Cleaning in the U.S.A, vacuums and pulire shows

The Way I See it

Coverings 2002 – Largest International Show for Stone and Marble in the World
This year’s show in Orlando FL, May 6 to 9 at the Orange County Convention Center included: The International Stone and Tile Exposition, The International Flooring Exposition and the Vision 2002 Educational Conference.

This was a big event with 25,000 attendees expected to attend 80 seminars and 1300 exhibits from 45 nations occupying over 1 million square feet of exhibit space. The show floor, all on one level was over 9 foot ball fields long, and your feet agreed after walking from one end to the other a couple of times.
I attended because I wanted to see what was new and see what the trends were when it comes to stone, marble, ceramic, porcelain and other natural hard floors. Here are a few of the trends I noticed:

- The interest in natural stone and hard floor coverings continues to grow.
- Earth tones, natural and rustic colors are gaining in popularity.
- Ceramic and porcelain materials are being crafted to look like other materials including woods, marble and granite.
- There were a lot of booths selling radiant heat systems.
- Spain, Italy and Brazil had the largest number of booths.
- The majority of stone and ceramic floor coverings are imported.
- There is an increasing selection of high-end exotic stone, marble, granite and ceramic materials being offered from around the world.
- China, India and turkey are entering the market with low price products.
- The price of carpeting will increase over the next year as fiber made from petroleum products continue to increase in price.
- There is more emphasis on installation, with new products and tools.
- High technology equipment is being used to cut, machine and polish stone.
- Designers are combining stone, wood, metal and carpet in the same areas.
- Embossing, reliefs and three-dimensional designs are being used on floors and walls.
- There is a lot of fancy ceramic tile now entering the market. It’s not the same tile you are used to seeing on the floor in the bathroom at the courthouse.
- Maintaining stone and masonry hard floor surfaces will continue to be profitable and a growing market for the next 20 to 30 years.

NISSCO Distributor Show
I recently took part in the NISSCO distributor show that was held at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, TN. About 100 distributors attended the event and took turns visiting the 50 different supplier tables that were set up for 15-minute personal sessions. This was the first time I had taken part in such an event and I found it to be a very good opportunity for me to meet and talk with distributors about their businesses as well as educational services and materials that I offer. At the same time, it was a grueling event, imagine making the same 15-minute presentation over and over again fifty times in a row.

The Opryland Hotel was a great location; the staff was especially helpful and friendly. The food as excellent and we were certainly kept busy with meetings, presentations and activities during the 3 day event. I was pleased and happy to be a part of it.

NISH – Operating a Successful Custodial Business
While in Nashville, TN I conducted my 15th three-day class for NISH. Twenty-seven NISH contractors from around the country were in attendance. NISH is a group that works with local disabled workshops to help them get GSA and other federal cleaning contracts. They have some where around $600 million in contracts currently.

What makes this interesting is that NISH contractors are required by law to use at least 80% severely disabled workers on all government contracts. I’ve heard some private contractors complain that NISH has an unfair advantage. Bull pucky, what those who complain don’t know is that the GSA is using totally unrealistic numbers provided by a company known as LMI to determining what the GSA should pay per square foot for cleaning services. The GSA typically asks for a bid and then tells the contractor how much they will pay. If you want the job, you figure out a way to get the work done regardless of standard industry production rates.

Bidding and Estimating – Looking at it a Different Way
The standard approach is to take the square footage of the space to be cleaned and divide an average production rate per hour into square footage number to come up with how many hours it will take to clean the space. Then you multiply the number of hours times an hourly rate to give you a cost per day, which you then multiply times the number of service days per month to get a monthly cost of service. Another approach is to take an average cost per square foot and multiply that times the total cleanable square footage to come up with a price per month.

Unfortunately, many times, when you use one or both of these approaches the conclusion is that you can’t do the job and you walk away from the opportunity or you submit a high bid which takes you out of the running. In dealing with some potential customers who have a set budget and that is the final amount they are able to pay, I find a different approach may be more successful.

You take what the customer has as a budget, you deduct out what you know are fixed costs for supplies, equipment, overhead, profit and management. Then deduct out priority services such as restrooms, lobbies, floor care and executive offices. Then you take what you have left and divide your burdened hourly rate into that number and it tells you how many hours you have available to do the remaining tasks. Take those hours and assign them to the remaining tasks and you’ll know how many square feet or floors each person has to clean on a nightly basis.

Once you are in the account you can continue to tweak the runs and refine the process to find additional efficiencies. I’ve found this approach to work quite well as long as you have a customer that will work with you because they realize they can’t have champagne service on a beer budget and you have a 30 day cancellation clause in the contract. It’s amazing to me what you can do when you want too and have too. And I’ve always found more opportunities on the inside looking out than on the outside looking in.

Green Cleaning Comes of Age
In the past, when we have thought of green cleaning, our first and only action was to begin purchasing green chemicals for cleaning. Today green cleaning has evolved to the point that we realize that green cleaning must involve all department in a facility and to be truly effective must also deal with such issues as cleaning procedures, soil prevention, recycling, waste stream reduction, reuse, building design, maintenance, construction and remodeling, pest control, landscaping, and energy conservation.

We also know that not everyone defines green or environmentally preferable in the same way. To some, green means that all natural or even organic renewable base products are used in chemical formulations, to others, it means that the label on the bottle was printed with soy ink.

To have an effective green cleaning program takes research, commitment and the involvement and support of everyone from upper management and the purchasing department to suppliers as well as those who use and clean the facility. It doesn’t do any good to use green chemicals for cleaning and to then spray poisons for pest control and landscaping in and around the facility. A green cleaning program must be well planned, comprehensive and integrated throughout an organization to be truly effective. Anything else is a good effort, but a joke.

Trends You Should Know About
Being aware of industry trends will help you better serve your customers needs. As I travel the world collecting information on cleaning I have noticed a number of trends that I believe will impact what you sell in the future. Here’s what I see coming your way.

- Vapor Cleaning
Small imported units that use very little water and clean with high temperature dry vapor. These units are great for detail cleaning and sanitizing, as well as carpet spotting and upholstery cleaning.

- Topical Coatings
Several companies now make topical coatings that repel or prevent soil from sticking to a wide variety of surfaces, which makes cleaning faster and easier. Other coatings now give surfaces long term protection against bacteria growth.

- New Floor Coverings
Stone, marble, wood and laminate flooring are gaining in popularity, with carpet losing market share. This means that customers will need new products, equipment and training to keep these surfaces looking like new.

- No Touch
The public is concerned about touching restroom fixtures and catching something. You will continue to see more no touch dispensers for paper towels, hand soap and trash cans.

- High Class Bathrooms
The public is fed up with dirty restrooms. Image and marketing conscientious companies are cleaning up their act and remodeling their public restroom into high class facilities with all the amenities, which includes good lighting, soft chairs, color coordinated flooring, paint and fixtures. Going to the bathroom is becoming a more pleasant experience as companies, in an effort to attract and hold customers, go to extreme measures so their customers can go in comfort.

- Low and No Maintenance Flooring
As labor cost increase, the use of low and no maintenance floor coverings, some with special factory applied finishes, are gaining popularity. We are seeing wide spread use of permanent coatings on wood, stone, concrete and laminate flooring.

- Low Moisture Carpet Cleaning
As moisture becomes more of a mold and environmental issue in homes and offices, steam cleaning is feeling the pressure from dry or low moisture systems. Even the IICRC in it’s recently updated and released International Carpet Cleaning Standard recognized low moisture systems as viable carpet cleaning methods. For more information on the IICRC Carpet Cleaning Standard: call 206-693-5675 or visit: www.iicrc.org

- Prevention Lowers Cleaning Costs
As costs become more of a concern, attention is focusing on prevention. The goal is now more on keeping areas, surfaces and buildings from getting dirty, rather than how to clean them. The idea being, that if you don’t make a mess, there is less of a mess to clean up. Entry matting and trashcans are becoming more common prevention tools in both public and private facilities.

- Flat Mops
The typical string mops that have been in use for many years in the U.S. are giving way to the flat mop. Some systems even have solution containers on the handle eliminating the need for the expensive mop pail and wringer. Others are using micro-fibers for more thorough cleaning with less use of chemicals.

- Green Cleaning and Chemicals
Natural and organic based cleaning chemical use is on the rise. These products are now competitively priced and in some cases more effective cleaners than petroleum based products. For many customers, there simply isn’t any reason to use products that aren’t as safe as possible for workers, building occupants and the earth.

- Floor Machines with a Vacuum
We are starting to see a backlash by customers who don’t want dust put in the air during dry cleaning processes such as polishing and burnishing. Many floor machines now incorporate a positive vacuum attachment to catch and hold soil particulate during dry floor care processes.

- Mold and Indoor Environmental Quality
Mold is a hot issue. There are no nationally recognized standards, so what you get is a lot of misinformation and controversy as to what are acceptable or safe levels of mold in the air. Mold is part of the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) issue and will continue to be a problem in the future. Along with mold and IEQ come liability and lawsuits related to employee health and safety issues.

- Microfibers
Specially manufactured cloths that enable you to clean surfaces without the use of chemicals. These launderable cloths are great for metal, glass and other flat surfaces and are also now being used in wet and dry mops as well as floor and carpet cleaning pads.

The Economy – The State of Business in the U.S.A Today
The economy doesn’t look any better to me today than it did 6 or 12 months ago. Regardless of what stock brokers, bankers, the government or the newspapers say, I don’t see a recovery now and I don’t see any silver bullet on the horizon that is going to magically turn things around and give us a robust economy. I think we are in for tough times for the next five to seven years.

A few years ago, the dot com’s were selling hot air to the venture capitalists and finally the bubble burst. Now, I see the banks doing the same thing with the large corporations. How can United Airlines and others lose 70 billion dollars and still stay in business? I can barely float a $25.00 check. Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to pay for cost of the corporate incompetence and waste. Right now the banks and the stock market are carrying these corporations. Once these two groups bleed the corporations for everything they can get, they will drop them like a hot rock and then the government will have to step in and in the end, our taxes will pick up the tab. Not great news any way you look at it.

At the same time, I think there is more opportunity to sell cleaning services than ever before. But doing so requires a different focus and approach than in the past. You have to work a little harder today to get potential customers attention and even harder yet to make a sale. Money and budgets are tighter, which means owners and managers are more cautious about what they purchase and how much they spend. Look around you, read the business section headlines. United Airlines loses billions, Xerox is on the verge of bankruptcy, Ford to lay off 20,000 workers and will close five plants. These are not reassuring times.

The reality is that business will go on. Orders will get placed and filled which means there will be areas, surfaces and buildings that need cleaning. The question becomes, will you be the one to get the job or will your competition get the call. It takes more money and time to make a sale than it did last year and personally, I don’t think this will change. It is just a new and different approach to doing business in 2002. The sooner you get used to it and adjust your sales and management strategy to cut costs and improve production, without a loss of quality, the better you’ll be able to deal with it.

Education is the Answer
Regardless of what you’re trying to accomplish or achieve with your business, department or in your personal life, your best chances for success lie in education. Between now and the end of the year you have an opportunity to attend two of the best cleaning related educational conferences and trade shows in the country.

- CMEXPO
This annual show is scheduled for Cleveland OH; June 24 to 26 and following it will be a two-day certified Floor Care Technician Seminar on June 27 & 28.
Don’t miss these great programs. For more info call. Cleaning Management at 518-783-1281 or visit them on the Internet at: www.cmmonline.com

That’s it for this month.
Next month I’ll have a report on what is new at the ISSA/INTERCLEAN Show in Amsterdam and the World Federation of Building Service Contractors Association Convention in Scotland.
Until we talk again, Good Luck and Keep it Clean out there. If you have any question, topics or comments you can reach me at the phone and email address listed here.

Bill Griffin






			Cleaning in the U.S.A			May 2002

			The Way I See it Coverings 2002 – Largest International Show for Stone and Marble in the World This year’s show in Orlando FL, May 6 to 9 at the Orange County Convention Center included: The International Stone and Tile Exposition, The International Flooring Exposition and the Vision 2002 Educational Conference. This was a big event with 25,000 attendees expected to attend 80 seminars and 1300 exhibits from 45 nations occupying over 1 million square feet of exhibit space. The show floor, all on one level was over 9 foot ball fields long, and your feet agreed after walking from one end to the other a couple of times. I attended because I wanted to see what was new and see what the trends were when it comes to stone, marble, ceramic, porcelain and other natural hard floors. Here are a few of the trends I noticed: - The interest in natural stone and hard floor coverings continues to grow. - Earth tones, natural and rustic colors are gaining in popularity. - Ceramic and porcelain materials are being crafted to look like other materials including woods, marble and granite. - There were a lot of booths selling radiant heat systems. - Spain, Italy and Brazil had the largest number of booths. - The majority of stone and ceramic floor coverings are imported. - There is an increasing selection of high-end exotic stone, marble, granite and ceramic materials being offered from around the world. - China, India and turkey are entering the market with low price products. - The price of carpeting will increase over the next year as fiber made from petroleum products continue to increase in price. - There is more emphasis on installation, with new products and tools. - High technology equipment is being used to cut, machine and polish stone. - Designers are combining stone, wood, metal and carpet in the same areas. - Embossing, reliefs and three-dimensional designs are being used on floors and walls. - There is a lot of fancy ceramic tile now entering the market. It’s not the same tile you are used to seeing on the floor in the bathroom at the courthouse. - Maintaining stone and masonry hard floor surfaces will continue to be profitable and a growing market for the next 20 to 30 years. NISSCO Distributor Show I recently took part in the NISSCO distributor show that was held at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, TN. About 100 distributors attended the event and took turns visiting the 50 different supplier tables that were set up for 15-minute personal sessions. This was the first time I had taken part in such an event and I found it to be a very good opportunity for me to meet and talk with distributors about their businesses as well as educational services and materials that I offer. At the same time, it was a grueling event, imagine making the same 15-minute presentation over and over again fifty times in a row. The Opryland Hotel was a great location; the staff was especially helpful and friendly. The food as excellent and we were certainly kept busy with meetings, presentations and activities during the 3 day event. I was pleased and happy to be a part of it. NISH – Operating a Successful Custodial Business While in Nashville, TN I conducted my 15th three-day class for NISH. Twenty-seven NISH contractors from around the country were in attendance. NISH is a group that works with local disabled workshops to help them get GSA and other federal cleaning contracts. They have some where around $600 million in contracts currently. What makes this interesting is that NISH contractors are required by law to use at least 80% severely disabled workers on all government contracts. I’ve heard some private contractors complain that NISH has an unfair advantage. Bull pucky, what those who complain don’t know is that the GSA is using totally unrealistic numbers provided by a company known as LMI to determining what the GSA should pay per square foot for cleaning services. The GSA typically asks for a bid and then tells the contractor how much they will pay. If you want the job, you figure out a way to get the work done regardless of standard industry production rates. Bidding and Estimating – Looking at it a Different Way The standard approach is to take the square footage of the space to be cleaned and divide an average production rate per hour into square footage number to come up with how many hours it will take to clean the space. Then you multiply the number of hours times an hourly rate to give you a cost per day, which you then multiply times the number of service days per month to get a monthly cost of service. Another approach is to take an average cost per square foot and multiply that times the total cleanable square footage to come up with a price per month. Unfortunately, many times, when you use one or both of these approaches the conclusion is that you can’t do the job and you walk away from the opportunity or you submit a high bid which takes you out of the running. In dealing with some potential customers who have a set budget and that is the final amount they are able to pay, I find a different approach may be more successful. You take what the customer has as a budget, you deduct out what you know are fixed costs for supplies, equipment, overhead, profit and management. Then deduct out priority services such as restrooms, lobbies, floor care and executive offices. Then you take what you have left and divide your burdened hourly rate into that number and it tells you how many hours you have available to do the remaining tasks. Take those hours and assign them to the remaining tasks and you’ll know how many square feet or floors each person has to clean on a nightly basis. Once you are in the account you can continue to tweak the runs and refine the process to find additional efficiencies. I’ve found this approach to work quite well as long as you have a customer that will work with you because they realize they can’t have champagne service on a beer budget and you have a 30 day cancellation clause in the contract. It’s amazing to me what you can do when you want too and have too. And I’ve always found more opportunities on the inside looking out than on the outside looking in. Green Cleaning Comes of Age In the past, when we have thought of green cleaning, our first and only action was to begin purchasing green chemicals for cleaning. Today green cleaning has evolved to the point that we realize that green cleaning must involve all department in a facility and to be truly effective must also deal with such issues as cleaning procedures, soil prevention, recycling, waste stream reduction, reuse, building design, maintenance, construction and remodeling, pest control, landscaping, and energy conservation. We also know that not everyone defines green or environmentally preferable in the same way. To some, green means that all natural or even organic renewable base products are used in chemical formulations, to others, it means that the label on the bottle was printed with soy ink. To have an effective green cleaning program takes research, commitment and the involvement and support of everyone from upper management and the purchasing department to suppliers as well as those who use and clean the facility. It doesn’t do any good to use green chemicals for cleaning and to then spray poisons for pest control and landscaping in and around the facility. A green cleaning program must be well planned, comprehensive and integrated throughout an organization to be truly effective. Anything else is a good effort, but a joke. Trends You Should Know About Being aware of industry trends will help you better serve your customers needs. As I travel the world collecting information on cleaning I have noticed a number of trends that I believe will impact what you sell in the future. Here’s what I see coming your way. - Vapor Cleaning Small imported units that use very little water and clean with high temperature dry vapor. These units are great for detail cleaning and sanitizing, as well as carpet spotting and upholstery cleaning. - Topical Coatings Several companies now make topical coatings that repel or prevent soil from sticking to a wide variety of surfaces, which makes cleaning faster and easier. Other coatings now give surfaces long term protection against bacteria growth. - New Floor Coverings Stone, marble, wood and laminate flooring are gaining in popularity, with carpet losing market share. This means that customers will need new products, equipment and training to keep these surfaces looking like new. - No Touch The public is concerned about touching restroom fixtures and catching something. You will continue to see more no touch dispensers for paper towels, hand soap and trash cans. - High Class Bathrooms The public is fed up with dirty restrooms. Image and marketing conscientious companies are cleaning up their act and remodeling their public restroom into high class facilities with all the amenities, which includes good lighting, soft chairs, color coordinated flooring, paint and fixtures. Going to the bathroom is becoming a more pleasant experience as companies, in an effort to attract and hold customers, go to extreme measures so their customers can go in comfort. - Low and No Maintenance Flooring As labor cost increase, the use of low and no maintenance floor coverings, some with special factory applied finishes, are gaining popularity. We are seeing wide spread use of permanent coatings on wood, stone, concrete and laminate flooring. - Low Moisture Carpet Cleaning As moisture becomes more of a mold and environmental issue in homes and offices, steam cleaning is feeling the pressure from dry or low moisture systems. Even the IICRC in it’s recently updated and released International Carpet Cleaning Standard recognized low moisture systems as viable carpet cleaning methods. For more information on the IICRC Carpet Cleaning Standard: call 206-693-5675 or visit: www.iicrc.org - Prevention Lowers Cleaning Costs As costs become more of a concern, attention is focusing on prevention. The goal is now more on keeping areas, surfaces and buildings from getting dirty, rather than how to clean them. The idea being, that if you don’t make a mess, there is less of a mess to clean up. Entry matting and trashcans are becoming more common prevention tools in both public and private facilities. - Flat Mops The typical string mops that have been in use for many years in the U.S. are giving way to the flat mop. Some systems even have solution containers on the handle eliminating the need for the expensive mop pail and wringer. Others are using micro-fibers for more thorough cleaning with less use of chemicals. - Green Cleaning and Chemicals Natural and organic based cleaning chemical use is on the rise. These products are now competitively priced and in some cases more effective cleaners than petroleum based products. For many customers, there simply isn’t any reason to use products that aren’t as safe as possible for workers, building occupants and the earth. - Floor Machines with a Vacuum We are starting to see a backlash by customers who don’t want dust put in the air during dry cleaning processes such as polishing and burnishing. Many floor machines now incorporate a positive vacuum attachment to catch and hold soil particulate during dry floor care processes. - Mold and Indoor Environmental Quality Mold is a hot issue. There are no nationally recognized standards, so what you get is a lot of misinformation and controversy as to what are acceptable or safe levels of mold in the air. Mold is part of the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) issue and will continue to be a problem in the future. Along with mold and IEQ come liability and lawsuits related to employee health and safety issues. - Microfibers Specially manufactured cloths that enable you to clean surfaces without the use of chemicals. These launderable cloths are great for metal, glass and other flat surfaces and are also now being used in wet and dry mops as well as floor and carpet cleaning pads. The Economy – The State of Business in the U.S.A Today The economy doesn’t look any better to me today than it did 6 or 12 months ago. Regardless of what stock brokers, bankers, the government or the newspapers say, I don’t see a recovery now and I don’t see any silver bullet on the horizon that is going to magically turn things around and give us a robust economy. I think we are in for tough times for the next five to seven years. A few years ago, the dot com’s were selling hot air to the venture capitalists and finally the bubble burst. Now, I see the banks doing the same thing with the large corporations. How can United Airlines and others lose 70 billion dollars and still stay in business? I can barely float a $25.00 check. Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to pay for cost of the corporate incompetence and waste. Right now the banks and the stock market are carrying these corporations. Once these two groups bleed the corporations for everything they can get, they will drop them like a hot rock and then the government will have to step in and in the end, our taxes will pick up the tab. Not great news any way you look at it. At the same time, I think there is more opportunity to sell cleaning services than ever before. But doing so requires a different focus and approach than in the past. You have to work a little harder today to get potential customers attention and even harder yet to make a sale. Money and budgets are tighter, which means owners and managers are more cautious about what they purchase and how much they spend. Look around you, read the business section headlines. United Airlines loses billions, Xerox is on the verge of bankruptcy, Ford to lay off 20,000 workers and will close five plants. These are not reassuring times. The reality is that business will go on. Orders will get placed and filled which means there will be areas, surfaces and buildings that need cleaning. The question becomes, will you be the one to get the job or will your competition get the call. It takes more money and time to make a sale than it did last year and personally, I don’t think this will change. It is just a new and different approach to doing business in 2002. The sooner you get used to it and adjust your sales and management strategy to cut costs and improve production, without a loss of quality, the better you’ll be able to deal with it. Education is the Answer Regardless of what you’re trying to accomplish or achieve with your business, department or in your personal life, your best chances for success lie in education. Between now and the end of the year you have an opportunity to attend two of the best cleaning related educational conferences and trade shows in the country. - CMEXPO This annual show is scheduled for Cleveland OH; June 24 to 26 and following it will be a two-day certified Floor Care Technician Seminar on June 27 & 28. Don’t miss these great programs. For more info call. Cleaning Management at 518-783-1281 or visit them on the Internet at: www.cmmonline.com That’s it for this month. Next month I’ll have a report on what is new at the ISSA/INTERCLEAN Show in Amsterdam and the World Federation of Building Service Contractors Association Convention in Scotland. Until we talk again, Good Luck and Keep it Clean out there. If you have any question, topics or comments you can reach me at the phone and email address listed here. Bill Griffin By Wm R. Griffin, President Cleaning Consultant Services, Inc. Copyright (c) 2002