All posts by Michael

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Should You Outsource Your Studio City Office Cleaning?

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Outsourcing your Studio City office’s cleaning tasks can be a great idea. Most business managers seem to intuit that, as given the lack of in-house cleaning teams in most offices, but not that many could tell you why. Fortunately, as the people getting outsourced to, MegaJanitorial is in a good place to answer that question.

Cost-Effectiveness
There are quite a few costs that professional cleaning companies are great at cutting — costs that ordinary businesses generally wouldn’t think of. Having specific recruiting, screening, training, and managing techniques for janitorial staff, leveraging economies of scale on cleaning equipment, and so on all make outsourcing a great idea just for money’s sake.

Cleaning Quality
Professional Studio City office cleaning groups have a particular core competency — it’s cleaning offices. If you’re relying on your staff (the same ones who fill out paperwork and manage accounts for a living) to do your cleaning, you’re not really leveraging them for what you hired them for. Outsource to people who clean for a living, and you’ll find that things get clean faster and stay clean longer.

More Responsive Service
As time passes, your business needs shift. Industry cycles, seasonal peaks, and innumerable other factors can change how your office works — and if you have a professional, outsourced cleaning staff, they’ll change with you. Any mid-sized or larger janitorial service will have several ‘sweepers’ that can keep coverage seamless and service top-notch even when business surges (or drops off) unexpectedly.

Reduced Liability and Insurance Costs
There are a number of specific liabilities associated with keeping your facility clean and operational — and when you outsource your office cleaning, you also outsource those liabilities. Several kinds of premises liability cases can be taken off of your shoulders this way.

 

The most important thing to remember when it comes to finding an outsourced provider for your Studio City office cleaning needs is to get a cleaning company that has experience handling your specific needs. Not all offices are the same — medical offices, school offices, and other specialized facilities deserve a service that knows exactly how to deal with their specific mess. Do that one thing, and you’re likely to discover that you love having a professional to take care of your cleaning for you.

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The Restroom’s Revenge: A Tale of Encino Janitorial Services

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Alicia and Michael came to your store to buy The Thing You Sell. (“The Thing You Sell: It’s How You Pay the Bills!”[TM]) But while they were there, Michael realized that there was something else he needed from your establishment: a place to take care of a bladder-related issue. You directed him to the bathroom, and turned your attention to Alicia. She was looking carefully at the various options and configurations of The Thing You Sell, and pondering fiercely. You let her be, figuring she’d get your attention when she was ready.

But before that happened, Michael came out of the bathroom and walked swiftly up to Alicia. He whispered fiercely in her ear for a moment, shot you an appalled look over his shoulder, and the two of them slipped out the door. You didn’t think much of it — but that night, at closing time, you opened the bathroom door yourself, and the stench alone sent you staggering backwards.

The scene before you was worse than you were capable of imagining — it went beyond the capacity of mere text to describe. As you struggled to shut the door against the power of the reeking havoc within, you knew what happened to poor Michael. You also knew, with the grim certainty of a small business owner, that you would never sell The Thing You Sell to Alicia or Michael, for they would never ever return.

“This is what you get…” the evil bathroom seemed to whisper as you finally got the door closed. “For too long, I have been cleaned only by lowly Customer Service Representatives. I demand a REAL CLEANSING! Or shall I banish every full-bladdered customer from your store and leave you with an enormous backlog of The Thing You Sell?”

Hands shaking (and nose running), you opened the office door, struggled to find the phone book, and opened it to Encino Janitorial Services. There had to be someone who could…yes. There it was…the name that would solve your dilemma.

MegaJanitorial.

Your trembling hands could barely dial, but the voice that answered was as reassuring as it was competent. This was going to be all right.

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Beverly Hills Commercial Cleaning: De-Grossing a Keyboard

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Every business that offers Beverly Hills commercial cleaning services has a variety of ‘secret’ services that they will do, but don’t generally mention to clients unless a specific circumstance comes up. One of the ‘secret services’ that MegaJanitorial has performed for clients in the past is a full-office Keyboard Deep Cleaning. It consists of five basic steps:

  1. Shut the Computer Down and Unplug the Keyboard. It’s not like you can properly clean a keyboard when it’s on a leash, and if it’s still plugged in, you never know what might happen to the computer as you mash a bunch of random keys during the cleaning process.
  2. Blow Hard. Before any kind of disinfection can begin, the keyboard needs to be clear of physical debris. That means first going old school and flipping the keyboard upside down and shaking it like a Polaroid picture. Then, it means getting out the old canned air and pshhshhshhting it clear of all of its junk.
  3. Remove and Clean. Time to get to the nitty gritty: pop off all of the keys with a screwdriver or butter knife, and pop them into a bucket using either rubbing alcohol, or a non-abrasive cleanser. Rinse them off, and lay them out on a towel to dry.
  4. Clean the Base. If  necessary, blow it out again, but basically by now you should just be able to grab a disinfectant and a microfiber cloth and wipe out all of the spaces between the key-tabs. Let it dry as well.
  5. Reconstruction. The last part is the most obvious — putting the keys back, reconnecting the keyboard, turning the computer back on, and testing it to make sure that it worked.

If you have one of the older kinds of mice that uses a ball — or you have a trackball or similar device — you should also take this opportunity to disassemble the mouse and clean out inside of it as well. Be certain to carefully examine the small metal wheels that read the mouse ball’s movement and make sure there are no hairs or other threadlike objects that got wrapped up in them. Good luck!

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Minimum Santa Monica Office Cleaning Needs

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Lots of office cleaning service providers make the same kind of promise — to clean everything in your office from top to bottom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but while it sounds good on paper, you might rapidly determine that ‘top to bottom’ also means ‘more expensive than you really want it to be.’ A couple of our Santa Monica clients have asked us what the ‘core’ list of office cleaning needs are, and here’s what we came up with:

Restrooms and Kitchens
If there’s any space in the building where moisture, potential bio-hazards, and humans all mix, it needs to be deep cleaned weekly, and preferably touched-up daily. This is absolutely the most common vector for disease transmission, and also one of the easiest ways to gross out a customer, so if you can clean nothing else, clean these places first and best.

Carpets/Flooring
The number two concern for almost any office is that hard floors show dirt and dust bunnies almost instantly, and carpets may hide dirt for a little bit, but that just means that by the time they become noticeable, they’re entirely unacceptable and will turn off any customer who sees them. Especially in any environment where children will regularly be present (which always means sitting or lying on the floor), a minimum of quarterly deep-cleaning should be absolutely mandatory.

Windows
Windows are crucial to morale, comfort, and health — because sunlight is crucial to morale, comfort, and health. (Seeing living, green things and Santa Monica’s bright blue sky helps, too.) That means that your windows should be cleaned at least twice a month — or once a season if you’re several or more stories above street level. That’s on the outside, by the way — they should be cleaned on the inside once a week, regardless of other factors, for health reasons.

Workstations
Finally, the workstations — in particular, the ‘touchpoints,’ including keyboards, mice, desk surfaces, drawer handles, and control panels on the office equipment — need to be cleaned weekly. During the cold and flu season, cleaning them daily is wiser.

If you’re not sure what your Santa Monica office’s cleaning budget can afford you, start at the top of this list and work your way down — the other details will need attention at some point, but these are the genuine minimums you should aim for.

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Can Hollywood Commercial Cleaning Be TOO Cheap?

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The fundamental paradox of modern business is simple: you don’t want to pay any more than you have to for anything, because every dollar that goes out affects your bottom line — but if you pay too little today, you’ll get a crap product or service, and you’ll end up paying even more a few months later as everything falls apart due to low quality. This is true of physical assets (try buying a $149 office printer/copier sometime!), but it’s just as true of services as well. In particular, one Hollywood commercial cleaning client (which shall not be named for privacy purposes) recently learned this lesson in detail.

“If something seems too good to be true, buy it before someone else discovers it!”  — That was the motto that [REDACTED]’s Chief Operations Manager, Lucy [REDACTED], seemed to swear by. So when Lucy discovered that there was a commercial cleaner serving the Hollywood area that would clean her company’s entire storeroom, office suite, and storage area for 27% less than MegaJanitorial, she decided to switch.

The problem is that every janitorial service has some hard costs that can’t be circumvented — and if they try, they’re going to have to cut corners somewhere to maintain their profit margin. They might be hiring illegal workers, skipping crucial cleaning tasks, or (as [REDACTED] was caught doing!) cleaning with materials so heavily diluted they could have been called ‘homeopathic cleansers.’ Sorry, Lucy, but water doesn’t kill germs!

(Don’t worry, it only took her a single month to switch back.)

The simple fact is that if a Hollywood commercial cleaning service seems significantly less expensive than their peers, it’s for a good reason — that reason being that they aren’t good at their job. Don’t be like Lucy Redacted. Hire a commercial cleaning service that will do it right.

If you’re not sure where to find one of those, we have what we’re pretty sure is a rock-solid suggestion for you. It’s called MegaJanitorial, and we know they’re good, because we clean their building, their cleaning equipment, and everything else they touch every single day.

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How to Compare Van Nuys Janitorial Services Prices

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There are dozens of companies that offer Van Nuys janitorial services for their commercial and institutional facilities. But there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to their pricing structures sometimes — so how can you know which of them are inexpensive but valuable, and which are simply cheap?

Fixed Elements
Every janitorial service has elements of their bill that are fixed, and elements that vary from job to job. The fixed elements, you can probably largely assume based on your own business’ similar costs. They include payroll, material costs, labor, management, and profit. These elements tend to be roughly similar across similar businesses, though if one janitorial service has an ‘in’ at a particular vendor, for example, they might be able to get lower material costs than others.

Variable Elements
The variable elements, ironically, are the ones that from your perspective are fixed. That’s because they’re based on the size and complexity of the specific job you’re asking for. Variable costs are usually determined by the service by looking at:

  • The square footage of the area you want cleaned,
  • The number of restrooms and kitchens involved,
  • The nature of the things that happen in the area (i.e. you’ll pay more for a gymnasium or children’s classroom, much more for a medical facility), and
  • The time that you need the cleaning performed (it’s generally less expensive to get something cleaned in the middle of the workday than it is to get it cleaned overnight.)

Matching the Variables
One of the easiest ways to maximize your RoI on Van Nuys janitorial services is to pick a service that is proportionally sized to your business. For example, if you have a three-person operation running out of a cheap rented storefront, you’ll generally get better value-per-dollar by hiring a lone janitor to come in and clean up occasionally than you will by hiring a multinational janitorial superpower. If you run three office buildings out of the same industrial complex off Raymer Street, you probably want to hire a mid-sized, well-manned, full-service company like MegaJanitorial.

By and large, if you hire a janitorial service that’s too small, you’ll end up paying extra for them to get the materials and tools they need to handle your job — and possibly some overtime on the side. Hire one that’s too big, and you’re paying for equipment and manpower you don’t actually need. Find the Goldilocks Point, and everything will end up just right.

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Santa Monica Office Cleaning: Because Janice Sneezed

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You all know Janice. She’s the hardcore, type-A redhead in Accounting who never misses a day of work, even when her node is so plucked up she cad barley talk at all. And this is the story of what happened when Janice sneezed. It happened on Friday morning at your company’s Santa Monica office. Cleaning crews could have been scheduled to come in over the weekend and this never would have happened, but they weren’t. Instead…

Janice’s sneeze blew several billion haemophilus influenzae bacteria into the air just inside the break room door, where the ventilation system mercifully sucked about two billion of them up, and because the HEPA filter had been recently replaced, they stayed far away from human bodies. The other five or so billion spread rapidly through the room on the air currents caused by Janice walking promptly through her own invisible sneeze cloud. She re-inhaled a quarter-billion, and about four billion settled on the floor where they did no harm.

But of the three-quarters-of-a-billion that landed on tables, chairs, and Dan’s half-eaten submarine sandwich, a good 20% were lucky enough to get picked up by people’s hands as they pushed in their chairs, grabbed their papers, and so on. And the 5% that made it into the fridge when Dan put his sandwich (unwrapped!) back on the top shelf, well, they were the luckiest of all.

See, the employees whose hands got Janice’s sneeze-germs on them mostly washed their hands before they rubbed their eyes, picked their nose, or licked their fingertip to better separate two annoying papers. Only three of them caught Janice’s flu in those moments.

But over the weekend, the cold of the fridge slowed down the haemophilius influenzae — but it didn’t stop them. The moisture in Dan’s sandwich helped them thrive, and come Monday, when Sally knocked Dan’s sandwich over and bits of bacteria-laden mayonnaise and pickle juice splashed all over the paper bags and Tupperware below, the entire Marketing department was taken down for three days straight.

Moreover, the small water spill that Mark left on one table and the small coffee spell that absolutely everyone left on the counter next to the sink operated as breeding grounds over the weekend as well — and while the water only affected Jeff, the coffee knocked out about a quarter of the office at random.

Don’t let Janice’s sneeze blow up your Santa Monica office — cleaning is a low-effort, high-yield activity, and if you can’t get organized enough to do it yourself, hire someone who will!

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Sherman Oaks: Commercial Cleaning Plans Proving Successful

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A decade or so ago, a social scientist trying to figure out what made some Sherman Oaks schools more successful than others came to a fascinating realization: cleanliness mattered. In fact, the cleanliness and functionality of the facilities proved to be more important to scholastic success than any of:

  • The students’ average socioeconomic status, race, or cultural background,
  • School attendance records,
  • The percentage of students with behavior problems, or
  • The average pay rate of the non-teaching staff.

(For the record, some items, including average class size and average teacher pay per hour and per student, were more important than cleanliness — but not much!)

So what does this have to do with commercial cleaning plans? Simple — while we don’t know of any studies that have been done of businesses, Sherman Oaks’ business owners clearly believe that cleanliness matters to business success as well. We can tell, because we have a surprising number of Sherman Oaks commercial cleaning plans in place — plans that have us heading out that direction a few times a week to spend a few hours making sure that a storefront, a cubicle farm, or a suite of offices is immaculate.

What are the results? Well, as a janitorial service, we generally don’t get a lot of active feedback — if we do our job right, the result is that no one notices. But what we do get is the ‘dollar vote’ — if something we’re doing isn’t working, we stop getting paid to do it. And we’ve been executing these commercial cleaning plans for businesses around Sherman Oaks and the entire northeastern LA area for years now, so we’re pretty sure it’s accomplishing our clients’ goals.

What does a commercial cleaning plan look like? Pretty simple: you tell us to make your business look like someone cares about it, and we do. We clean car dealerships, nightclubs, gymnasiums, private schools — from the grossest of gym showers to the nastiest of break room refrigerators, when we’re done with it, you’ll never know what was lurking there last night when the closing crew went home.

Ready to experience a facility that’s clean top-to-bottom and ready for business every single Monday morning? Call MegaJanitorial today!

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Los Angeles, Janitorial Services, and ‘Broken Windows’

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A long time ago (OK, it was 1982, but hey, anything pre-Karate Kid is old as far as we’re concerned), a couple of social scientists came up with a fascinating theory called the Broken Windows effect, that has a direct bearing on Los Angeles janitorial services. They noted an experiment in which a previous scientist had left two cars unattended with the hood up — one in the Bronx, and one in Palo Alto.

The one in the Bronx was stripped within 24 hours. The one in Palo Alto was untouched until the scientist himself walked up and broke one of the windows with a hammer. Within 72 hours, it, too, was stripped. The Broken Windows theory offers this explanation: once something shows signs of neglect, it inspires further neglect and abuse from people who use or encounter it. That’s one reason why it’s so important to keep your commercial facilities clean and in good repair — because as soon as one thing is noticeably out of place, everything will fall apart fast.

The Most Important Areas
Perhaps in no part of your facility is this more obvious than in the bathroom. If a customer walks in and finds that the bathroom is sparkling, smells nice, and everything is stocked, there’s a much lower likelihood that they’ll treat it with disrespect. On the other hand, if the first thing they notice is the grunge, the graffiti, and the complete lack of soap, chances are pretty good that they’ll add their own commentary on the wall, not flush, and steal the toilet paper roll to decorate their friend’s house with.

Perhaps counter-intuitively to some, the other ‘most important’ area is your front door — just inside and outside of it. If a customer approaching your business sees a bunch of cigarette butts stuck in dried-on chewing gum on the way in, they’re going to walk in with a mindset about your business that you really don’t want. And if they get just inside and encounter a smell that definitely doesn’t belong inside a business establishment, they’re likely to walk right back out.

The easiest way to keep Broken Windows theory on your side is to have someone with the explicit job of keeping everything clean and in working order. That’s exactly what Los Angeles’ janitorial services are all about — get in touch and see how they can work for you!

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Woodland Hills Office Cleaning for the New Season

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Spring has sprung, and that means it’s time for Spring Cleaning! Don’t think that’s just something that happens in the homes that sprawl across Woodland Hills; office cleaning is on the agenda as well. But what does spring cleaning look like for a commercial facility?

Well first you take the spring and you stretch it out a little, slipping a microfiber cloth between the coils and–sorry. Sorry. Here’s the deal:

Deep-Clean Your Carpets
You’ve probably been keeping your carpets in maintenance mode through the rainy season, because there’s not a lot of point in getting things super-spiffy when the next day is going to bring more mud than the day before. But now that the sky is regularly blue for weeks at a time, you’d better bust out the steam cleaner.

Sanitize Everything
Cold and flu season is ending, and you want it to end as soon as humanly (or perhaps virusly?) possible. That means making sure that every single hard surface, horizontal or vertical, top and bottom, is sanitized. That famed 99.9% of bacteria and viruses that a good sanitizer kills? Yeah, that’ll cut your cold and flu season short by a month or more.

Clear out the Cobwebs
That bright sunlight is probably illuminating corners of your office that haven’t been carefully examined in months — the top corners. Get a stool, or one of those supercool extending dusters, and make sure that there’s no dust-gathering, customer-upsetting cobwebs in any nook, cranny, crevice, or gap in your facility.

Put the Pressure On
The outside of your building probably hasn’t been professionally pressure-washed in months — because why would you, again, knowing the mud thing is still a thing? But now that the ground outside is mostly dry and mostly staying that way for most of the foreseeable future, it’s time to put the pressure on. Get a pressure washer out there and get your sidewalks, windows, walls, and entranceway as clean as they can be.

Once you’ve got all of the lethargy of winter stripped away and the fresh growth of the new season has room to shine, you know you’ve accomplished your Woodland Hills office cleaning properly for Spring. If you don’t have the time, tools, or manpower to get these items done on your own, naturally, you can hire a service like MegaJanitorial to do it for you — we’re just a phone call away!