What's The One Thing Your Company Can Improve Upon?

Taylor M. Bruce Jr.

The first quarter of 2009 is wrapping up and like other companies, IH Services faces a challenging landscape with all the economic stresses facing our customers. We are involved in a strategic planning exercise in order to maximize our strengths and minimize or improve our weaknesses.

One of our weaknesses that we plan on improving in 2009 is our green cleaning initiative. As we all know, green cleaning has been a hot button for a few years and it is getting more emphasis with the customer. We currently use green chemicals and green equipment in our offering to our customers, and we use a green cleaning manual for procedures and training our people. What we lack is a program custom-made for IH Services that delivers our green cleaning message very consistently.

Our goal in 2009 is to have this program complete and in place before year end.

Chris Fairfield

Many companies struggle with time management issues; Arkansas Building Services (ABS) is no exception. It can be very difficult to efficiently manage your time with all the unexpected issues that constantly pop up. We have found at ABS that good communication, planning your day and prioritizing daily tasks can help increase the efficiency and productivity of your day. Some days can really be challenging. Make sure you know your employees and customers well enough to determine which issues need immediate attention and which ones can wait. The overall key is not to get discouraged when things seem to get busier than you can handle. Always stick to your plan and you should be able to keep control of most situations.

Marc Lisenby

We need to become more innovative and flexible in order to find profitable business opportunities. We have been in business for 45 years and we have remained focused on our core business, which is contract housekeeping services. However, in this unusually competitive economy, we need to find new services to offer our customers that are not being offered by our competition — not just carpet cleaning, VCT refinishing or window cleaning. We already provide those add-on services. We have recently identified a niche service that we can offer to our current client base and we can also use to attract new clients that may not have been potential prospects for our janitorial services. We need to compete where our competition is limited and the prospect of profitability is high.