What is Commercial Cleaning
Your customers expect the best when they venture through your doors. Commercial cleaning services sell the experience of venturing through sleek glass doors and into an oasis. Glimmering floors, fully stocked restrooms, and maintenance—both regular and preventive—are the cornerstones of a positive customer experience.
Let's run through a few commercial cleaning service offerings. We'll show why your competition has likely hired a commercial cleaner—if they haven't already. Customers feel safe in a clean environment. Sick time, among other operational expenses, reduce when working environments are positive, clean & empowering.
What is Commercial Cleaning?
The commercial cleaning industry is an amalgamation of simple general cleaning services. If properly trained, these techniques are often simple. These infrastructural services allow businesses to run with remarkable efficiency and build on their successes over time.
Office cleaning & general maintenance includes tasks such as changing light bulbs & monitoring equipment status, such as elevators & other company assets. Most commercial cleaning services offer maintenance as an added benefit to their clients.
What Kind of Businesses Hire Commercial Cleaning Services?
Since the COVID-19 outbreaks across 2019 and 2020, as well as the resurgence in 2021, businesses have taken note of anything they can do to minimize the risk of spreading microbes. Regular cleaning keeps surfaces clear. Electrostatic sprayers disinfect hard to reach crevices. These areas include the grout between tiles, the gap between countertops or desks & larger surfaces, such as desks, chair & point-of-sale systems.
Schools and offices saw massive amounts of foot traffic prior to COVID and many saw substantial amounts of people returning to normal habits and behavior patterns. Trusting in a commercial cleaning company with your janitorial services also instills confidence in your team.
Grocery stores, restaurants, and other food-handling businesses must take additional care when disinfecting services for food preparation—which is absolutely essential. Further, table bussing often involves a high-speed, general cleaning, which rarely allows disinfectants to remain on the surface long enough to neutralize the majority of microbes.
Why Do You Need Commercial Cleaning?
As a business owner, you are obligated to ensure the safety of your patrons, business partners & any on site workers. Not only does this responsibility benefit others, it also notably reduces your business’ operational expenses. Hiring a professional cleaning service enables small business owners to reclaim hours each week that would otherwise be spent cleaning and maintaining their property.
Commercial cleaning businesses also use specialized cleaning equipment that would cost a small fortune for most small businesses. Larger scale businesses benefit from hiring commercial cleaners because the scope and scale of upkeep for a larger commercial space can quickly surpass the capacity of smaller, localized businesses.
Types of Commercial Cleaning Services
There are several types of commercial cleaning services. Not all companies offer all of the services, while some may only offer one or two sets of services. Specialty cleaning services can bolster commercial cleaning company efforts.
For example, a commercial cleaning company may recommend that a brand hire a certain specialist they have worked with in the past. This can save time and money when evaluating your general cleaning and janitorial services.
Upholstery
- Professional upholstery cleaning companies tend to utilize a blend of steam cleaning, green cleaning solutions, and low-heat, high-flow air dryers to ensure that your fabrics are clean and dry to prevent mold and mildew growth and Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) release in your buildings. Further, they are able to disinfect certain types of cloth and fabric that other companies aren’t able to, due to their niche expertise.
Window Cleaning
- Window cleaning is a cornerstone of commercial cleaning that requires great attention to detail and substantial commitment to quality. We know that clients tend to notice fingerprints and any other marks or imperfections left on the windows, glass doors, or other glass fixtures within their property. They are able to see them so prominently because they obscure the view—whether that view covers the San Francisco Bay or it gives them an ability to see how their employees are doing.
Power Washing
- A commonly used deep cleaning technique in commercial cleaning exclusively for external surfaces, power washing, especially in the context of post construction cleaning, enables businesses to remove grit, grime, and other forms of mess from their buildings, sidewalks, and any other surfaces. This is vital to operational excellence because customers judge businesses based on everything they see—subconsciously. It impacts the way they taste food, the way they interact, and even their trust in a business’ expertise.
Tile Cleaning
- Tile and grout cleaning is time consuming, one reason it is best to outsource to a commercial cleaning company. Special tools & professional cleaners ensure the grout between tiles is not damaged from the cleaning process. Particularly when companies choose to use grout that is neither black nor white, the evidence of dirt, staining, and other impurity in grout draws the eyes and the mind to wonder what caused the gritty surface to change color. We replace broken or mismatched tiles to optimize customer safety. Tiles receive a regular, thorough cleaning to prevent slipping hazards.
Garbage Removal
- Garbage is just part of doing business, but it should never be part of what defines your business unless you’re in sanitation, garbage, or waste management—and the site is a landfill. Garbage should be put in trash cans until it can be removed from the site. Day porters and other personnel are generally responsible for removing refuse bags at the point they become full, or they begin to release foul smells. Part of garbage removal is deep cleaning the bins and their containers to minimize the amount of matter that can produce a negative customer experience.
Sanitation
- Similar to garbage removal, sanitation often involves disinfecting services, restroom deep cleaning, removing aggregated waste and garbage from facilities, and dealing with any scrap materials, such as recyclable water containers, aluminum cans, and scrap paper collections. Service workers transport these materials to an auxiliary location, such as a landfill, for proper disposal.
- In the medical space, among others, specialized sanitation personnel are responsible for managing biohazards and other types of high-risk waste. This may include expired medicines, used needles, and used surgical implements. Other industries that may benefit from these services include hospice and family care. Industrial facilities with used oxygen and acetylene tanks or hazardous byproducts, such as solar panel factories and machining facilities also benefit from proper sanitation services.
Vacuum and Buffing
- Vacuuming and buffing are core to commercial floor cleaning in virtually every industry. Manufacturing shop floors must be swept & cleaned multiple times per day to ensure hazards, sharp objects & other risks are correctly managed. Woodchips, metal filings, dirt and dust, and many other obstructions pose a risk to consumer and worker health.
- Allergens also result in reduced quality of life for anyone who stays in the building regularly. High efficiency vacuum filters for carpet cleaning, such as HEPA filters, produce a thorough cleaning, where dust is removed in bulk from carpet, tile, and other surfaces rather than remaining there, waiting for someone to walk by and agitate it into the air again.
- Buffing not only keeps floors aesthetically appealing, it also removes scuff marks and other surface-level impurities that can cause passersby to slip and fall.
Finding a Commercial Cleaning Service for Your Business
When seeking a commercial cleaning company, remember to start by drafting a list of the core, nice-to-have, and extraneously cleaning tasks. A solid commercial cleaning company should have plenty of additional options, but be sure that they meet all of your must-have criteria. If you require a more detailed service and thorough cleaning (with cleaning validation), speak with a Pritchard team member. We work with many data centers, pharma, and bio labs whose cleaning needs are more advanced than a commercial office space.
Pritchard has been operating for more than 100 years and our clients speak with every contract renewal. They love the way our professional cleaners maintain their facilities. More than 95% of customers who have hired us are still working with us. If you’d like to book a consultation, contact us here! Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for the latest on our building cleaning guide.