Is Your Carpet Cleaning Company Built for Commercial Accounts?

Commercial accounts can bring a carpet cleaning company steady revenue and long-term growth. They can also expose every weak spot in how that company is organized.

From the curb, residential and commercial jobs look alike. Both involve carpet and a truck full of equipment. Underneath, scheduling, staffing, pricing and client expectations follow different rules, and a company built around daytime residential work often strains when contracted commercial work arrives.

Dane Gregory has seen that play out from several angles. He is national sales manager for Carpet Cleaner America, a Spartanburg, South Carolina-based manufacturer of carpet and floor cleaning equipment, and an IICRC-approved instructor with more than 35 years in the professional cleaning industry. He served two terms as IICRC president, in 1999 and 2000. Before that, he owned a cleaning company in central Wisconsin that started in janitorial and hard floor work before moving into carpet.

What counts as commercial

Gregory said the word gets used loosely in the online groups where cleaners trade information. Plenty of companies say they do residential and commercial work when the commercial side amounts to a handful of scattered jobs.

“Commercial, to me, is a contracted client that you’ve signed an agreement with for the course of a year, two years, five years, whatever the number is,” Gregory said.

Under that definition, the client pays a set amount every month for ongoing maintenance. The one-time hot water extraction at a fast-food restaurant doesn’t qualify. A true commercial account has both parties agreeing on the scope of work and the price before anyone rolls out a hose.

Gregory focuses on carpet through his role with Carpet Cleaner America, though the same thinking applies to other floor surfaces. Not every carpet cleaner offers hard floor care, he noted, “or not everybody does it well.”

The truckmount may not fit

The first structural question Gregory raises is whether the company has the right people for the environment. When he owned his business, much of the commercial work happened at night in shopping centers and retail storefronts, with crews arriving after 10 p.m. with extraction equipment.

Hot water extraction delivers a deep clean and lets you go longer between visits. For high-volume maintenance in places such as Class A downtown office towers, Gregory points owners toward low-moisture methods that cover ground faster.

“The thought process is, yeah, I’d like to use my truck mount to do all of this,” Gregory explained. “But the truckmount, unfortunately, even though it cleans well, is a little bit too slow for time that you need to spend in that particular building. So the money’s in the maintenance, not necessarily the cleaning part of it.”

Truckmounts also run into physical limits in multistory buildings. Gregory recalled a commercial job where a hose broke several floors up, and his crew looked out the window to see water running across the lobby. Some units have the power to reach higher floors, he acknowledged, though at some point the risk outweighs the reach.

The right account can pay off for years. One of Gregory’s best was a large insurance office whose carpet was nearing the end of its life. The client didn’t want to replace it, so his crew came in almost every six weeks.

“That account actually sent my oldest child through college,” Gregory said.

Someone has to go knock on doors

As a company leans into commercial work, Gregory said a sales function becomes essential. Waiting for building managers to call rarely produces enough business.

“You probably need somebody out there pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, making visits,” he said.

Those visits should target buildings that fit the company’s equipment, staffing levels and training. Landing an account the crew can’t service well does more harm than good.

Recruiting needs an owner too. Commercial contracts demand a steady pipeline of workers, and that responsibility has to land somewhere even in a small company with no formal HR department. In Gregory’s company, his wife handled it.

“She was really good at it, too. I worried about my job several times,” Gregory joked. “In a small company, sometimes that’s hard to do. But somebody’s got to wear that hat at some point.”

Quality control rounds out the list. Gregory said owners need some mechanism for going back to confirm the work they billed for was done correctly.

Day crews and night crews

Whether commercial work deserves its own division depends on the local market and the type of buildings a company pursues. Gregory doesn’t consider a separate division mandatory. Shift timing tends to force the issue, though, since high-rise office work usually happens overnight.

“It’s hard to mix people who are used to working residential cleaning during the day, and then having them work at night,” Gregory said. “I’ve noticed over my time that day people and night people are somewhat different people in a lot of cases.”

At minimum, he recommends having dedicated staff for night work. Sending a residential technician to an overnight commercial job after a full day shift wears people down fast.

Gregory also encourages owners to look past downtown towers. Warehouse districts and business parks are full of buildings with a 75,000-square-foot warehouse attached to a 2,500-square-foot office. The carpet in those offices sees light traffic, and the accounts rarely draw national competitors.

“That’s a great way to get your feet wet in that space where you don’t have to go against the big boys, so to speak, and compete with them,” he said.

Where newcomers stumble

Gregory sees missteps more often than outright mistakes. The most common one is quitting the sales visits too soon. Owners make a few calls on a building, feel they aren’t gaining ground and stop showing up, which throws away the consistency they had started to build.

Receptionists and other front-line staff notice who keeps coming back. Gregory said they often watch new vendors over time to judge whether the interest is real.

“They like to test companies to see, are you just talking a good game, or do you really show what it looks like?” he said.

Pricing trips up newcomers as well. Residential cleaners can raise a ticket by adding services and premium features. Commercial property managers compare notes with one another and know the going rates in their area.

“When you come in way high or way outside the normal range that they’re in, they understand that too, that you might not know that market as well,” Gregory said.

Train supervisors before growth hits

The system Gregory most wants in place before growth arrives is a trained supervisory layer. He learned that the hard way. His first supervisor had spent years as a helper riding in the passenger seat, carrying equipment in while Gregory talked with customers. When that helper got his own vehicle, he didn’t know what to do, because he had never been in the room for those conversations.

“We called it headliner training. You know, all the information transferred across the headliner into the passenger seat, but it did not do that,” Gregory said. “That was on me.”

A formal training program prepares supervisors to visit job sites, work through client complaints and handle requests for additional work. Without that layer, the owner absorbs everything.

“When you get into the commercial side of it, that just means you work another 24 hours. And that’s not sustainable for a long period of time either,” Gregory said. “The owner thinks they can do all that work by themselves, and they usually can’t.”

Gauging readiness for a major account

Before going after a large commercial account, Gregory said owners should confirm two things: trained staff ready to go and an equipment package matched to the work. Options include low-moisture cleaning with planetary-driven machines such as Cimex, low-moisture encapsulation and dry compound. The point is knowing which process the company will run and having it dialed in.

The condition of the carpet shapes the starting point. Heavily soiled carpet needs extraction first. Many commercial accounts change hands because the previous contractor fell short, so a new provider often has to restore the carpet before routine maintenance can hold it at an acceptable level.

Some of that readiness only becomes real once a contract is signed.

“A lot of times it’s just making that first sale,” Gregory said. “You know, that’s when you have to be ready. Sometimes that’s the best way to do it.”