Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling down to Baltimore with my father to do some down and dirty training on cleaning supplies. When I say down and dirty, I mean down and dirty. We got hands-on training by cleaning bathrooms, stripping a breakroom floor, and using a carpet extractor. We also were in seminars learning about safety supplies, dilution control systems and even infectious disease prevention. Coincidentally, I got the stomach bug three days later. Go figure!
This is an introduction to a series of blog posts in which I hope to help accomplish two primary objectives for each area of focus. The first objective is to become more efficient. Truthfully, supplies are not your biggest expense when it comes to keeping your facility clean—it’s labor. Finding the balance between buying on a budget and getting your team what they need is difficult. If you’re leaning one way, you should lean on the side of getting what your team needs. They’ll be more efficient, which will save you more than the few extra bucks you spent on the products themselves. This may sound awfully convenient for us. We are selling the darn stuff after all. If you really look at it though, it’s a no brainer.
How about spending $15 extra on Rubbermaid’s mop bucket with patented WaveBreak technology? It keeps water from sloshing over the sides, meaning less clean up that you didn’t intend to do. Not all that revolutionary right? You could buy C-Fold towels that need to be replaced every day, or you could switch to a roll towel that lasts a week. I’ll let you in on a little secret: you’ll actually use less towels and in turn save money anyway, on top of saving your facilities team the hassle of changing out the towels all the time. Got to love a win-win.
Objective #2 is to increase sanitation. Sanitation is a huge reason to monitor what products you’re using. Have you ever thought about how disgusting it is to reach your hand up into a C-Fold towel dispenser to get a paper towel? Just because you clean your hands thoroughly doesn’t mean everyone else does. Also, if you’re buying a gallon of soap and refilling a dispenser instead of using sealed refills, you can bet there is bacteria in there from opening and refilling it time after time. Sorry if I took your innocence, but it’s for your own good!! We’re going to be running some specials within the next couple of months to help you get new dispensers for free or for very cheap, so be on the look out for that.
We’ll tackle all this and more in the coming weeks. Whether you use the knowledge for your organization or for your home, hopefully you come away with some nuggets that will make life a little bit easier. Buckle up and get ready to roll. It’s going to be a squeaky clean, money-saving ride.