Sometimes in life, you need a little help, a bit of guidance. Business is no different. Over the years, we’ve built something special and really enjoyed doing it. With great people working alongside, we’ve become good at what we do and we like to think we’ve been innovative with things like our bespoke auditing and management system and even the ‘Milk Round’ which means none of our plastic waste goes to landfill.
We always look to improve on what we do and we certainly have, in the main, got better as time has gone by. Either by recruiting people to do things differently or by asking people to come in and help us out. To be honest, I’m not good at asking for help, I’d rather try to get through myself and see what happens but recently it’s been a little different. Some of my managers have been asking things I just didn’t have answers for and I became pretty stuck as people in our industry don’t tend to mix let alone help each other out.
Anyway, I’d really admired a London based commercial cleaning business called Principle Cleaning because of their ethos and portfolio. They seemed to be where we’d like to be and with the help of social media, I’d made contact with their Chairman and founder, Doug Cooke. I’d bumped in to Doug at Exhibitions in Birmingham and Amsterdam and decided to drop him a line explaining both my admiration of his organisation and need for a little help. I explained how I’d love to know how they do things and run the business and asked if it would be possible to go and see how it all works with Andrius our General Manager and Hazel (my wife and Company Secretary) who handles the administration side of the business.
Very quickly Doug came back to me and having consulted his Board of Directors, invited us down to see them. We travelled down on Sunday 3rd March for a couple of full days with their team. Our contact was Lilia, HR Director and we arrived at the Principle Cleaning office in Stratford at 9am and were absolutely blown away by the warmth of the welcome and the openness shown to us by the superb Principle team. Every question we had was answered (usually without even having to ask!) and the honesty, advice and genuine care we received was truly awesome. Take a bow Directors Terry, Matt, Tom, David and Simona Senior Site Manager and everyone else we met, you were fantastic.
What an amazing team of people, all pulling together, passionate about what they have and so enthusiastic to share their journey and findings with us. Hazel and Andrius were as inspired as me as everyone from the onsite cleaning teams to Peter Smith, their CEO explained in great detail and showed us how they look after their clients, get and retain business and even how they budget and incentivise. Absolutely unbelievable and my admiration for Doug and his brilliant team of people is as high at it possibly could be. Principle Cleaning, you are where we aspire to be and thanks to you, we stand a chance. Thank you.
