Could being clean save you cash?

 In the past, when we’ve first got involved in a business, nine times out of 10 the owners have seen hygiene as a necessary evil.

 While you want to do the best thing by your employees and customers, meeting increasingly rigorous standards is a drain on your resources – both human and financial. It’s something else to think about and a pure cost to the company, when your focus is on growing profitability and being lean.

Of course, the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a whole new perspective onto this, by making every customer much more interested in –  and potentially judgemental about –  how businesses manage their hygiene. This means that it simply must be a top priority for every business, although, again, compliance with the heightened standards this has brought comes at a cost, and therefore being as efficient as possible in your choices is more important than ever.

So, when we say that there are steps you can take to reduce any drag on your bottom line, in both time and money – and that good practice can help grow your business as an extension of your marketing strategies – it should hopefully come as music to your ears!

10 ways to save money on your hygiene bill

Here are a few simple steps your business can take to reduce costs and ensure you are COVID-secure. Most of the organisations we work with for the first time need at least a few of these:

1. Introduce a formal cleaning rota and make sure it, and the products you use, are as efficient as possible to save on staff time
2. Plan your cleaning routes and systems like a proper project. Include day-to-day cleaning and periodic deep cleans of particular areas. As you do this, ask yourself questions like ‘why do we do this that way?’, ‘why is that there?’ and ‘who is the right person to be responsible for that?’. Walk your cleaning ‘routes’ and look at everything with a critical eye. You’ll be amazed how being more organised in this way will result in you implementing changes that save you time and money
3. Invest in the right equipment and products to enable your cleaning team to work more effectively and faster. As with anything, you’d be amazed what a difference having the right tools for the job can make
4. Install proper dosing dispensers for everything from your hand soap to your loo roll. This typically reduces usage significantly
5. Invest in the best, industrial grade cleaning chemicals. While the headline price might seem more expensive than shop-bought items, they are stronger and you need less per usage, driving down your ‘costs in use’
6. Replace your ready-mixed antibacterial sprays and floor cleaners with concentrated ones you prepare yourselves, and train your cleaning team to get the amounts right. ‘Self-service’ cleaners typically work out to be far more cost-effective than ready-made ones, as well as helping the environment by using less packaging
7. Review the paper items you use. As well as ensuring fair usage through dispensing machines, choose the right ply for things like your toilet rolls and paper towels, to strike the right balance between quality and value
8. Buy in bulk. Part of our remit is to ensure you always benefit from our buying power, to drive your costs down. We can always negotiate the best possible price with suppliers on bigger orders. This doesn’t mean over-ordering, though. If you’ve followed the first two steps from this list, you should have a much clearer idea of what you need and when, so that you can get your ordering just right
9. Plan ahead. It makes us want to weep when we receive next-day orders from customers. While we’ll always pull out all the stops to get you what you need, in time, ordering things at the last minute may result in surcharges and additional postage costs if our free delivery vehicles are already assigned, a situation that a bit of forward-planning can avoid. A few late orders in a year can really add up in terms of cost
10. Call in the experts. While we hope the above list will have given you a good starter-for-10, there’s no substitute for experience. We guarantee to save firms time and money as a result of a hygiene audit – between 40 and 100 per cent! And getting us in for some initial advice costs nothing. Having worked in hygiene supplies for several decades, we’ve seen just about everything, across a variety of industries. This means we can apply that experience to making things work for you.

Why good hygiene can boost your bottom line

Modern customers want things to be just right, and they choose the brands they deal with carefully. Not only that, but first impressions also count with everything from business relationships to recruitment. From the hygiene rating on your front door, to whether you have the right hand soap in your loos and your offices are spick and span, these things send out a strong message to all your stakeholders about how much you care about what you do, now more than ever.

Get these things right and you will steal a march over your competition. Not only that, but you’ll reduce risk, both in terms of employee sickness and lost productivity, as well as the potential contamination of food resulting in customer complaints or, worse, fines. 

 Not only this, but under Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) standards (more recently referred to as Material Safety Data Sheets, or MSDSs), businesses have a legal obligation to log and keep up-to-date data about their cleaning processes, the chemicals used and where they are stored.

 If any of the above has made you stop and think, why not get in touch and arrange a no-obligation initial chat about the money you could save by reviewing some of your business hygiene practices? Contact us now via 01482 327580 or email us.