How to grow revenue by adding floor care services

Your existing contracts are a great opportunity to grow your business by adding new services. 

Swept recently hosted a webinar with Rory Saleh, Director of Sales and Flooring Solutions, and Alec Germond, National Strategic Customer Representative from SunBelt Rentals. 

In this article, you’ll learn:

Want to watch the webinar? Click here.

Want to read the conversation? Continue on!

Michael:

Okay. Hello everyone and welcome to our webinar on How to Grow Revenue by Offering Floor Care Services. My name is Michael Brown. For those of you who don't know me, I'm the founder and Founder of Swept Software. 

We help commercial cleaning business owners just like you:

• find profitability faster
• better manage your company
• get a good sleep at night. 

The data shows for those, again, if you're not sure of Swept or haven't heard of it, that cleaning business owners that use Swept retain their contracts, 91% better than the industry average, something they love and my team and I are very proud of. 

But today, we're not going to focus on the retention of the contracts, we're going to talk about how you can increase the revenue through your current customers by offering more services, specifically floor care services. 

So joining me today are two industry experts on all things flooring, Rory Saleh, Director of Sales and Flooring Solutions, and Alec Germond, National Strategic Customer Representative of Sunbelt Rentals. So thank you both for joining.

Rory:

Happy to be here. Thank you.

Michael:

So I'm going to run through a couple fast facts on both of you. For those of you who don't know Rory and Alec. But Rory has 30 years experience in the floor care industry, has a keen focus on providing sustainable solutions for cleaning business owners just like you. And what I really like about Rory is his passion for sales and sales leadership, not just of Sunbelt, but also of the industry. 

So we've been together on some different events and things like that. And when I send him an email and say, "Hey, the last presentation that Sunbelt put on was so impactful, would you guys jump on?" Immediately, like yes. It's like, "Pick the date, let me know." So he'd loves to help people learn and grow and I think that's incredibly special. So thank you so much Rory for joining.

Rory:

Happy to be here, Mike, thanks for the opportunity.

Michael:

And shifting gears to Alec, he has over a decade of experience in the floor care industry. He's well versed in the four key areas of cleaning, preventive, daily maintenance, interim and restorative cleaning. And he's always there to support the cleaning industry, whether it's jumping on a call, jumping on a stage, or jumping on a machine to train. So again, thank you both for jumping on today. 

Alec:

So let's jump into who is Sunbelt Rentals? Well, we're one of the largest rental companies in North America with over a thousand locations throughout the US and Canada. And we even have presence in the United Kingdom as well. Sunbelt Rentals is the largest provider of rental equipment to maintain indoor and outdoor services.

Alec:

Safety and training are part of our culture with everything that we do and we safely make it happen with over 19,000 employees or as I like to say, solution makers that are available 24/7, 365 days a year, just like probably all of you are. And we have experts in over 14,000 different items available to rent. What do these experts look like? We have 11 different verticals or specialty divisions in which we're all one power sunbelt that are here to help you say more yes. What Sunbelt Rentals has been a leader in, is recognizing that once construction ends, facilities maintenance begins. And that's where each of you come in on cleaning and maintaining your client's footprint. Rory and I represent flooring solutions where we specialize in providing immediate availability of tenant cleaning equipment, ranging all the way from an upright vacuum all the way to a street sweeper and everything in between.

Alec:

We also carry specialized cleaning equipment such as:

•  electrostatic sprayers
• touchless cleaning systems like the tiebacks
• gum removal steam cleaners

In addition to flooring solutions, our other specialty divisions can help you say more yes to your existing customers or help obtain new customers and help you grow your business. 

For example, if your client's HVAC system goes down over the middle of the summer or the heat goes out in the middle of winter, you can now say yes to providing that service. Or has the power ever gone out in one of your clients' services in one of their buildings? You can now say yes, to providing power through our generators. Or do you ever have to change the light bulbs, indoor or outdoor within your facilities? 

We've got plenty of scissor lists and boom lists in order to make it happen and for you to say, yes.

Alec:

All these services are available to each of you. 

Quotes cost nothing and one of our experts can walk your client's site alongside you and help make recommendations. 

Now, you may be wondering, and you see on the map here where our thousand locations are. What you'll see are two different color dots. The black dots represent flooring solutions that both Rory and I represent. We're now over 70 locations strong and just over 7 years old as a specialty division. 

So there's a real appetite for what we're providing to building service contractors and cell providers. We have the appetite and we hope after today's call that you have the appetite for what we're doing through renting the clean for as short or as long as you need with immediate availability of our cleaning equipment, tenant sweepers, auto scrubbers, vacuums and carpet extractors alongside our concrete polishing and restoration equipment. 

Alec:

We'd invite each of you to come by and check out our locations firsthand. And you'll also be able to see in the second picture that we can and will deliver to your job site. 

And that when we do that, we come in with white gloves and close trucks to protect the equipment from the outside elements. 

And then the last picture is the inside of our warehouse where we keep all of our equipment indoors and not kept outside. 

The yellow dots on the map represent the rest of the power Sunbelt. And what Rory and I want to showcase is that no matter where you're located, we have a Sunbelt Rentals location near you to help make it happen. 

Now for each of you on the call today, we do have a single point of contact. Until you get to know a local solution maker and that's through a dedicated sales support team that you see there at the bottom through 844-723-4778 or flooring.info@sunbeltrentals.com.

Alec:

We're standing by and ready to support you 24/7, 365 days a year. 

Michael:

Awesome, thank you very much. 

Just going to take a look here and see if there's questions off the top. So Tiffany, "So if I get a job and I don't know how to use the equipment or know what to recommend for floor service to current her new customers, will Sunbelt help me get that knowledge?"

Rory:

Great question. Thank you Tiffany. And extremely glad to be here and you would think that we planned that question, but as Tiffany will tell you, we didn't. So yeah, the reality is, we would love to train you in a number of different ways. If you'll build time in the delivery, all of our drivers are trained. 

We've taken all of the tutorials and hands on and our partners, not only do we have Tenant as a partner, but we partner with Niagara and we partner with MonoPOD, the chemical company and Kaivac and others. So we like to get factory trained much like you probably would. And so we bring that to you at the delivery. Now some deliveries are third party or you like to pick up and we would be happy to invite you in our warehouse that you see in the lower picture.

Rory:

And we would for free a charge, walk you thru, get you a safety vest. We are very safety conscious if you have your own safety glasses bringing, not that there's risk, but we just like to be on the safe side. And we would let you run the machines right at our facilities. As you'll see in a few minutes, we offer ISSA Cleaning Management Institute Training, so I'll save that for just a little bit. But the short answer that I'm probably making a little longer than it needs to be is yes, we would welcome the opportunity to train you either at the job site, upon delivery or at our site if you'd like to pick it up.

Alec:

That's right. Great.

Rory:

You may have a great rental partner that can provide some of these to you locally and we would encourage you to get to know them. What we are going to talk about is our frame of reference and what we know we can deliver. But rental is big, these solutions are large and wide and there are a lot of good players in this area of support. So I don't want to make it sound like we have an exclusive on the business, but what you'll hear from Alec and myself are what we can certainly deliver to your value equation. 

Rory:

How do you grow top line revenue? 

Well, Alec has already talked on one of them and that is to get you to say more yes. 

You could say yes to climate control, you could say yes to cleaning. If you have to get up into the high level, we could get you into a scissor lift and say yes, you don't have to own a scissor lift to get up in the air, we can rent those solutions to you and a lot more. 

We're going to talk about the total cost of ownership, but there's always going to be good reasons to own and there might be some reasons that you would want to avoid that, avoid it. 

We'll talk about risk mitigation. I know that all of you probably hope to stay within the entire scope of work, but there are causes in scopes of work that may result in an early out and with rental, an early out is a phone call in most cases.

And then of course, managing today's challenging supply chain. And we could also include inflation in that sentence as well. 

So how do you grow your business? 

We believe there are free ways to really grow your business. 

The first would be you could acquire another company that's certainly on the table. Acquiring another company or somebody that might want to sell or legacy their company to you with a monetization side do it. That's going to require capital, it's going to require experience, there is going to be some risk in acquiring a company and probably a lot of the outside expertise needed like lawyers and things like that. But it is a way to grow your business. 

Another way, which is probably a little bit more suitable to most of us, is acquiring new customers and growing your business by expanding your customer base.

Now, I don't need to tell you, I think you know it's very competitive out there. Acquiring new customers may require a sales person beyond yourself and your immediate team. And that comes with a bit of overhead. You do need to have bidding expertise with that. You have Swept, and we've already mentioned Ricky and his team, they're very good at helping with that level of expertise. 

Where we can bring support is if you wanted to bid a project or tag work on a scope of work, we can do a quote for you based upon the links that you'll think that you'll need that equipment. You can look at that quote, free a charge, you can add whatever markup is right for your business, put it on your own letterhead, and then take that to your customer and say, "Hey, I can mechanize this or I can acquire the equipment to do this job." And we can go that way, so we can help you with bidding.

But again, acquiring new customers does require some investment and some financial muscle. 

The third way, and you could almost say is one of the easier ways is to expand the services to your existing customers. 

If you have a scope of work, now, what can we do together to help you quote tag work? 

Is disinfecting something that you were doing before the pandemic? I have to imagine you're all doing it now. We certainly are, all of our machines will come to you disinfected. But is there work beyond the scope of work that you're on now? And expanding services with an existing client is something that we like to talk to you about in ways of growing your business. 

So these are what we believe are the three ways to grow your business. We'd like to think that we can help you on acquiring new customers as well as expanding services to existing clients. Now we talked about-

Michael:

Rory, I just want to jump in on that point. I know people who, and we all know how competitive it is when you're trying to win a new contract and sometimes you're not getting the margin exactly that you want. People are low balling pricing and you don't want to match them, and you're trying to work that back and forth. 

I know people who include, as part of their strategy, pricing competitively even a little bit lower than they'd like on their regular services, knowing that they're going to offer floor care and other services like tag work, that they can actually charge a bit more margin because they're already in there, they already have the customer and that balances out things overall in the company. 

So it's another strategy on how to be competitive as you're acquiring customers is knowing that you have the ability to upsell.

And of course as we know, it costs more to find a new client than it does to sell to an existing client that trusts you. Which is why, again, we're holding this webinar because there's so much value to getting... We have customers that have so many of their own customers that they could just send a single email offering this new service and increase their revenue like that.

Rory:

Yeah, Michael, I'm actually at the experience show here in Las Vegas this week and one of the subject matter experts here was talking about bidding. And his basic message was, look, if you underbid and if you try to win through price, you will get more work, but it won't be profitable work and you and your teams are going to be working real hard for much less income, much less money, much less reinvestment in your business. 

So be very careful when you're doing these bidding projects to make sure you build that margin in there to cover your costs, cover your salaries, cover all of your expenses and overhead because a lot of work could cost you on your bottom line and you got more work, but you're not really growing the side of your business to reinvest in your business, so…

Also, we'll talk about supply chain, but most of the equipment that Alec mentioned in those early slides we have are available right now.

We have: 

• scrubbers
• sweepers
• climate control machines
• machines you could pick up today in many cases

 And we could tell you with a phone call as you get to know us a little better, and again, I'd say most rental companies can do this for you as well. 

The idea is, if you're going out and acquiring that asset, that takes a whole other level of process within your organization. And right now there are long lead times on equipment that two, three years ago we're sitting ready to ship, they're now waiting on parts to build. 

So there's a lot going on that you need to consider when you're bidding this work and saying yes, without a good rental partner, you would be very careful. All right. 

Michael:

Looks like we have a question from James. "Do you have equipment that I can buy or rent to own that can help me grow my flooring business?" So do you guys just do rentals or do you sell or do rent to own?

Rory:

Yeah, we do not. Now I'm not saying that all rental doesn't do that, but Sunbelt, within the categories that Alec and I are representing, we rent, we do long term rentals, the longer the rent, the more competitive the rate would be. We actually have a value equation that includes 12, 24 and 36 month rentals. We will talk about that here during the presentation. But all of our benchmarks for support are built on supporting the rental equation, not a negotiation to buy out the equipment, things of that nature. There might be other rental companies that do that, Sunbelt, in the categories that we represent do not. So I hope that answers that question. 

Looks like we have a question from Jamaica.

Welcome, we're glad to have you. “Regarding international clients, would you sell the equipment?” 

We ourselves don't. Denise, thanks for jumping in and welcome. The reality is we do not. Now there are a lot of auction companies that will take American rental companies, not just Sunbelt, but others and they'll auction them off into other countries and other locations. So there are answers for that, but that's not something that we provide as a solution. 

Other ways we can help you is have you ever been asked by your clients, "Hey, I'd like to grind out a little concrete that we're taking the carpet out and there's going to be some cleaning under the carpet. Can you help us with that?" Many of you might be saying no to that right now. Well, we would like to help you say yes. We could actually take you through removing substrate materials like glue or other rough sides to the concrete. We can even train you how to polish concrete and of course maintain it. How do we do that? Well, every Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 PM Eastern time, we offer a free online much like we're doing now, Concrete 101 webinar.

Much like I just described, we have industry experts, they will take you through slides on how to do it and they talk about active markets. Who are some of the contacts that you would want to ask for at a business that would be in charge of this scope of work? And we're happy to do that. And then finally, we are also offering free, now these are Sunbelt free webinars, excuse me, Live concrete polishing, repair and restoration workshops. These are onsite at our locations. We actually have one going up in just two weeks from now in Charlotte. These are going to be from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. You're going to get a chance to do hands on, you're going to talk to industry experts. You can promote your business. By the way, we welcome you to promote your business on the concrete 101 and the grow your business.

These are networking experiences. So we're happy for you to join and mention who you are and where your scope of work and where you have the best ability to serve. And same would go with the concrete workshop. These are hands on, we actually provide lunch free of charge, there's no charge to this. All we ask is that you come with safety gear. If you don't have it, we'll provide you safety glasses and vests. If you have steel toe shoes, we would encourage you to bring them and we'll do some pre-intel work on what we would hope that you could bring with you. But they're very helpful and these all three are free of charge. We'd like to help you explore this business and you're not obligated to do anything beyond that other than let's become friends and network.

Michael:

Pause for us just to reflect for a moment and think about the power of this. You're going into bid for your regular cleaning services. They're comparing you to every other company when they can only compare you one price. If everyone looks the same, they'd go with the lowest price. When you can show them, "Hey, we also offer these services." We can check in, we can look at these things, but I just want you to know we offer grind, polish, so you can maintain your floors. All of these things, they're going to look at you a little bit differently. They're going to know, "Oh, we can trust them to do the job Monday to Friday. We can also trust them for some other things." You don't have to go find another vendor.

So there's a lot of power in just being able to offer these services. I just want you guys to think about that as you're thinking about bidding and how frustrating it is when someone comes in and underbids you consistently, how you can show up more professional and create that doubt in the customer, which person they go with and they select you because they trust you.

Alec:

We can support store, train and deliver to all your sites. Now also, what about if you want to get into schools and start performing extraction and stripping the floors, but currently don't offer it or don't want to invest in the equipment until it's proven out to have an ROI for you and your business. You can now rent the clean for the time that you need. And so I'll pause there if there's any questions or anything we want touch on, on this slide. Michael, whenever.

Alec:

So let's talk about, has anyone lost a contract early? 

So rental can be a safe haven if you happen to be removed from a scope of work early. Hopefully none of you on the call today have, but we know and we work with several companies across the US who unfortunately have been removed early in the past from their scope of work. And now these companies are having to relocate the equipment or store the equipment, pay people to go and check on the batteries while it's stored, all while still paying the financial institution should they still owe money on their asset. With a rental, you can simply call it off and we come and pick it up and store it and maintain it for you.

Think about also if your client doubles their space, you're doing such a great job and they double their space and you currently own a small walk behind auto scrubber like the T 300 you see at the top, to clean their whole facility. Previously you might have to go out and purchase another auto scrubber or go to your banker and use additional capital funds. With rental, there's complete flexibility to move up in size or down in size depending on how your scope of work goes. We had just the rate to mesh the unit, but you're no longer tied to that original asset that may be too small or too big now to perform your scope of work. And another great thing is that you can also try out the latest in technology with rental and try and rent it before you buy it. And then the middle there, you're going to see a drone clean the outside of our support office in Fort Mill, South Carolina.

Rory:

Very good. All right, so hopefully this is starting to make you feel like there's some growth opportunities and business expansion opportunities and that we're here to help you in these different areas. 

So we'll move on here and managing today's supply chain. 

Well, we've talked about a lot of this already, so we can just touch on the high points here. We do have equipment ready to go as quality equipment. We've mentioned Tenant, Niagara and Square Scrub. We partner really well with Square Scrub. We believe because our customers have told us that these are benchmark products, they're the best in the industry and so that's why we've invested in them. You take Tenant for example, great partner, they train us, they train our service techs. We do have live service techs at all of our facilities to work on our equipment and keep the uptime for you and the flip time if need be.

But again, they partner really well in this environment. So the long term rental solutions, essentially, what that looks like is if you don't want to have your own service, if you don't want to use third party service, if you've only got eight months left on a scope of work and you don't want to invest in that 5, 10, 15, 20, we actually have $200,000 machines out there in flooring solutions. If you don't want to put that money on your balance sheet, we could talk to you about a long term rental solution. These are not published rates, you're not going to be able to go to a website and say, "Hey, what does a eight month or a 12 month look like?"

We need to have a conversation, we want to have a conversation. Find out what your environment is like. 

Are you cleaning a aluminum shopping plant which is severe and very hard on equipment? Or are you cleaning possibly an Amazon solution center or something that is soft on equipment. A nice retail facility that doesn't require a lot of heavy use on machines? How many hours are you using it a week? 

If you're using low hours, we can negotiate a nice long-term rental rate with you. If it's a super high application, there are people that rent from multiple shifts. We have customers out there renting and running these things two, three shifts because they need to. That's where propane comes into play. We saw that question earlier. And if you're going to run a machine just nonstop, you got to get into some kind of combustible fuel and propane is usually the way we go.

But we have those long term rental solutions we can talk about. Obviously with supply chain, we have some customers, and you might be one of them that have an operation. We met Swept in Chicago. We'll just say you might have an operation in Chicago, but you have a customer that wants you to go to Indianapolis and you want to bring that same value equation to them or Detroit, you're spoken out with your customers. 

We can help you with that footprint that you saw there. We can bring you a level of consistency that quite frankly is nationwide in Canada.

We have a very large haul fleet and with enough time, we can get anywhere you might need us. And the good news is, we would quote you before we went anywhere so you'd never be driving blind on what the costs were to you. But good footprint here to show you where some of the solutions might exist for you if you like what you've heard so far.

Michael:

Awesome. Rory, Alec, anything else you want to touch on before we wrap up? We're just about at time here.

Rory:

Yeah, I'll go in and Alec, you can have the last word. First of all, thank you all that we're able to make time to attend. We surely appreciate this and for Emma and Michael and all the Swept organization, we appreciate being a part of this message. I would like to just extend the offer that we've mentioned that we're here to help, we're here to support. Let us know what that might look like for you, whether it's a PowerPoint presentation or some hands on training or some scholarship information on the CMI courses, which are hosted by the ISSA. As we've mentioned, we'd love to get to know you personally, either through our branches that you saw on the earlier map or if you have a chance to get by one of these shows like the ISSA Booth 1032. Love to shake your hand and show you around some of the things that we're doing. With that, have a great safe day everybody. And Alec, if you want to take us out on behalf of Sunbelt, please do.

Alec:

Yeah, thank you again Michael and Emma, really appreciate you inviting Rory and myself on. To all those joining today, thank you for your time. We are an email or a phone call away and look forward to supporting you and helping you grow your business. So thank you again for the time. 

flooring.info@sunbeltrentals.com | 844-723-4778

Michael:

Awesome. Thanks everyone. Take care and look forward to seeing you at the ISSA.

Alec:

Us as well. Thanks, Michael.