Lawrence Cleaning Services (LCS) was opened for business in 1996 by David Lawrence. The business was started from his home in Northampton, with one vacuum cleaner and a bucket of cleaning materials. David’s previous employment saw him serving his country on nuclear submarines. Following on from this role, he then worked with some of the largest cleaning companies in the UK where he gained invaluable experience to use as the foundation of LCS. His first clients were small offices, however, after recommendations the business started to flourish with some of Northamptonshire’s finest household names coming on board as customers. After 2 years of working from home, LCS moved into its first office located in Northampton town centre and employed its first Area Manager.
Following various organic growth spurts, bigger premises and additional staff were required for its expanding team. In 2003 LCS became a limited company. Whilst retaining a lot of their original customer base, over the years LCS’s expansion has continued to its present level of 275 staff. They now possess Corporate Membership of BICSs, have obtained accreditation with Altius and are an approved Safe Contractor. The company has also gained accreditation from the National Academy of Crime Scene Cleaning.
Throughout their history, their main principle has been to work with customers who want a quality service. LCS then form a good understanding of what is needed and they endeavour to forge an effective working relationship with their clients. From a free initial survey, all areas are carefully measured, and individual room usage is taken into account. Using this information, LCS produce a comprehensive report which will show only the areas and tasks that are required to maintain a clean premises. There’s no guesswork involved, customers get exactly what they are paying for. LCS understands that cleaning staff leaving early can cost customers money. Either the job may not have been completed, or the required standards are not maintained. LCS ensure that their customers receive the very best service throughout the entire contract, by utilising an effective telephone-based time & attendance system. The system is used to monitor staff attendance times and eliminates hand written time sheets. LCS staff are only paid for the time they spend on a customers’ site. LCS recognise that their cleaning staff are key to achieving exceptional service, this is why they strive to recruit the best. LCS only use fully BICS trained managers. They are also proud of the fact that their customers will be dealing with real people. They don’t use call centres and the need for email communication is negligible.
When asked why they had selected CleanLink’s software solutions for their business, Mark Lawrence, General Manager explained: “We had grown as much as we could whilst relying on numerous spreadsheets, paper timesheets and manual customer audits. The paper trail was very long and had become far too time consuming for us. We started to look at technology for a solution and came across CleanLink, online. We wanted a solution that gave our managers all of the key information about their staff and customers at their fingertips. We needed to free managers from updating spreadsheets so they could be out visiting sites and really add value for our customers.
We chose CleanLink because it became apparent from day one that this software really was bespoke to the cleaning industry. It allowed us to enter data from a bunch of spreadsheets into one central system that could easily be updated, as well as interlinking with our existing accounts package and time and attendance system.”
LCS has been using the CleanLink software solution since the beginning of March 2018. When considering the benefits that using CleanLink has already provided them, Mark further commented: “Tasks that previously took a few days to complete such as stock/wage budgets are now done automatically, Payroll has been reduced from 5 days, to less than a single day. Using CleanLink’s Mobile App, our cleaning audits are so in depth that our customers are benefiting from their premises being cleaner on a day to day basis. We feel that utilising CleanLink has added value for our clients by freeing up time for our managers to spend more time out on sites preventing issues, doing site audits and spending more time with staff, rather than sat in the office completing spreadsheets. Our customers get a detailed cleaning audit every month sent to them in a professional format with pictures to back up what we have found. Many have commented on how this sets us apart from our competition.”
LCS strive to provide a quality service and at a competitive rate for their customers. They firmly believe that they can rival any other cleaning company in keeping their cleaning services both localised and personal for their clients.
