All posts by Michael

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Why Office Cleaning, for Woodland Hills, is a Great Choice

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Your office is probably the place you spend the most time other than your house. If you really want to creep yourself out a little bit, look around at all of your coworkers and ponder the fact that all of them probably spend more time at the office than anywhere else except home. That’s a lot of people occupying a relatively small space for a huge amount of time, most days of the week. Do you think your office is actually as clean as it should be, given the sheer volume of human life that goes on there?

It should be — cleanliness, as we’ve all heard, is next to Godliness, and besides that it’s a pretty firm requirement for keeping your office population healthy. But when it comes time to trim the budget somewhere, most managers seem to think that getting all of the garbage taken out every few days is distinctly less important than getting people to build widgets and get them out the door in exchange for cash money.

The effects of that trade-off are profound.

First, your offices will rapidly become a breeding ground — nay, even unto a petri dish  — for different bacteria. This won’t have any immediately noticeable effects, but after a week or two, some people will start to sniffle basically constantly. After a month has gone by, productivity will start to take legitimate hits as people get sicker. Considering that the average U.S. worker costs the average U.S. business more than $230/year in absenteeism caused by personal illness, the cost of hiring someone to take care of the cleaning starts to sound like a heck of an investment!

Second, your workers will start to get fussy. They’re going to have to start cleaning up after each other, which means cleaning up after themselves as well. No one likes to have their normal workflow interrupted by an unexpected need to find a bottle of disinfectant and a wipe. Now imagine that frustration as experienced by a few hundred of your coworkers simultaneously.

Finally, your workplace will start being recognizably grungy. That’s the point at which you’ve definitely gone too far, because if you can see the filth, your vendors, clients, customers, and visitors can as well. In a world where first impressions are as critical as they are in modern America, can you risk having all of those outsiders see your business in it’s nasty, nasty glory?

No. You can’t. So don’t. Call MegaJanitorial today and get us set up to keep your office space clean with minimal hassle on your part.

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Livin In the Fridge? Call the Janitorial Services of Encino!

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With a soft pop, the door comes open. The smell assaults you like a Mortal Kombat uppercut straight to the nostril. You look inside, but all you see is an ill-defined dark greenish lump. Part of that is because your eyes are watering, but the other part is because whatever it is, it’s covered in something else. Something dark green…something alive. You slam the refrigerator door shut, cursing Janet in Accounting — that was her raw vegan paleo probiotic gluten-free seitan kombucha steak, but you know she’s never going to clean up the primitive civilization that’s growing ever so slowly at 35 degrees Fahrenheit.

Time to call the experts. Janitorial Services of Encino to the rescue! Infrasprays up! Squeegeetherms connected! MegaJanitorial is go! Form Broom and Mop! Form Towel and Bottle! And I’ll Form…the Disinfectant! Let’s Go JanitorForce!…yeah, this fight we’re going straight for the Blazing Sponge.

That Green Thing is a Terrorist. Don’t Negotiate.
If there’s an ill-defined green mass — or anything similar — keeping you from opening your office fridge, don’t play around. Not every form of mold is toxic, but every form of mold is a health risk. And worst of all, if that horror has been growing like that for even 48 hours, you’re going to need that refrigerator cleaned like no one has cleaned it since it was first built. If you let even a dozen mold spores come to rest in a tiny damp spot somewhere in the channel that the vegetable tray’s rollers move along, all of the rest of your wiping and throwing away isn’t going to cut it. You have to kill off the intrusive colony completely.

That’s what MegaJanitorial is for — not just for keeping everything in your workplace clean enough to continue operating week after week, season after season, decade after decade, but also for tackling the truly profound messes that no one else wants to — or can stand to — deal with.

Fortunately, from your perspective, it’s not even particularly difficult — you just have to pick up the phone, call the number in the upper left corner of this very screen, and we’ll unleash the Five Robot Lio–err, that is to say, we’ll get our most relevant, most talented guys and make sure they get out there and get it taken care of. Even if it’s developed the wheel and the concept of ceremonial burial by the time we get there.

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A Deep Commercial Cleaning for Studio City Businesses

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So your company is running on a tight budget and cash flow issues are keeping you from contracting out your cleaning needs the way you’d like to. Welcome to the modern economy; guess what? That describes about 80% of all businesses in America right now. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to keep the place clean. It just means it’s difficult to keep the place clean. But this is, after all, America: getting by long enough to hit the big time is pretty much the name of the game!

So how do you ‘get by’ when you’re trusting a bunch of desk jockeys and middle management suck-ups to keep your building clean? By putting a decent maintenance plan in place, with People In Charge and a schedule and all that for the everyday stuff — and then spending the most efficient way you can by hiring a professional just barely often enough to get by. About every four months, a deep commercial cleaning for the Studio City business you own and operate should keep you doing well enough.

Ideally, of course, you want a weekly cleaning with a seasonal deep cleaning — every three months — but if you can get some buy-in from your workforce and get them to do the basics well and consistently, you can get by only hiring a professional three times a year. The best times are around the beginnings of December, April, and August — that way, you get the beginning of the fall season, mid-winter, and honestly there’s probably a month or so of give in the Spring but it should be done at some point in there.

The only caution we would give businesses who intend to take advantage of this ‘alternative’ to a genuine professional clean is this: talk to the workforce repeatedly. When your job is writing code and you wipe down the break room as a mandatory side activity, it’s easy to forget how important those basic efforts at cleanliness are! When they go for a few weeks without being properly cleaned, all of those everyday-use spots that everyone touches over and over (light switches, common telephones, the coffee pot in the break room) become breeding grounds for bacteria and sources of constant cross-contamination.

This is why we say that getting a regularly-scheduled commercial cleaner is important — but if the budgetary realities of doing business force you to sacrifice your cleaning contract, at the minimum, keep up with the regular deep cleaning. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a very disgusting surprise someday, in a place no one ever thought to look…or clean.

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A Window into Office Cleaning in Glendale

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Office cleaning: in Glendale, it’s more than just a brigade of mop-and-vacuum-wielding uniforms. Glendale goes all out when it comes to putting our best foot forward. Just ask us why Good Charlotte is long-gone but The Cramps are still here. That’s why our office cleaners don’t just clean the office — they clean the sidewalks, the exterior, and even the windows.

Did you know that the first windows were simply holes in the roof that had shutters you could close with a stick? Then we figured out how to put them on walls, and some time significantly later, someone had the brilliant idea of putting glass in them. For a long time, a window with glass in was a “fenester,” as opposed to a “window” (which literally means “wind eye”) which was a hole with no glass. But we left the fenester in the dump-ester when we ditched a bunch of French words about a half-century ago, and ‘window’ took over both meanings.

And man, are we at MegaJanitorial glad! It would be extraordinarily annoying to have to do the kinds of deep cleaning that we do if there were just open holes in the walls that constantly let in the pollen and dust that we work so hard to keep out of your HVAC filters. Of course, having glass in your windows means cleaning the glass, but unlike the people that spend all day in your building, we have the tools and equipment to make window washing a pretty easy endeavor.

Why is that important? Simply put, sunlight helps us do our job. Not only does it keep your employees more mentally stable and emotionally even-keeled, but sunlight (you may have heard) is a pretty good disinfectant. Even if you have UV-blocking laminate on your windows, it’s still easier to clean a room that’s been exposed to sunshine than one that’s been dark and dank for days. So if your windows aren’t letting in the amount or quality of light that they should be, it might be time to get us out there and get your windows professionally cleaned.

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Janitorial Services in Burbank: Actually Saving Lives

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Did you know that of the billions of things in this universe that could utterly kill you, at least four are in your office right now? It’s probably closer to forty or fifty, given the number of people who work there, but that’s not really the point. The point is, some of the things that MegaJanitorial’s service in Burbank cleans up on a regular basis are actually saving lives. Here’s some examples:

Printer Toner Inhalation
According to Environmental Science and Technology Magazine, the ultrafine toner particles emitted by nearly 30% of all laser printers (divided by age and repair, not anything rational like brand name or model) are as or more damaging to your health than cigarette smoke. To avoid inhaling these particles, you have to leave the space alone for several hours (say, from the end of business until we get there in the pre-dawn hours) and wipe down every surface in the area of the printer. If your cloth comes away with visible black ‘ripples,’ you know you need your printer repaired. Needless to say, we’ll be more than happy to alert you.

Electromagnetic Smog
Scientists at the Imperial College in London believe they’ve discovered precisely why computers get dustier than everything else around them — and it’s not because of the fan. It’s because electromagnetic fields emitted constantly by computers, monitors, and other electronic equipment actually attracts dust. The more electronic equipment there is in your office, the more likely it is that your air quality is potentially dangerous for your health. Unfortunately, other than getting a powerful HEPA filter on your HVAC system, the best thing you can do to reduce this effect is clean deeply and regularly. Or, more likely, let MegaJanitorial clean deeply and regularly for you.

Your Keyboard
Oh, you didn’t know? It makes perfect sense if you stop and think about it: almost everyone eats at their desk at some point during the day. Microscopic food particles either fall between the keys, or they get transferred from your fingers to the keyboard. The end result? The average keyboard has somewhere upwards of twelve thousand times the amount of bacteria than your average toilet seat. Yup. That’s some grossness. (Your mouse is only half as gross at six thousand times, but that’s still really gross.) Get your office cleaned regularly, by professionals, and keep the danger at a minimum.

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Commercial Cleaning for Westwood Business Furniture

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We’re about 90 degrees around the year from the classic ‘spring cleaning’ efforts that many businesses go through to prepare their spaces and stuff for the growth seasons. That means it’s time to step back and take a look at what you can do to help ensure that your place of business makes it through the winter looking sharp and fresh, even when it’s not all that fresh outside. Do you ever get that not-so-fresh feeling? Sure, we all do — even our chairs and desks and whatnot. That’s why MegaJanitorial includes business furniture in our commercial cleaning for Westwood‘s leading businesses.

Save Money
We can help you save money by making sure that your existing office furniture lasts as long as possible. Those cool swivel chairs cost a pretty penny, and as much as they might not be as comfortable as the ones at home, those couches and benches that you can find every so often in the halls aren’t exactly cheap, either. Rather than let one fall to an irremovable stain or a problem with the wood, call MegaJanitorial and we’ll keep it serviceable and looking good for far longer than your employees could with their limited janitorial skillset.

Save Face
We can help you put your best foot forward to your customers, clients, and vendors. Rather than letting Ralph from BigChinaImportCompany sit on the Tuffet of Questionable History and send up a dust cloud that will have him sneezing up a fit, don’t! Let us come in and give your furniture a fall-time freshening that will let him plop down in peace.

Save Your Furniture
Dust particles may be all but invisible to us, but to the long strands of your furniture’s woven exterior, they’re perfectly tangible. That’s because dust particles are a lot like microscopic buzzsaws, cutting into the fabric of your furniture more and more with each movement of each gluteus maximus that makes contact with the sitting surface in question. (The same is true of other limbs and other surfaces, but the butt-dust-fiber grinder is nearly the trifecta of slow, low-grade furniture destruction.)

There’s are few reasons you wouldn’t have a professional commercial cleaner like MegaJanitorial come out and give your office furniture a top-tier once-over. The only really good one being that we’ve already done it this fall — and if that’s the case, well, we’re looking forward to coming back next Spring!

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4 Advantages of Outsourced Office Cleaning in Beverly Hills

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No one ever really wants to clean their own space. That’s why professional cleaners get together and start businesses — so that they can get paid to clean someone else’s space. That really does make all of the psychological difference. That’s just one reason why it’s smart to outsource your office cleaning. Beverly Hills, do you want a few more? All right, you asked for it! Or rather, I asked for it on your behalf. And now I’m going to answer!

Let Your Staff Do What They Do Best
There’s no point to hiring the best Excel spreadsheeters in Beverly Hills and then paying them to wipe and vacuum. Let them concentrate on remembering that annoying apostrophe that comes at the beginning of a non-formula in a cell filled with what looks like a formula. Does that one get you every time? It gets us every time. Let them use the space, and let us clean it up afterward. We’re faster, more thorough, we use the right cleanser for the right job, and best of all, we usually do it overnight while you’re out doing whatever Excel spreadsheeters do at night. We assume it has to do with Excel bedsheets.

Improve Morale
Do you know what the number one crusher of office morale is? Obstacles. Have you ever wanted to do something simple, only to discover that before you could, you had to do something else, and then that the something else also had an obstacle that forced another task on your list? Can you imagine, for example, going to the breakroom to grab a cup of coffee, and discovering that your coffee cup was dirty and needed cleaning, the coffeepot was empty and needed cleaning and refilling, the sugar was all crusted into its container and had to be broken up with a ballpoint pen, and to top it all off, the fridge was so gross that it made you gag to get out the creamer? Well, we’re not going to brew the coffee — but we’ll make sure your cup is clean, your fridge is clean, and your sugar is closed properly so that it doesn’t get all crusted up like that. Ta-da! Instant morale boost, and you have an outsourced office cleaning staff to thank for it. You’re welcome, Beverly Hills!

Improve Health
This should go without saying — when your environment is cleaner, your employees get less sick, are less tired, and are better able to focus. Win-win-win! That’s three wins! This compared to having them clean up themselves, which exposes them to all of the dust and bacteria and whatnot that you want them to avoid. No-brainer, right?

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Maximize the Value of a Janitorial Service in Santa Monica

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Outsourced janitorial services: in Santa Monica, they’re a pretty standard-issue part of doing business. Seriously, who wants to pay your in-house people to spend their valuable time vacuuming and wiping up other people’s desks? They didn’t go to business school for that. But as much as it pains us to admit it, janitorial services are not the be-all and end-all of keeping your workplace as healthy and fully-functional as possible. There’s something that you can do to make our commercial cleaning even better. It’s called a “Facility Maintenance Plan,” and every business that intends to be doing business in their current location for more than a year should have one.

A Proactive Facility Maintenance Plan (PFMP, as $0.50 would say) is, writ short, a plan…for maintaining…your facility. Work with me here. The point is that if you don’t have a plan for maintenance — meaning ‘the regular and planned examination, repair, and replacement of large and important bits of equipment’ — you’re not getting the most of your cleaning. Our job is to make sure that your big important bits of equipment don’t get dirty and thus wear out more quickly — but if you’re not having your physical assets examined (dirty, dirty maintenance men) and repaired, they’ll go ahead and break down anyway no matter how clean we keep them, because there’s always some little ball bearing or summat that goes awry deep in the bowels of a thing anyway.

So put together an PFMP. It’s not that hard, just follow these steps…

  1. Break down all of your physical assets into three groups: those that need monthly, seasonal, and annual preventative maintenance. Consult your vendors, user’s manuals, and/or the Internet to get a grip on where each of your major assets belongs. Note that anything more than a few years old should get bumped up a category.
  2. Break down each of those groups into sets of items that can be proactively maintained by the same experts in the same trip. So, for example, if you can have the same guy examine your printer(s), fax machine(s), and paper shredder(s) all in one trip out, do that. Your goal is to minimize trips out, because they charge you for every visit.
  3. Once you’ve established a minimum number of maintenance-days, set up a schedule such that no two important systems are being proactively maintained at the same time. Set up each of your vendors with their schedule and get their buy-in, and you have a PFMP  to be proud of!

…and we’ll be glad to know that your office is purring along just as cleanly behind the scenes as we make it out front.

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Commercial Cleaning for a Sherman Oaks Winter

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It’s almost wintertime again, which for Sherman Oaks means…it’s a little bit brisk and a little bit rainy. Yeah, we don’t believe in winter per se. It’s not like Minneapolis where winter means you can’t open your front door and the A-Bomb-inable Snowboarder is doing 720-degree tailgrabs off of your garage roof. Or like Seattle where winter means you might see the sun again as an April Fool’s Day prank before it disappears until June. The most significant effect winter has on Sherman Oaks is the appearance of long sleeves and the closing of most windows.

Of course, if you’re in the world of commercial cleaning, a Sherman Oaks winter is actually more relevant for you than it is for the rest of the area. That’s because closing your windows actually means something to us janitorial folk. At least, it does to the kind that work at MegaJanitorial. That’s because we care about more than just wiping and sweeping and scrubbing — we attend to all the things. That includes your business’ air quality.

See, when you close your windows and doors, the only thing you have between you and breathing in a mélange of air that was very recently breathed out by your co-workers, any several of whom may be playing host to a fresh batch of their daughter’s kindergarten’s freshly-flown-in-from-out-of-state bacteria is your office HVAC system’s air filter…and us.

Some other commercial cleaners, whom we shall not name because we don’t believe in advertising our competition, don’t particularly see this as a problem. They’ll keep right on wiping and sweeping and scrubbing and not giving a second’s thought to the giant ever-circulating pile of airborne frighteningness that builds up in your breezeless businessplace. MegaJanitorial has a different perspective. We see two, possibly three months of closed windows as a threat to your workflow; a fundamental imposition on your efficiency.

So ask us, when the coming winter hits and you feel compelled to wear long sleeves and possibly carry that umbrella you keep in the back of your closet to work, what we can do to winterproof your workforce. We’ll hazard you’ll appreciate the answer. If you don’t already know us, try the phone number at the top of the page. It works. We know because we use it every day.

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What Can an Office Cleaning in Los Angeles Get Done?

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When you think of an office cleaning going down, what do you see in your mind’s eye? Bored-looking dudes in bland uniforms, eyes down, slowly mopping, vacuuming, wiping, and taking out the trash? Sure, that happens every day all up and down the California coast, from San Diego to Sacramento, and probably in whatever is north of Sacramento, too. (There has to be something up there besides Lake Shasta, right?)

But that’s just “an office cleaning.” Los Angeles has so much more to offer than just drab uniforms and slow mopping. We have businesses like MegaJanitorial, with people who care about cleanliness, who want to do more than just go through the minimal motions of everyday scrubbery. There are no Roger the Scrubbers here. Our Roger is into floor care. Hardwood, laminate, tile, Pergo, you name it, our Roger can and will not just clean it, but help it stay clean with a protective coating of…whatever it is that kind of floor takes. Don’t ask me, I’m not Roger. (Names have been changed to protect the potentially innocent.)

The point is, there’s no reason for a Los Angeles office cleaning to consist of a mop dipped in weak sauce and then thoughtlessly smeared around until the floor is weak and vaguely saucy. MegaJanitorial, like the -Man and/or -Tron and/or -Deth that we may and/or may not be named after, goes above and beyond. Do you need your:

  • Industrial-grade carpet free of industrial-grade spots and stains?
  • Upholstery cleansed of its upholsting ways and returned to a life of innocent furnishing?
  • Restrooms de-grossed, re-stocked, and actually restful?
  • Windows forced into the kind of transparency you’d like to see in the government?
  • High-traffic areas scraped and scrubbed completely free of traffic jam?
  • Break room kitchenette slain and resurrected in the form of a safe eating environment?
  • Sidewalks pressured into walking a straight-and-narrow path of well-blasted cleanliness?

We’ve got people for that! People who thrive on the kind of filth your workers generate as an unintended side effect of your epic workflow efficiencies and mad synergy skillz. Not thrive on like they eat the stuff. That’s gross. They thrive on it the way that Donald Trump thrives on TV cameras pointed in his direction. They take pride in cleaning impossible-to-clean things the way that Michael Bay takes pride in exploding his explosions as they explode, or Xzibit takes pride in that last sentence.

Want to see what MegaJanitorial can do for your business? Give us a call; we’ll be happy to show you. The phone number is up there at the top of the page.