, so he had the opportunity to correct the record.  He signed the jobs off as done.  

I suspect he's now in the fast food industry.

This brings up a point about record keeping and communication.  Part of our morning office opening procedure is to pull the floor techs' overnight check ins and enter the jobs done; an email is sent automatically to the client informing of the jobs, explaining why an extra tech was in the building that night, and why a bit of furniture might have been moved around and asking if the job was satisfactory.  Information the client needs first thing in the morning.

Besides catching the rare floor tech who inclines to misreporting (the only instance in recent memory), the system reminds the client of the various periodic floor jobs we include in our ongoing service, lets the client check to see if we're on top of the schedule, and helps us keep up quality. And, the client having been informed of the job at the time, there's less chance of a perception of a job missed weeks or months later.

Quite a lot of benefit from a simple tweak to the program.

Connections and stability

Several days ago, I was asked the value of various association memberships and accreditations; often it's difficult to quantify the value of such if one looks at clients signed or the "bottom line".

I told a story.  We recently started service for a pre-school through 5th grade charter school.  In my first meeting with the principal, she mentioned that she had asked her receptionist to track down several janitorial firms to quote an annual service package.  Wanting quality, receptionist logged onto the BBB.  Their site includes (the last I looked) a bit over 100 janitorial firms locally.  She winnowed by BBB members, then by A+ rating, then by no unresolved complaints - and had a much smaller list to deal with. Finally, she looked for those with long-term BBB memberships.  We easily made the initial cut, and our 49-plus years in the BBB was unique (as is our 49 years with the Phoenix Chamber).  We were assured of the call, and the meeting.

My initial meeting was with the facilities director, but the principal dropped in - "just for 5 minutes". We put in close to an hour, talking about all that CBN has to offer (see my various posts on health, indoor air quality, security and so on), and on education philosophy, on limiting the state bureaucracy's control of teaching, and her student created cookbook.  Throughout the conversation, we both were trying to figure out where we knew each other from, but we both were a bit embarrassed to ask.  I got it a couple days later and gave her a call; we'd served together on a Metro Phoenix Chamber Of Commerce committee, ten or fifteen years prior.

My eventual proposal was several thousand over what her board had authorized (and over, I gather, the other quotes she received).  She went to bat for us partially because of our comprehensive program, but partially, I suspect, due to our earlier connection.

Likewise, several years ago, we started service for a local bank that found us at Local First Arizona.

Should a prospective client (at my nudge) want to check out the competence of my management team through Building Service Contractors Association International
(the oldest such in the industry - we've been with them 35-plus years), he'll find that only five janitorial firms in Arizona employ anyone holding either their executive or managerial certifications, and we've more than all but one other firm.

And I could relate stories about our membership in ISSA, US Green Building Council, Arizona Recycling Association, Homeland Security's IMAGE program, and others.

I added up our annual membership dues to those.  A bit under $6,000.00 annually. We make that back pretty quickly in profit from clients introduced to us by those memberships.

And, even if there were no revenue at all from those memberships, it's the right thing to do.

Honesty is the Best Policy

A good friend, Ken Clark, a Realtor at HomeSmart, sent out the following article in his newsletter.  A good story, with great moral.

In a market where flippers or sellers sometimes plaster over issues in the pursuit of the all-mighty dollar, here is a case study on how to do it right.

You may recall our 2br/2ba, 976sf cute bungalow in Central Phoenix that closed just last week. The sellers encountered a problem. There was a minor bit of settling around a stem wall, where some plumbing work had been done, or there had been some leaking over years. The source of the problem is inconclusive.

They called a foundation repair specialty company to give them an estimate for repairs. I can’t say exactly what the amount was, but it was significant. So significant that they did not have the available cash to fix it. Furthermore, it would take more than a month for the foundation company to get around to this job, and the sellers needed to get the property sold.

Naturally, we advised them to disclose this material fact of the sale. To do otherwise would have left them open to law suits in the future. They disclosed the issue on the Seller Property Disclosure Statement and made it public.

They had several options.

They could have just disclosed the problem and reduced the price by the amount of the estimate for the repairs. The problem with this approach is that it creates an incentive for buyers to offer even less for the home, even though the sellers have an estimate for repairs. Further, it narrows the field of potential buyers to those who can afford to do the repairs at some later date.

They could have disclosed the issue, kept the price where it was and simply said, “Hey, it’s an old house. That’s the way it is around here.” They would be hoping, of course, that the tight home market would result in a sale anyway. Our advice was that such a move would probably mean they would not get an offer right away, resulting in a “stale” property that sits on the market for months because people see that others have not made an offer. This would result in a series of price reductions that would probably reduce their profit even further than if they just fixed it up front.

So, our advice: disclose, initiate a work contract with the foundation company to be completed after the sale of the home, with the cost of the work being subtracted from the sale profits and held by the title company. When the work is completed, with a warranty, the foundation company is paid from the escrow account.

This is not idea, but it meant that the sale could go through, the buyers could move in and know that the work would be completed with a multi-year warranty on the work.

It all started from the sellers being up-front about the condition of the foundation and willing to cut their profits, but also their losses.

When you sell your home, consider using an experienced team like us who knows how to solve problems

        From Ken Clark [email protected] at HomeSmart Realty

PS - I see Ken every few days at our downtown Phoenix neighborhood dog park.

Gave up on this particular indoor air quality situation

Talking recently to one of my folks about our successes, and failures, in helping janitorial clients improve their indoor air quality, a particular situation from years back came to mind.  We'd spent some years measuring airborne particle count in client facilities using a neat piece of technology, a hand-held particle counter.  Couldn't help re-posting the following:

A guru of American industry remarked that "you cannot improve what you cannot track, and cannot track what you cannot measure", or something very similar.

We clean for health, not (like many in the commercial janitorial field) for appearance.  Likely the most significant impact we can have on the healthfulness of our client's facility (and thus on our client's health) is in improving indoor air quality: HEPA vacuum filters, microfiber dust wipes and damp mops, vacuuming rather than dust mopping hard floors, careful chemical selection, and so on.  The studies that have been done over the years, by the Research Triangle Institute, Daniels Associates, Michael Berry, and so on, have documented a 50% or better reduction in daytime airborne particles, in the size range of most allergens, as compared to standard cleaning, using roughly the methodology we employ.

A good many years ago, I came up with the (rather obvious) idea that being able to measure our results, a bit more formally than trying to eyeball dust on sills and baseboards, might be fun.  So, for the price of a mid-level used car, I bough the kind of hand-held particle counter (HHPC) used in clean rooms and similar applications.  Generally, I see about that 50% percent airborne particle reduction that the fellows in the white lab coats recorded.  It lets us better monitor what our crews are doing, through their results.

And it sure impresses the clients.

A few years back, I had a semi-industrial facility with particle counts many times higher than what I was getting in seemingly similar places.  Checked the vacuum filters, the microfiber mops and wipes, and what the crew was doing; also snooped around the facility a bit.  No ideas.  Doing a visit, I sat down with our client contact to explore possibilities, and wound up none the wiser.  Until we heard a rumbling above the fellow's head, and saw a fine cloud of dust coming down from the ceiling.

Explains the client, "that's just the pallet-jacks moving inventory around".  The second floor, built out above the office portion of the warehouse, was wood, and not too stiff, or sealed.  A pallet-jack, heavily loaded, run over a wood floor can set up a lot of vibration.  And a lot of dust displacement.

We gave up trying to improve indoor air quality for this particular client.

 

A varied clientele

One of the most enjoyable aspects of providing commercial cleaning service to a large and diverse clientele is the opportunity to work with, and learn a bit about, lots of different businesses and professions.  One of my favorite clients is The Nash, Phoenix's premier jazz club, which happens to be a half mile from my office, adjoining downtown Phoenix.  This last weekend was their annual fundraiser, and I scored early tickets to their New Orleans themed Sunday brunch and music.

Can't go wrong with a Dixieland band, quiche, parfait, waffles and chicken, fruit and berries, various bacons and sausages, and all the fixings.  

AND, fronting a local band, was the incomparable Wycliff Gordon, on vocals, tenor and alto trombone.  Quite the coincidence that, at a poolside picnic put on that very afternoon by my own Salt River Brass Band, conversation moved to great contemporary trombonists, and Wycliff's name came up.  Nobody else even knew he was in town.

All in all, a great weekend!

Don't fall off

I had a site visit yesterday with one of my larger clients, a vocational ed campus. The facility looks quite good, just a couple of periodic floor jobs (burnishing, scrubbing textured VCT, ceramic) we need to catch over the next class break.  We generally include such occasional jobs as part of our ongoing service; no extra bills for the customer. We did get the textured VCT scrubbing done last night; I try to move fast when I can.

One bit of periodic work needed involves something of a safety challenge - we do an occasional scrub of stairwells, including the yellow safety line.  Here's a before-and-after of the last time on those.

I did notice one issue: a big greasy boot-print in the restroom closest to the diesel repair lab.  I'd not noticed it before, because it's in the middle of a rather high ceiling.  I'd really like to know how it got there.

Which caused me to notice an article today from our good friends at Cleanlink about Ladder safety.  Ladders are so commonplace that we tend to ignore the kind of commonsense safety concerns that we might pay more attention to when using, say, a chain saw. 

I might sum it up as: keep your eyes open, and your grey matter involved.  From the ceiling with the boot-print, it's a long way down.

Working out

A bit after the Covid pandemic, and associated lockdowns, started, I began - VERY gradually, with due concern about protecting my back) - lifting weights.  (With the bars and honky-tonks shuttered, I needed something to do...) Looking on-line, based on my age and weight, I'm still rated at novice level on deadlifts, but (for reasons I cannot imagine) close to elite level on the one-arm dumbbell row.

Kind of thinking, should I ever retire, that a bit of competition might be fun.  Not thinking seriously, but something to conjure with. 

One inducement to such is that one generally competes within age brackets, so I wouldn't have to go up against a buff 25-year old. 

If I had sense, I'd avoid stepping into the current culture wars, but if one cannot do so in one's own personal blog, where can one? 

Seems to me that, in various athletic competitions, we categorize by age for reasons similar to our categorizing by gender. As I have different obstacles facing me than does the above referenced 25-year old, so does a biological female face different obstacles than does a male, for instance in sports involving upper body bone and musculature.  

As I would not want to face said 25-year old simply because he really, really believes he's 70, so would (I imagine) a female weight lifter not want to face a male - even if he really, really wants to be a female.

Perhaps Mark Twain put it best: "If I call my dog's tail a leg, does that mean that I own a 5-legged dog?  Clearly not.  Calling the tail a leg does not make it so."

Don't get rolled up in the carpet

Got a call from a client; she wanted us to skip the weekend cleaning because they're doing some renovating due to a pipe leak, mostly replacing drywall and all the carpet.  As she put it, the renovation crew would have to work fast (given the size of the job and the Easter holiday) and she didn't want one of my smaller folks rolled up in some old carpet and trucked to the dump.

It reminded me of a situation I doubt I've thought about in 20 years.  We used to office in a 1929 building in the heart of downtown Phoenix.  Our suite was on the second floor, with several other smaller tenants and a couple of large rooms used for storage - old furniture, files, several rolls of old carpet.   For our suite, we had an alarm system that featured a set of microphones that would be monitored at the central station should the alarm trip.  A nefarious individual broke into the building and triggered the alarm apparently by rattling our office door.  The police arrived right away (we were a half dozen blocks from the central police station), and entered before the intruder had time to exit.

To search the entire building, including storage rooms, the police brought down a K-9 unit.  After searching the office space, they went for the storage rooms.  The hollering recorded on the tape at the alarm central station was quite evocative, when the dogs sniffed out the carpet that the fellow had rolled himself up in.

As former AG William Barr titled his memoirs, it's "One Damn Thing After Another".

Get a feel (as it were) for hand sanitation

We tend to focus on the sexy "what's new and better" in jobsite health: hydrogen peroxide and quat sanitizers and disinfectants, microfiber for floors and surfaces, HEPA filtration on vacuums, chemical selection and training in use of, and so on.  All of it good, and I figure we're somewhere around the cutting edge of the industry along those lines. But the lowly washing of hands (thoroughly) is overlooked.

Here's an article from our friends at Waxie (our go-to paper and equipment supplier - good folks!) focusing on just hands.

Per the article, other points in hand sanitation, often overlooked, include:

"...the use of automatic dispensers enhance the consumers perception of restroom cleanliness and placing paper towels by exits are preferred by building occupants. Strategic placement of automatic hand sanitizer dispensers near the restroom, at building entrances and exits, reception counters, and anywhere else they are needed to ensure good hand hygiene."

Good links in the article as well.

As the article notes, bacteria shouldn't be the only culture you're exposed to.

Enjoy, and wash up afterwards! 

 

Never, NEVER set the keys or cell phone down.

Caught an article via our friends at Cleaning & Maintenance Management regarding a janitor suing her employer because she trapped herself in a jail holding cell over the weekend; the holding cell door closed behind her, and both her keys and cell phone were outside on her cleaning cart.  There does seem to be a bit of mismanagement on the part of the employer; to quote the article:

"The complaint claims that Allied Universal should be held responsible for the incident due to improper training and a lack of supervision of their employees. “There had to have been at least seven shifts where new security folks came in,” her attorney, Bill McAfee, told WKMG. “[They] should have seen [her] driver’s license sitting there, should have seen that [her] keys had never been turned in, and that the log had never been signed out.” '

She also had health problems that made the incarceration serious.  Sounds like her employer missed some bets.

I believe in always having back-up; years back, an older client referred to it as a "belt and suspenders" approach to life.  We keep on hand a backup set of keys to all our clients, and always have a least one person easily available straight through the night (via phone, if you've not set yours down) and the weekend.

It would be interesting to see what sort of training her firm provided, regarding keeping keys and phone on one's person.  

I do our initial orientation myself.  I stress that one NEVER sets down keys or phone ANYWHERE.  We don't have many holding cells on our janitorial routs, and if one is locked in the office, there is generally a phone available But it's always possible, say, to be taking the trash to the dumpster, located in the fenced back lot, and have the self locking back door close behind you.  You'd be in the lot for the rest of the night, or weekend, if you'd left keys and phone on the front desk.

In our orientation, I illustrate using a personal example.  Just after going into business, 40-plus years ago, I was cleaning a small office building featuring several locked suites off a central hallway.  Entered the hallway, locked myself in (to avoid being surprised by the burglars), went into the first suite, set my keys on the reception desk, caught trash and dusting and then went back into the hall to get my vacuum (a Kirby in those days - remember them?)  The self locking door closed.  I was trapped in the locked hallway, without a phone booth (remember those?)  And these were the days long before any kind of mobile phone (remember those days?)

Managed to hop atop a soda machine and accessed the suite, and my keys, via the hung ceiling. Likely I was a bit more spry in those days (remember those days?)

I learned my lesson. Wonder if the gal's firm had a similar personal example, of what not to do.