Outsourcing your building maintenance services can help you drive your company’s top-line growth. Here are a few tips to consider.
Outsourcing your building maintenance services can help you drive your company’s top-line growth. According to an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, concentrating your company’s resources on its core competencies — what it’s best at and what makes it stand out from competitors — can help provide unique value to your customers and drive revenue growth.
Combining this with strategically outsourcing many, if not most, activities that don’t relate to your core competencies, strategic goals or special capabilities can help you concentrate on what makes your business different. For most of you, cleaning and maintenance services are important, but they’re not what make you stand out. Here are some tips on outsourcing these services to help you focus on what’s most important.
Impact of Site Condition
Whether you own or rent, your building is a reflection of the pride you take in your business. If your facilities are dirty or in disrepair, your business will be poorly portrayed to customers and visitors. Site conditions also affect employees: Working in subpar conditions lowers employee morale, which leads to lower productivity, higher absenteeism and tardiness, and even incidences of employee theft. Additionally, multiple studies have shown that consumers will avoid establishments that have dirty or unsafe conditions, especially in the bathrooms. Outsourcing your maintenance services to a high-quality provider can help show your employees and customers that you care and will help grow your business.
Cost Benefits
Scheduling your building maintenance services in advance has many cost benefits. For one, it allows you to reduce your accounting costs by streamlining the billing process. Instead of multiple bills coming in from multiple vendors for various services and products, you’ll have one bill that covers everything and that is paid on a monthly or quarterly basis. This will give you or your staff more time to focus on better pricing, new product pricing or bundling products and services, which will all contribute to the growth of your top line.
In addition, knowing the pricing in advance helps you reduce the time spent on your annual budgeting process. Your building maintenance services’ provider may even be able to notify you in advance when a major capital expenditure is needed for a repair or to replace a facility item. This will allow you to significantly reduce the time spent on determining your capital expenditure budget, which translates both into hours saved and peace of mind, because you won’t have to worry about unexpected expenses.
Contract Terms
When you outsource your business’s cleaning and maintenance, you typically enter into a single or multiyear contract — although the term could be shorter. Depending on your business type and the facilities you operate, the terms may include the frequency of cleaning services, the products used, the type or level of cleaning, the frequency of maintenance checkups and general repairs. Because all this is outlined in the contract up front, you no longer have to make regular daily, weekly or monthly decisions about your work site, which will free up your time to focus on your top-line growth.
Consequences of Irregular Maintenance
According to the Department of Treasury, “The consequences of not performing regular maintenance could include increased safety hazards, poor service to the public, higher costs in the future and inefficient operations.” The cost of deferred or irregular maintenance can be significantly more than the original cost. By outsourcing your facility’s cleaning and site maintenance services, you can avoid these high, unnecessary costs.
Outsourcing and scheduling building maintenance services can help you grow your top line by allowing you to focus on generating more sales and better servicing your customers. Take these tips and considerations, and consider entering a contract for recurring services. Before you know it, you’ll have peace of mind that the facilities that house your business are well taken care of.
