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.