Can Tile Floor Care Be Profitable?

By George Barnett

I have over 20+ years in the tile floor maintenance business. Almost the entire experience has been cleaning grocery chains but it has also included cleaning quite a few major retail locations. The tile is the same only the names change.

Five years ago the floor care market changed dramatically in the Southeast as well as many other areas of the country. It would seem that no longer is it your abilities and the integrity of your company that secures the contract, no longer can you work in the close proximity of your office, but most of all you can no longer depend entirely on tile floor maintenance to be your primary source of income.

What happened to the profitable commercial floor care accounts?

The larger grocery chains are using mostly maintenance management companies whose intent is to make money on the overall chain through portioning of each location in the chain to make a large overall profit. This leaves the knowledgeable floor care expert with little recourse in servicing multiple locations since profits are often tied to the cost of experienced floor care personnel and most if not all maintenance management companies offers are based upon low hourly wages for the contractor. The larger retail outlets use many of the same management companies and some have decided to use their own in-house personnel. This has also caused other smaller independent chains to pick up on their competitions leads and continually accept services to the absolute lowest bidder without taking experience and references into consideration. All use the availability of inexperienced low priced contractors to fill their needs and replace them regularly when the floors do not meet appearance standards.

What can the experienced professional floor care contractors do to make profits?

Once a chain has decided to cut expenses, nothing you say will affect their decision. Manager’s hands will be tied and complaining is often met with corporate rhetoric. Your potential customers are now concerned more with expenses than gaining customers to make their profits. I believe the first thing is to set up each individual location that you service with bottom line lowest price. Management companies use scheduled services such as finish recoating and strip and refinish services on a regular basis and the less than experienced contractors do a poor job of maintenance techniques. Use your experience to extend the time between refinishing and stripping cycles. Maintain locations that may have poor sales performance at longer service intervals at a slightly higher price. Modernize your equipment and procedures. There are many new products that will save you time and labor. If you provide chemicals, learn to use them wisely and try not to experiment with many types of finishes. Use what works. Offer discounts for allowing you to service multiple locations within a workable route that allows for less travel. Many of these suggestions many seem to cut into your bottom line but will give you a better reputation for controlling costs and should lead to more business. Probably the most important thing and least likely to be a popular choice is to make cuts in your lifestyle and control business expenses. Buy used equipment whenever practical and shop around for supplies. It may be time to involve yourself even more at the account level if you are not already doing so. Modify your personal and business expenses to allow for several weeks or even months of lower receipts, once you get used to living on less it gets easier to deal with. Save in anticipation of buying equipment or vehicles instead of financing.

What if things seem to be critically slow? It may be time to consider branching into new areas such as carpet care, ceramic tile and grout, power washing, or other alternatives that your experience in the cleaning industry may serve to make you successful. Remember to investigate the market and equipment that you may choose to make your services more diverse carefully. You can easily end up with new equipment gathering dust because of an inability to market a new process. There are many resources to help you market and get the most out of your new endeavor. Some have negotiated with maintenance management companies to get higher fees for certain specific services but this should be investigated carefully.

Other things that you can do:

Get on a contactors list. Many construction companies, flooring companies, and websites have lists that you can join to help find the non-mainstream commercial accounts.

Make offers to maintain entire districts for regions in order to show the savings your services will generate on a large scale. Be sure to make every location blend with others. Managers that visit other locations do not like to see others look better than their own.

Be friendly to your competitors. They will often give up small or out of their way accounts if they know you will maintain that location.

Try to find commercial customers that are smaller. The invoice amounts may be smaller but you will usually find they are more loyal to their contractors.

Speaking from the experience of losing customers that I serviced for nearly 20 years to the maintenance management companies that receive the same contract prices and tried to sub it back to me at ½ the price plus pay their liability insurance left me no choice but to walk away from the many accounts serviced by me and my crews. Having not regretted my decision has left me with a better business outlook and diversify services. Don’t get the wrong idea; there were signs years in advance that changes were coming in the commercial floor maintenance market. Accounts began labor cuts, frequent changes in suppliers, noticeable increases in less qualified contractors obtaining accounts, and a constant reminder of how much we were getting paid. When the change came I was well prepared to go months without full benefit of many contracts we serviced.

Remember, many people are capable of completing the contract as well as you but few are capable of using learned professional abilities to give true value in their services.

Who is George Barnett?

Owner of G & G Services in Trussville, Alabama.

Specializing in tile floor maintenance for 25 years. 3 years as project manager for janitorial service. Clients have included, Bruno’s Inc., Wal-Mart, Piggly Wiggly, plus many other chains and independent retailers.

HydroTech equipment representative. HydroTech manufactures high pressure full feature portables and hard surface cleaning tools.

The G & G Services / HydroTech website is www.webnow.com/HydroTech .

Owner of Cleaner Network website designed to help small cleaning services become more successful. www.cleanernetwork.com .

To contact George Barnett:

Email: HydroTech@webnow.com

Phone: 205-919-8244

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