Mikey P said:
I don't care about you One Truck Wonder Boys, I want to know if your monkeys have been trained to really desire to do a great job despite the pain doing so can create.
"trained to really desire to do a great job"? Good question, Mike. I'm not sure you can "train" that- someone either takes pride in their work or they don't. And of course like all multi-truck operators we were constantly sifting our candidates looking for those special "keepers". (You'll find out.)
However, even with the "less than perfect" tech (yes, we had those too) you CAN insist on following consistent procedures. Since our target market in residential was middle class to wealthy high-end homes here was our routine procedure for the actual extraction cleaning of padded saxony carpets:
1. Pre-spray all open areas.
2. Move furniture out the width of the furniture and a little more from the wall. (Techs were instructed to look for possible bleeder furniture such as darkly stained antiques. However, we seldom had this problem at least in our area and if something bled it could be easily cleaned up while we were there.) Extract this area including edging the baseboards with a scrub wand.
3. Replace furniture and block/tab.
4. Switch hoses over to RX-20 and clean and double extract all open areas.
The only exceptions to this were berbers with problem seams (don't ask how I learned about this one) and highly delaminated carpets.
When I did my routine "just stopping by" random checks and found an employee not following this procedure he received one written warning and a stern talking to. The second time was three days off without pay. Third strike and he or she was out.
Yes, rotary extraction does create an extra layer of work and more equipment to be brought in. However, the consistently higher quality work it provided in the open areas was more than worth it IMO.
Enforcing rotary extraction was a "challenge." (Most techs are interested in one thing- themselves and what can make their life easier.) However, employees work according to a routine. When you move to a multi-truck company you just have to be sure it is YOUR routine they are following, not one they invented themselves.
Steve
SFS.JonDon.com
PS Interestingly, after my ill-fated sale of the company one of the first things out technicians did was convince the new owner to mothball all of our RX-20's. Things went downhill from there on many different fronts.
BTW, while I was a huge believer in rotary extraction for high end residential we seldom used it on our regular contract commercial work. I found that a) on direct glue down low pile carpet the five extraction heads had a hard time getting good extraction, b) it tended to distort the pile and c) since we were cleaning most of these jobs every month anyway a scrub wand (or low moisture cleaning) did a more than adequate job plus slice and dice it anyway you want rotary extraction is slower than a 14" wand. Your results may vary.
