Sometimes the answer has to be ‘no’

As much as we hate saying the word “no”, sometimes it’s the only way to move forward.

We’ve had a great year and are delighted to be going into the festive season in the best shape we’ve ever been in. We’ve retained more clients this year than ever before, we’ve picked up even more new clients this year and we’ve taken on an additional 20+ permanent staff. This all makes for great reading but please be assured it’s not down to luck and is the product of countless hours of hard work and dedication by the team to ensure that this has happened. However, on looking back at the year we realise we could have been more efficient and maybe could have done things a bit better. Maybe if we’d said “no” more often it could have been easier and a bit less stressful.

We know what we are – we’re an office and shop cleaning company that covers Edinburgh and Fife. However, if you were to see some of the projects we’ve undertaken this year you’d swear we were a pan-Scottish builders cleaning company. Or, if you looked further through our figures and client lists you’d see we even cleaned leisure centres and that the bulk of this work done was either over the weekends or working all through the night. Whilst we can do all of this, and do it exceptionally well for some of the countries biggest companies – it’s not what we do. Whilst this has all been high profile and profitable work it has been a massive strain on the team that provide our core services to our biggest clients day in and day out.

To ensure that 2016 is another great year we have had to make some tough decisions and the first has been saying “no” to some large projects – which means we won’t be doing some large builders cleans in Carlisle, Ayr, Dumfries, Glasgow and Aberdeen in the New Year. It doesn’t mean we won’t still be working with these clients, because we still are, but just not outside of the areas where our cleaning teams are based. We have also chosen to step down from a contract that involved intensive cleaning over the weekends. As much as we hate saying “no” we realise that by saying “yes” to these projects that we put our core business in jeopardy. These projects take our key team members away from our core business and we put incredible strain on our cleaning teams asking them to work unsociable hours, often quite far away from home. Whilst they are well rewarded for it – it’s not something we want to be doing any longer.

We’ve already said we know what we are – we’re an office and shop cleaning company that covers Edinburgh and Fife. Well, next year our aim is to be the best cleaning company in these areas. We know what type of clients we work best with and we know how to attract the best cleaners around and in 2016 we intend to be closer to our clients than ever before.

We intend to increase our client retention rate (this will be hard given it’s already (90%+) and we’d like to welcome more clients into our business that want to work with a cleaning partner that works to a routine that suits the changing needs of their business. We know that flexibility and continuity are the key factors and we always build our teams around our clients needs. Now we’re rebuilding our whole company around servicing these clients even better than before.

We’ve set ourselves some big goals for next year and it won’t be easy, but with the commitment and support of the team we’re confident that 2016 can be our most successful year yet.