Brisbane and South East Queensland’s commercial cleaning machine specialists

I grew up fixing things. Trucks, forklifts, cars, whatever was broken that week. I did my apprenticeship on heavy road transport, everything from little Hinos up to Kenworth K909s, and when I finished I went contract field servicing on fuel tankers.

That job taught me the thing I’ve built this business on. On trucks you don’t get a second chance. If a truck runs into a family car because someone got complacent with a brake service, there’s no fixing that afterwards. The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one is enormous, and on that gear it’s measured in lives.

Cleaning equipment isn’t that high stakes. But I brought the same standard across anyway, and I train my technicians the same way. We don’t go to the site to fix a machine. We go to fix the problem, then work out what else is going to fail before we’re back.

From there I ran the service side of a golf operation in Canada, over 300 machines across two courses, then came home to Australia and into cleaning equipment properly. First at PowerVac in WA, the biggest Tennant dealer in the country, then in a major manufacturer’s service department here in Brisbane. That last one taught me what manufacturers do brilliantly and what they do badly. They bring scale and stability. What they often can’t bring is someone who knows your site and picks up the phone.

For the first stretch of CCM I had nothing to sell. I’d be standing in front of a machine telling a customer the motors were going and the chassis was rusting out and it was time to stop throwing money at it, then pointing them at another dealer because I couldn’t help them. Eventually enough customers wanted to buy from me that a couple of manufacturers were willing to back a small operator. Most weren’t.

That’s still how we work. On the government contracts we’ve taken over, sites that were getting weekly repair visits now sit at close to zero callouts.

We get a lot of second opinion calls too. A manufacturer washes their hands of a machine and quotes a replacement, and the customer isn’t convinced. One of those was an $80,000 quote for a new unit. We’d seen the fault before. It was a $30 microswitch. That customer is still one of our biggest today.

The flip side is the advice that costs us money. Mostly robotics at the moment. If I were any good as a salesman I’d have sold ten times the robots we have. But if we put one into a site where it was never going to work, that lands straight back on us. So we tell people when it won’t work.

In ten years I want CCM to be the leading supplier of quality cleaning equipment across Queensland, backed by service and support that keeps every customer coming back. Not the biggest for the sake of it. The one people stay with.

Outside of work, any real free time goes to my family and running.

If you’ve got a machine someone’s given up on, or you’re about to sign for one and want a straight answer on whether it suits your site, get in touch.