“We bought our first sweeping truck before we got married,” Jodi remembers. Today, they have thirty employees and about twenty-eight vehicles for sweeping, pressure-washing, landscaping and snowplowing. But at its core, Bramble Sweeping owes its success and steady growth to the same values that keep a marriage strong and vital: earnest, caring people who work at their relationships.

“We strive to connect personally with our clients,” says Jodi, who runs the office and serves the company as Vice President (Paul is President). “It’s something that sets Bramble Sweeping apart from other companies. This way, we learn how we can help them achieve their goals.

“Instead of just coming in to sweep, for example, we will notice areas that could use pressure-washing, signage that needs to be cleaned or replaced. We are the eyes for the property managers and owners, since we are on the property regularly, as well as when management typically is not. We develop a partnership with them that benefits us both.”

For Jodi—who was running an ice cream shop when she met Paul—and for Paul—who started out with a janitorial business—the “partnership” feature also makes the job far more satisfying overall.

Give me a challenge
Jodi takes pleasure in the fact that something comes up every day to make her job different from the day before. “I like to handle a challenge. If there’s an issue that comes up, I enjoy finding a way to make my client happy or to bring harmony to my crew. It could be an oil spill that needs to be handled or an issue with line-striping or power-washing. My goal with my employees is to make them feel part of our team, because what they bring adds value to the whole business and to all of us.”

There was one challenge the Brambles faced that went far beyond solving a minor equipment issue or correcting a mistake with a client. Eight years ago, Paul broke his femur—the thigh bone— and has spent literally years dealing with the repercussions of the injury.

“It was the height of winter, and he was out of commission for nine months. Prior to that, Paul had always been on top of it all, especially snowplowing jobs.” He eventually had four surgeries, the last one just a few years ago. “Our mechanic, supervisor, drivers, our nephew—they all pulled together,” Jodi recalls with deep appreciation. “They kept everything clean and running, with no slack in the line.”

Retaining employees and clients
Bramble’s experienced, alert, committed personnel are cross-trained on all the clients’ routes and—not coincidentally—treated with respect and high regard by management. The result, as Jodi and Paul have observed, is minimal turnover and a more stable company. “We take care of each other; there’s a sense of community all around.”

That community approach naturally extends to the clients. As Jodi explains, “I always follow up. It’s my way to make sure the job is done properly. It goes both ways, really, to clients and to employees.”

A checklist—which employees turn in with their daily reports—helps ensure that every step is completed and that problems or potential issues are noted so the property manager or owner can be notified. In addition to a full-time mechanic in the shop, Bramble’s Sweeping maintains two back-up sweepers—virtually eliminating the risk of missing scheduled sweeps.

Advancements at home
“We deal with a lot of corporate chains, but also a lot of smaller companies and business owners with whom we have a personal relationship,” Jodi says. “We resolve our issues immediately, so we make their customers happy and we make our clients happy, too.” However, with the difficult economic situation so widespread, Jodi has found a lot of clients who are trying to cut costs. “A lot of them tell us, ‘We’ll keep you on but for twenty percent less,’ which is common.”

Meanwhile, in the midst of these challenges and changes, the Brambles are planning—make that hoping—for a late fall groundbreaking for their new shop in Bensalem Township, outside of Philadelphia. It’s slated to include mechanic and garage bays and the office for employee check-in. Since it’s on the same site as the current operations, Jodi will find herself in an office trailer for the duration of the renovation.

Bramble Sweeping recently began a major website overhaul as well. The new site, www.BrambleSweeping.com, is gradually shaping up, with a new logo, new images and new copy.

Advancements in the industry
In addition to focusing upon the company’s offices and website, Jodi also recognizes the huge value in two industry-wide technologies: the growth of GPS and of low-noise, more environmentally friendly sweeping equipment. “GPS [global positioning systems] allows us to stay on top, to save on payroll and to make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

However, for all the benefits of new technologies, it’s really the values that the owners have made central to the business that make the real difference.  “When it comes down to it, people are still people, and relationship is still important.” Sort of like a marriage.

For more information on Bramble Sweeping, visit www.BrambleSweeping.com, or call 215.245.8940.

By Anne Biggs

Gale Maly came to Tucson from Chicago in May of 1982, having fallen in love with the town and its beautiful mountains and weather while vacationing there four years earlier. With her two daughters, four and seven, in tow, she had decided she would buy a business and make a fresh start in this golden region of remarkable vistas and sunshine for days on end.

“The only business for sale was a mechanic’s shop, and that didn’t fit where I wanted to go,” she recalls.

Then, one day, inspiration struck. She and her girls were eating dinner at a shopping center when she noticed a big truck speeding across the parking lot, kicking dust into the air. When told that the driver was conducting his nightly sweeping of the lot, she was perplexed. The machine was so old, the dirt came in the bottom and blew out the top.

“When I do a job, I want it to be perfect. So I decided to go back to the shopping center and see who this guy [was].” She followed him from job to job that night, watching as he raced through each parking lot, redistributing the dirt but making no discernable improvement. 

“This is not what I have in mind,” Maly told herself then, “but I can do this and do it so much better.” So she contacted the property manager and asked him to meet her over breakfast—at the shopping center. After inviting him to step outside to examine the lot, she took advantage of his embarrassment to pitch him on a deal. She would sweep his lot for the rock-bottom price his current sweeper contractor was charging, only she would do it so well that half as often would be sufficient. He ended up giving her thirteen properties.

But there she was, signing contracts, and she had no sweeper. She contacted the only company she knew at the time who would work with her, Tymco Sweeper in Texas, and got them to drive her single Tymco to Tucson within the week. And she was in business.

Branching out
Over the past twenty-eight years, she has gradually developed the company—and herself—far beyond parking lot sweeping into a power in the commercial property management arena.

 “I believe in diversification,” Maly says. “That way, as the economy bellies in one area, it grows in another. There isn’t anything I can’t do for a commercial property.”

From parking lot sweeping, she added a full landscaping division to Maly & Associates facilities management to provide landscape design, construction, and maintenance for residential and commercial properties. The division creates often stunning hardscapes and plantings for owners in this region that is so focused on the outdoors. The facilities management company offers additional services that run the gamut from typical changing- a-light-bulb tasks to pressure washing and graffiti removal. Maly Pest Control developed from the landscaping and property management. Maly Construction is a logical expansion that handles tenant improvements as well as remodels and build-ons such as outdoor kitchens. 

“We do all of that, all coordinated, without any effort on the property manager’s part. And if they have an issue, it’s one phone number to reach us,” Gale says. With forty-two employees on staff—ballooning to seventy when a major construction project is afoot—Maly hasn’t neglected her own professional growth. She became a real estate agent in 1994, has studied design and landscaping, and is a licensed contractor.

“It sounds like I mapped this out in 1982, knew exactly what I’d do. But instead, I got up and put one foot in front of the other and when an opportunity came up, I walked through the door. It’s been very exciting.”

A sweeping philosophy
First and foremost, “I’m a businesswoman,” Maly asserts. It is that capability, which she has in abundance, to which she attributes her success in these male-dominated industries. “There are a lot of men who are capable of maintaining and running the equipment, but you need to have both sides—the maintenance and the business. You can always hire the mechanic and hire the sweeper, but by God, you have to know how to run a business.

“And that would lead me to employees. Drug testing, background checks, staying on top of them.” The days are long over when Maly would tuck her sleeping little girls into the backseat of her car while she spent the night following her sweepers on their rounds so she could be assured they were doing their jobs to her uncompromising standards. Today, it’s GPS tracking on each piece of equipment and following through each morning with the system’s reports.

“I also don’t believe in keeping equipment more than four or five years.” Rather than carrying a big maintenance budget to keep old machines running long past their prime, she prefers to add a more predictable line item for new sweepers. “I can budget more easily for payments than for maintenance, and the tax laws are more advantageous. And I always have good-looking equipment that works well.”

Maly still loves her adopted community and gives back to it through her involvement with and support of the Northwest YMCA, Arizona Theater, Arizona Opera, Ballet Arizona, and the Tucson Symphony, among other organizations and causes. But she also takes a great deal of satisfaction from the businesses she’s developed and her successful accomplishments. She isn’t ready to stop any time soon.

“You have to be passionate about what you’re doing. You work with your client[s]. When they know you care about them and their budget, they trust you and let you do what you do best. It’s not that sweeping is so glamorous. It keeps me out of trouble, it’s exciting, it’s diversified. I like making people happy, and I like a achieving a goal…and that makes me happy.”

For more information about Maly & Associates, Tucson’s only one-stop source for commercial and residential property owners, call 520.299.0856, email info@malyandassociates.com, or visit www.malyandassociates.com.

Story by Anne Biggs

“Our company prides itself on providing exceptional service at a competitive price,” says Powell. Her restructuring plan included changing everything from staff to operations. “We have better control of the work through scheduling systems, operator-specific training and specialized quality control,” she explains. “That allows us to excel. Quality is our name, and that’s what we offer our customers. We have the best equipment in the area and a full-time mechanic who works on it on an almost daily basis, so it’s reliable.”

Quality Street Service maintains a full parts inventory for its fleet of regenerative air sweepers, vacuum sweepers, and mechanical brush-type and high-dump broom sweepers, as well as vacuum sweepers equipped with specialized attachments for catch-basin cleaning. The company services equipment in the field, as necessary, for maximum up time. Every piece of equipment is AQMD certified and meets all PM10 standards for fine particulate containment.

Excellence = productivity + value
The company focuses on providing excellent service while improving productivity and value for its customers.

“Recently, a customer was looking for two specialized heavy-duty pieces of equipment, eight hours a day, for an asphalt project on a major highway that needed to be completed on a tight schedule,” Powell recalls. “We got the call on a Friday and delivered it on Monday as requested.  We provided good equipment and good drivers who knew what they were doing. We were able to complete it with no incidents and [with] compliments at the end.”

“In this type of business,” Powell readily admits, “being reliable is really huge.” On construction projects, the equipment is held on the site, so the customers can see it and know it is there. But when it’s a service contract for which the equipment and operator must arrive at the site on time and ready to work, there’s that element of doubt. Powell, however, knows that her company’s reliability is one of its top attributes and selling points.

Expanded services
Quality Street Service provides street, parking lot, and construction-site sweeping and storm drain cleaning for the Inland Empire, parts of the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County, and the Los Angeles basin. All equipment operators are highly trained and experienced in their specific applications and follow best sweeping practices to comply with all federal and state EPA mandates.

For Powell, the joy of the job is simple: “I like the challenge of keeping up with the good quality of work with my employees. I’m involved in every step, from the bid on the first call to providing the service. I enjoy the fact that I can rely on my guys to provide a great service. We’re providing customers with the excellence they’re expecting—that feels good.”

For more information on Quality Street Service, please contact Alicia Powell at 760.776.8460 or at APowell@QualityStreetService.com; website: www.QualityStreetService.com.

Story by Anne Biggs

Yesterday, Matt Peach, Vice President and Owner of Extreme Clean USA, the event and venue cleaning company, was painting trash cans for Walt Disney World®. If he tells you it is an endless job, that’s because it truly is an endless job. When he and his team finish refurbishing the 17,900 trash receptacles that grace the entire Orlando resort, they start right over, repairing and painting each one again. About 300 to 400 containers a week enter Extreme Clean’s MAACO Collision Repair Shop and come out ready to return to the job of keeping the famous resort as spotless as Disney World’s reputation demands.

And that level of clean is what Extreme Clean USA’s own standards demand. Whether it’s the Talladega Superspeedway, Disney’s Wide World of Sports, the New York Yankees’ Legends Field or the State Fair of Virginia, Matt’s superior cleaning teams have received accolades from event-goers and clients again and again.

Before he established Extreme Clean USA about ten years ago, Matt Peach spent most of his life getting ready for this career. He worked for his father’s cleaning company in rural Indiana when he was a kid, picking up the basics of techniques and equipment. He honed his custodial, managerial and special events capabilities during several years on staff at Walt Disney World, overseeing the cleaning companies that took care of the huge resort. His time at Disney, a stint with another event cleaning company, and some practical experience working the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, convinced him he was ready.

“I came back and thought I’d do it myself,” Matt says. Apparently, his timing was perfection itself. “It blew up overnight.”  

Ten years later, Extreme Clean USA has contracts with famous racetracks, popular state and county fairs and well-known sports events and venues. Although most of its clients are major events—more than a million people—some are as small as just 300 people.

Cleaning and more
The company also does much more than just pre-event cleaning; it also maintains the venues during the events and post-event clean-up. It has expanded to include Distinct Decorators, which builds sets and installs them for events, and the MAACO body shop that also paints thirty to forty cars a week. The newest branch, Extreme Green USA, began last fall in response to a need for recycling services for its clients.

“Recycling is finally hitting the event industry,” explains Matt. “Partnering with Coca Cola, we now handle the recycling at all the racetracks and fairs. It’s a very big challenge to turn it around.” For example, Talladega Superspeedway sports a mile-long grandstand: “We have to go through it twice, once to pick up the recycling and once to clean and sweep it.”

Extreme Clean has a core group of eight full-time managers in different regions around the country. “That’s who runs the show on the road for me. They live in New York, Indiana, Alabama—wherever—and we fly them into the event, or they drive in if they have one of my pickups.”

The company operates with a full-time staff of thirty. However, give the team a race at Daytona International Speedway or a New York Yankees’ Spring Training weekend and the staff suddenly swells to as many as 1,300 workers. And this is where Caroline Peach, Matt’s wife and the “numbers person” for the business, really shines. Caroline is responsible for locating local nonprofit organizations to staff about 75 percent of the part-time workforce—a feature that makes Extreme Clean different from all the rest.

Unique way to “give back”
“We don’t use a bunch of day laborers,” says Matt. “We employ mostly local high school kids, church groups and military personnel and give that money back to the community. Every single race at Richmond International Raceway, we’re able to give a huge donation so all the military families can attend without paying at all,” because the local military personnel, under the supervision of their drill sergeants, serve as Extreme Clean’s temporary workers.

“There’s a church group that works two races a year for us at Talladega. The pastor told me that what they did for us paid the church’s mortgage and all its utilities for an entire year.

“We pay them the same hourly wage we’d pay any temps. They work hard for us. That’s a win-win for all of us.”

Matt is responsible for contract negotiations—“we’ve never lost a contract”—and customer relations, along with budget and staffing.

With the economic downturn, he’s found that “everyone wants discounts.” So he works with them.  “Caroline prints out the P&L sheets, and I show them to the client. I tell them what I need for the project to be profitable, and I suggest options to save them money. We work it out.”

In pursuit of excellence and customer satisfaction, Matt knows that successful communication is a key feature.  “I don’t stress out about anything. If there’s a problem, we fix it.”

Extreme Clean USA and its subsidiaries are based in Okahumpka, Florida, northwest of Orlando. For more information, visit the website: www.ExtremeCleanUSA.com or contact Caroline Peach at 407.832.0590 or CarolinePeach@ExtremeCleanUSA.com.

Story by Anne Biggs

“Kevin and I were looking to buy a business that fit our skills: Kevin’s background is in engineering and sales, and mine is in finance,” Viki says. “And we wanted a business where we could make a positive impact pretty quickly. We found this.”

Dayton Sweeping was started in 1972, by a one-man sweeper operator. When the wife-and-husband Kroeger team purchased it in 1999, it had a workforce of seven.

“Like a lot of people outside the industry, before this, we were blind to parking lot sweeping, never thought about it, didn’t even know it was done. But we built the company quickly. We’ve doubled our employees, from the original seven to our current fourteen, and have doubled revenues as well. I can’t believe it’s been ten years.”

Sweeping and more
“Our core business is parking lot and construction sweeping. We also provide snow removal services and have recently added power washing and landscape maintenance, based on customer need. In addition, for a few select customers with specific property management needs, we provide a variety of other services that we subcontract and oversee.”

DSS regularly sweeps at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Fairborn, Ohio, as a subcontractor on construction projects. In 2009, the company also did construction sweeping at Dayton International Airport as a subcontractor. The remainder of DSS Sweeping’s clients are within a two-hour radius of Dayton for construction sweeping and within a one-hour radius for parking lot sweeping, covering seventeen Greater Dayton and Greater Cincinnati counties in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

“Our parking lot customers are shopping centers, strip malls and big-box stores like Walmart. Besides construction clean-up jobs, we subcontract on municipal projects. Our ideal customer is one who wants the job done right. Usually, these are property managers, who are less hampered by costs and driven more by the quality of the work.”

Viki, who is responsible for strategic planning and budgeting, gets a kick out of her work. “I really like strategic planning. I’m a very organized, detail-oriented person, so I like generating ideas, coming up with a plan, and then watching the plan come to fruition.

“We are very quality driven. We believe in communicating with the customer, finding out what the needs are and then meeting those needs, instead of offering just a flat service.”

Change can be good

What advances has Viki seen in the industry?

“I think GPS technology has made a significant impact, providing us with a huge opportunity to improve our operations and cut costs, especially since GPS has become more cost-effective. We use it to assist us with billing and routing.”

To her relief, the economic downturn hasn’t impacted DSS’s business as much as she feared it might. “Only a few of our customers have cut services completely, while others have reduced services, but not significantly. And fortunately, some property managers see the downturn as their chance to let go of ineffective contractors and hire us to do a better job. We’ve seen the downturn as a growth opportunity and have hired a sales executive to generate new business. We are also pursuing projects funded with stimulus dollars.”

She believes strongly that one of their key skills is their willingness to learn from others, especially when faced with challenges. “We had a big problem with turnover a few years ago. Parking lot sweeping can be a tough job, working at night on your own. We’d train the new hires, but after two or three nights, they wouldn’t come back.

“We’re involved members of NAPSA, so we took some of the best practices of companies across the country, tweaked them to meet our needs, and implemented them. Now, we describe the job better in all our hiring materials so applicants fully understand it before they’re hired. It’s reduced our turnover by half, and now we have quality people who are really proud of the work they do.”

DSS Sweeping, majority owned and run by a woman, is certified as a Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE), Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE), Encouraging Diversity, Growth & Equity (EDGE) and is a NAPSA Certified Sweeping Company. For more information, visit the website: www.DSS-Sweeping.com.

 Story by Anne Biggs

Cupp really couldn’t afford to buy a new sweeper truck. So he bought three.  "I got three used Schwarze trucks," he recalled, "for $15,000 total. Then I combined them into one truck, which I used for two or three years."  A second truck followed, and Artscape now has a fleet of four. Thanks to the efforts of Schwarze Industries (Ricky Hyatt) and Tech support.

"We do a little of everything, parking lots, state roads," said Cupp.  “We’ve even got a contract with the LaFarge Company for quarries."  Cupp isn’t shy about forging new business relationships.  "I’m a little guy, but I’m kind of personable," he said.  Like the time he noticed a sweeper company working on a state highway.  "I pulled over and asked one of the guys how they got into that. He told me who to contact, and everything fell into place.

Before he was "micromanaging" parking lots, Cupp hung drywall. Then, he started cutting grass and landscaping.  "Through the grass-cutting job, I got to know a lot of the property owners in the Baltimore area, and I saw where a sweeping company might have potential."

Cupp continues to drive one of his company’s trucks, focusing primarily on highway work.  “A lot of guys, when they start building a company, decide to sit back and put all the work on somebody else,” he said. “Me, I still like to get out there and make sure the job is done right.”

In the lagging economy, Cupp sees the recent trend of property managers and municipalities hiring one company to perform multiple tasks to be reversing itself.  “It’s getting so everything is done by bid,” he said, “and not splitting things up.”

Nevertheless, he remains upbeat.  “I don’t think its all price,” he said. “I just can’t look at it that way. I think service still counts for a lot. When we bid $75 for an hour and a half, and if we’re out there for only 30 minutes, we adjust for that.”

Cupp took something of a gamble, he said, by not passing a fuel surcharge along to his customers. Instead, he decided to ride it out, and has recently been rewarded with pre-2007 prices.

The management tier for Artscape (now a $400,000 a year business) remains tight and a family business – Cupp, his son Danny and his wife Tammy. But that doesn’t mean Fred Cupp doesn’t think his other employees aren’t crucial to the company’s success. 
“You’re entrusting someone with a $90,000 piece of machinery,” he said. “That’s not something you take lightly. And it’s really to your benefit to keep your employees happy, something we try to do with bonuses and maybe an extra week’s vacation.”

Flashing back to long nights trudging across deserted parking lots with a broom and dustpan, Cupp now sees a long-term benefit in that drudgery.  “It made me very meticulous.”