No one goes into the cleaning business with the goal of losing money. Building service contractors quickly learn that to be financially successful in this industry, they must strike a balance between quality and quantity of work. So, it is incredibly important to accurately estimate how long tasks take when bidding a job, and again when performing the work.

That’s often easier said than done—an estimate may feel more like a guesstimate. When it comes to hard- floor care in particular, timing is critical and confusing.

Potential pitfalls
There are many types of hard floor care tasks, from simple sweeping to involved stripping and refinishing. Each task requires a different amount of time to complete — chemicals must dwell on the surface for a certain amount of time in order to be effective, and finishes must be given adequate time to dry.

But inaccurately estimating cleaning times can cost money.

“It is critical that floor-care supervisors and technicians get proper training on floor maintenance tasks required to maintain the floors in their facility. Ignorance can be costly in labor and materials,” says Glen Franklin, a floor-care instructor and owner of Franklin Floor Care in Snohomish, Wash.

For instance, if you think it takes just 20 minutes to spray buff a 1,000-square-foot floor but it actually takes 40 minutes, then you’ve just cut your profit in half. Getting the timing wrong can also lead to a customer-relations nightmare.

To help with estimating cleaning times, the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA) offers its “The Official 447 Cleaning Times” booklet, which was just revised in September. As evidence of how complicated cleaning times can be, the ISSA has updated its “bible” on the subject four times in the last 10 years.

“There have been a lot of requests for additional information,” says the booklet’s author, John Walker, an industry consultant. “We never had transportation times and bucket and tank filling times. There have been a number of new technologies that have come out and several new ways of doing things, such as flat mopping.”

The book uses a set of uniform conditions to come up with approximate times for hundreds of general, healthcare, floor, window, restroom and other cleaning tasks.

Cut out corner-cutting
Even though labor is expensive, rushing jobs ends up costing more in the long run, says John Robertson, owner of Quality Cleaning Service in Indiana. Fail to rinse properly after stripping and the floors may look patchy and dull or the buffer may put swirls in the finish. Put down uneven coats and you may be back to re-strip the floors.

“If you try to rush the job, it ends up costing money and there’s no profit to make,” says Robertson. “I’d rather take my time and do the job right because if we have to go back and it will be triple the time. If we do it right the first time it will save time in the long run.”

Another potential problem is not allowing enough dry time — the amount of time it takes for a chemical to dry fully, not just on top, but to the floor. A refinished gym floor may feel dry to the touch within an hour, but that only means that the top layer has dried. It is still moist against the floor. If you allow people to use the floor before it is fully cured, they can wear off the finish in a matter of days.

More work now, less work later
When it comes to hard-floor care, the best way to improve cleaning times — and improve quality while decreasing quantity of work — is to have a good preventative maintenance program. By doing more day-to-day small tasks, or “periodic work” you can reduce the amount of large, time-consuming chores, or “project work,” you and your staff must do.

Hard-floor care tasks from easiest to most difficult, according to Walker, are: matting, dust mopping, vacuuming, dry burnishing, spray buffing, mop-on gloss restoration, damp mopping/scrubbing, wet mopping/scrubbing and stripping. The wetter the task, the more expensive it is. Looking at the chores on a cost continuum scale, Walker says that ideally, cleaners would do inexpensive tasks the most often and costly chores least frequently.

“My experience is that’s not how people schedule work in this industry,” Walker says. “They do a lot of the wet things and do them well, but they don’t do the real cheap dry things to the frequencies that the they should. A lot of them don’t even do them at all. They don’t have mats but they do a lot of stripping. For the price of stripping you could put maps in your entire building.”

Franklin agrees that prevention is the key to a good cleaning program.

“Time spent in preventative maintenance will save many hours of labor later on, with the bonus that the floors will look better, last longer, and be safer to walk on since properly maintained floors have better slip resistance and are therefore less likely to cause a slip-fall accident,” he says. Plus, periodic work is safer for indoor and outdoor environments because these tasks require fewer harsh chemicals than project work.

However, routine maintenance isn’t within the control of every BSC — some facilities handle matting and mopping in-house. In that case, it’s a good idea to educate the customer about the benefits of routine tasks.

“The better the floors are taken care of, the easier the job is. I do the cleaning and floor services for most of my customers so I try to stay up with it,” says Robertson. But for other clients, helpful preventative measures, including matting and routine cleaning, are out of his control. “I recommend it to all of my customers and some choose to stay up with it and some don’t.”

For example, Robertson has found that his clients who invest time and money in routine floor maintenance (either on their own or by paying him to do the chores) need their floors stripped and re-coated less frequently than those who ignore the floors.

“When they don’t take care of the floors properly, we have to strip them every six months,” he says. “The ones who take care of floors properly, we probably only have to strip every two years for about half the cost.”

Becky Mollenkamp is a business writer based in Des Moines, Iowa. She is a frequent contributor to Contracting Profits.




POSTED ON: 10/1/2003