Every contract cleaner we deal with is being asked to hold the same standard on tighter margins with fewer available staff. Working harder stopped being an answer some time ago.
What follows is what we see separating the operators who are still profitable from the ones grinding. It is mostly unglamorous.
Buy for the Site, Not the Spec Sheet
The most expensive equipment mistake is not buying cheap. It is buying a machine that does not fit the building.
A wide-deck scrubber that cannot get between the shelving spends the job doing three-point turns. A ride-on in a building with small disconnected rooms never gets up to speed. We collect machines that were the wrong shape for the site from day one and were never going to pay for themselves.
Measure your tightest access point before you look at anything. Then match the machine to your worst floor rather than your average one.
If you are not sure, hire the machine for a fortnight and run it on the actual site. Two weeks of real data beats any productivity figure on a brochure, including ours.
Automate the Boring Floor, Not the Detail
Automation pays where the work is large, open, repetitive and unsupervised. It does not pay on detail work.
A robotic scrubber covering the open floor overnight frees your crew for touch points, amenities and edges, which is the work clients actually notice. The ROI calculator will tell you fairly quickly whether your sites have enough open floor to justify it.
Be honest about the failure case. If someone has to clear pallets or move furniture before the robot can run, the labour has moved, not disappeared.
Train Once, Properly
Most of the productivity loss we see is not equipment failure. It is equipment being used at half its capability.
Three things worth fifteen minutes each on handover:
- Squeegee setting. A badly set squeegee leaves a wet trail and the operator slows down to compensate. Fixing it is free and immediate.
- Pad and brush selection. The right pad for the floor changes cleaning speed more than machine size does.
- Solution flow. Most operators run more water than they need, which means more tank fills and more downtime.
Have the person who will actually run the machine at the handover, not just the supervisor. This is the single cheapest efficiency gain available and almost everyone skips it.
Maintenance Is a Scheduling Problem
A machine that fails mid-shift costs you the shift, not the repair.
The failures we attend are overwhelmingly avoidable, and the same few every time:
- Batteries run flat then left flat. Deep cycling kills batteries faster than heavy use does. On charge at end of shift, every shift.
- Recovery tanks left full. This causes most of the smell complaints and a fair share of the pump problems.
- Worn squeegees left on too long. Cheap part, and running it worn puts the load somewhere more expensive.
Put scheduled servicing in the calendar at six or twelve month intervals depending on duty, rather than waiting for a failure. When something does go down, we run same-day repairs from stocked vans across Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast, the Gold Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Moreton Bay and Toowoomba.
Keep a few consumables on the shelf too. Pads, squeegee blades and filters are the parts that stop a job, and they are cheap to hold in stock.
Measure Something Other Than Hours
Most cleaning contracts are priced on hours and managed on complaints, which means you find out a site is underperforming from the client.
Two numbers worth tracking per site:
- Square metres per labour hour. Track it before and after any equipment change. It is the only way to know whether the machine actually did anything.
- Machine downtime days per year. If one site keeps producing breakdowns, it is usually the wrong machine for that floor rather than bad luck.
If you run robotic machines, the onboard logs give you coverage data for free, and it settles disputes about whether a site was done.
Where to Start
Take your least profitable site and work out whether the problem is the equipment, the training or the pricing. It is usually one of the first two, and both are fixable this month.
Tell us about the sites you run and we will help you work out what is worth changing. We supply, hire and service commercial cleaning equipment across Brisbane and South East Queensland.
