David Hendricks dons his cleanest overalls to talk to the EVP of Bee-Clean Building Maintenance, a contract cleaner that provides cleaning services to a wide range of clients across Canada.
Mark Andrews, executive vice president of Bee-Clean Building Maintenance, is talking about the company, begun in Canada’s centennial year (1967) by Jose Correia and Brian Gingras, and today with 21 locations in seven provinces. “We’re likely the largest privately owned national contract cleaner in Canada with over 9,000 employees, and obviously we’re successful for a lot of reasons, but I have to give the most credit to our company-wide commitment to excellence for driving customer satisfaction, and that satisfaction has in turn directly fueled our growth,” he says.
The company services office tower properties, healthcare facilities, shopping malls, entertainment venues, high-security complexes, educational facilities, heavy industry, hospitality and transportation. “We also work for all levels of government, including federal corrections facilities and law enforcement.” The company cleans more than 200 million square feet daily.
Every Bee-Clean branch office is fully equipped to handle any of those market segments. “That’s one of the many big and small elements that set us apart from our competitors,” Andrews says. “We maintain infrastructure in support of our accounts, so where some contract cleaners might use the customer’s facility as the base of its operation and not have any resources other than those on that site, we’ll have a nearby fully equipped branch that supports the routine service with things like truck-mounted steam cleaners, pressure-washing units, spares for auto scrubbers and floor-care equipment; you name it. As you can imagine, this corporate focus on capability and capacity is critical to being able to guarantee meeting unplanned contingency needs and provide uninterrupted routine services.”
Andrews says that disaster services are an essential aspect of the business. “Things like flood and fire service are common offerings in our industry, but maybe the most notable example of how far our people go in their commitment to service was the outstanding work our staff at Ottawa International Airport did in providing service to travelers affected by the Air France crash in 2007 resulting in the Pinnacle Exceptional Service award from the Building Owners and Managers Association [BOMA] being presented to our Ottawa branch. Our people shifted from cleaning to caring for stranded passengers and their personal needs seamlessly, and that kind of effective front-line action comes from staff who have years of service and are empowered to confidently act in the best interests of Bee-Clean’s customers”
There’s a priority commitment at the branch operations level to training staff in performance and customer service along with the job-specific technical skills a cleaner needs. “This week we have six people training on one of our supplier’s lines, Tennant equipment, and we’re doing that so we can maintain our equipment professionally,” Andrews says. “Beyond our internal need for equipment maintenance capability, we have some accounts where we deliver these services for customer-owned equipment on a fee basis. For the majority of our accounts, though, where we own the machinery, we believe that professionally trained maintenance personnel add value to the provision of cleaning labor services, by ensuring that equipment maintenance failures don’t cause gaps in service. Another of the many distinctions between us and other service providers is how effectively we manage this and all other aspects of our supply chain to ensure that shortages don’t occur, and that the right products for each job are in place.”
The vast proportion of what the company does, though, is people-centered, and it’s the people who make up Bee-Clean who have built and continue to foster the highest level of customer loyalty in the industry. The whole staff, from the top down, is supported and encouraged with professional development opportunities, training, processes and systems in an organized approach to quality improvement, not just quality assurance.
“People try to turn contract cleaning into a commodity,” Andrews explains, “but we learned a long time ago that cleaning is the opposite of that. It’s unique for each facility because our clients are inviting our cleaners into their personal space; they’re entrusting us with the keys. They’re depending on the janitor to answer the challenge of routine cleaning along with many unpredictable issues. Last year infection control took center stage, with the H1N1 pandemic causing concern and a need to reassure public facilities that effective cross-contamination protocols and disaster plans were in place.”
Andrews says that the best people in the cleaning industry come to Bee-Clean and stay for the long term. “Being known for how well we treat our employees and how consistently low our turnover is has been a key reason we’ve retained our clients as we grow. Our staff is very much valued in the facilities they’re assigned to, in large part because the faces aren’t changing all the time. Customers feel comfortable and secure with us in their space because they know we have up-to-date security clearances for all our workers and that we pay our people well, treat them well and retain them more effectively than our competitors.”
Bee-Clean also provides many added-value services, such as snow removal and landscaping. “We’ll try to help with anything our customer asks us to do,” says Andrews, “either directly self-performed or by assisting with service sourcing. But what we’re known for is delivering high-quality cleaning services. Our simple and successful approach has been to concentrate on being a great cleaning company and not let distractions cause us to dilute our offering by trying to compete too far outside our customers’ needs or, even worse, accidentally compete with our customers for facility management service contracts. This is essentially why our growth strategy is to leverage our core competencies and allow our customers to take a hand in defining our evolution rather than aggressively play the acquisition game and move in the direction of an integrated service model, for example.
“Having said that, though,” he continues, “we have recently ventured into the accommodations service space by providing housekeeping laundry and building maintenance to the 2,500-member security force deployed to the 2010 Olympics in Whistler. We were chosen because of our reputation for being able to deliver high-security cleared staff in a challenging, tightly scheduled environment where thorough and accurate communications were essential. Our customers have been our most effective business development driver, so who knows what the future holds? If they ask, we’ll deliver.”
Andrews believes that Bee-Clean’s culture is different. “It starts with the people at the top living it and consistently demonstrating it. From the beginning, the people who pay the bills for all of us have maintained an attitude of being approachable. I can’t give them enough credit for establishing such a positive work environment and supporting it by recognizing the people that treat their customers they way they want to be treated. They go the extra mile for long-serving employees and sincerely enjoy celebrating employee long-service milestones. They’re called on for employee-recognition events a lot because we have the highest ratio in our industry of folks who have served between five and 30 years, which speaks volumes about what kind of family business they’ve built.”
Andrews says that Bee-Clean hasn’t bought growth as much as it has earned it. “Our new business often comes from our existing customers; they’re our greatest resource. Whether by their expanding needs or their word-of-mouth reference, they consistently generate or help us capture opportunity. Every year we’re looking at expansion, but our technique for developing regional infrastructure is a bit of a moving target. It’s based largely on how much business volume we have in an area and what expense we have in servicing that territory, with these two being the most important influences on the decision to establish a bricks-and-mortar branch. That’s another differentiator: our ability to assess and make sense of regional business performance when we’re building organically.”
What keeps Andrews engaged is how much commitment his workers show in the pursuit of personal success with Bee-Clean as their chosen vehicle. “I feel honored to call so many my friends,” he says, “especially the ones I’ve worked with longest over my 18 years with the company, as well as those who know me well, who constantly challenge me to make sure that they and all the front-liners are being considered in all the important decisions that hopefully bring success and stability for all of us long into the future.”
