Finding the truly remarkable at ISSA/Interclean 2011

When very large events take place, it is hard to see the overall impact and cull the essential lessons or observations. Communicating those observations is sometimes more difficult and I needed several days to process everything I saw, heard and experienced in Vegas at the ISSA/Interclean 2011 conference.

I am a man given to the remarkable, the most interesting, important or at minimal, the avant-garde. This is why when moving to the mid-west, hot dish seemed like what they feed prisoners to stay just this side of the Geneva Convention. I am not a meat and potatoes guy, I NEED spice. That is why I dumped my TV and can’t handle top 40 music or celebrity news. I am not just bored with the mundane but an avid hater of all that is average.

I attended the conference to find what I could see as the trends that now and into the future will shape our companies and careers in this industry. It was a hunt for the remarkable and I found it.

The remarkable I found was in two areas; the maturing of our trade as a profession and as you would guess, technology. The destructive message from the business opportunity magazines is discredited within the first ten minutes of walking in the door of the convention.

The hucksters selling franchise fantasies and the purveyors of the “grab a mop and make a million” nonsense, would have their victims choking on the mistaken idea that any idiot can make a fortune without knowing anything after seeing what awaits them in the marketplace.

This is why so many small or new operators are desperate to know how do we get accounts? I got my mop, vacuum cleaner and business cards, so where is my million dollars? The purchasers of your services have a choice of professionals to choose from so your side ways baseball cap and stained golf shirt just won’t cut it.

Make no mistake about it, we are a profession now, and that was very evident at the convention. There is room for beginners but you better roll up your sleeves and start learning about your profession if you are serious about making money in cleaning. There is no $139. or even $1,500. short cuts to becoming a professional in our industry. More about the particulars in following blog posts (so make sure and subscribe and not miss even one exciting episode)!

One other group would have been on notice if they were conscious at all while walking through the convention floor and that is those at the other end of the industry, the large players who think there is not a whole lot to what we do. The maintenance mafia and the “sub everything out to anyone with a mop” goons who will never make an investment in a corn broom.

These mouth-breathers who throw ridiculous prices at chains, who make promises that they have no intention of delivering on and where quality is merely a slogan, should enjoy their margins built solely on their lies because their days are numbered. They will never invest in the technology or the training to match the professionals who recognize the warning sign and do the hard work.

To my dear pessimistic friends, I saw facility managers at the convention and these folks will become tougher to fool in the very near future. Job number two is to communicate what differentiates us from the impostors (job one is safety, as it should be). Our expertise and professionalism has to be a foundational message to the marketplace we serve.

Technology was the other remarkable thing I saw and not just redesigned mop wringers (although there were several I really liked). I am not sure why we as an industry are so slow to see and adopt these advancements but I have an idea that it is the residual effects of our own poor perception of our mission. Moving dirt and making a profit will get better and better as we lose our own negative ideas. In most cases, we are our own worst enemies.

On one hand, there was technology that requires sizable capital investment and on the other, there were solutions that seemed like mere pennies. It is slower than it should be for these solution providers though they would not admit it. Superior technology does not always win be it hard or soft and there is the “this is the way we always did it” which stifles innovation and kills companies in a slow writhing death.

In the next few postings I will go into more detail about what was remarkable but to be sure, having International Sanitary Supply Association, Building Service Contractors Association International, the International Executive Housekeepers Association, and the Association of Residential Cleaning Services International all meet at one time, at one place made for an amazing event.