Well, here we are, potentially staring down the barrel of yet another gun in 2022. Maybe they will be a new variant, maybe another breed of flying killer bugs, maybe some politicians will argue unceasingly about some issue. Who knows? It might be a wild ride! It might not though – it might mellow out, right? … Right!?
Whatever 2022 has in store for you and your industry, one thing is for certain, business won’t be back to completely normal. Normal as in 2019, when the world was good and well. We will still be feeling the effects of the pandemic and we will still be scrambling around looking for workers, helpers, volunteers, and everything else you might need to complete your daily job: staples, diapers, toilet paper, coffee.
Because of these challenges, you will see below 3 key reasons you should outsource janitorial in 2022.
The elephant in the room – labor & workers.
As we’ve written elsewhere at length, the labor problem we have been experiencing in 2020 & 2021 is NOT going away. This is to do primarily with birth rates over the last 3 decades. Principally, older generations who are now retiring, just didn’t have enough children to replace themselves.
As Emsi, in their seminal paper on the topic explains:
“Since 1971 the fertility rate in America has been below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, which means millions of Americans will be absent first from the classroom and then from the labor market – because they were never born.”
The paper goes on to confirm our worst fears – yes, sitting in the Taco Bell drive through for 45 minutes is the new normal:
Regardless of what you think the ideal global population size might be, or whether you think our biggest problem is too few people or too many, a sharp and sudden population reduction will have enormous implications for the economy and the lifestyle we all take for granted. The ability to order a package and see it in days, to buy a cup of coffee on your way to work, to enjoy a wealth of affordable consumer goods, to have our garbage collected, to fill a prescription, to receive nursing care—all these functions depend on an army of workers that simply cannot be replaced if they were never born.
What this means for you:
You probably have a hard enough time staffing the main positions in your facility. Teachers are in low supply, factory work lines and conveyor belts are low in population, and you are needing to meet huge quoters to fill the demand and the supply chain is unrelenting. The last thing you need to worry about is staffing security guards, custodians, janitors, and a myriad of other ‘low-on-the-totem-pole” positions.
If only there were a way that someone else could worry about that…
It may not have always been this bad to staff those positions, but it is bad now, and it’s going to get worse. So much so that you won’t be able to focus on the main thing: your job! In 2022, instead of battling the employment ‘crisis’ all on your own, receiving complaints that the toilets weren’t cleaned, and trying to post jobs on indeed for janitors -off load that responsibility to a company to shoulder, that way you can at least just have to worry about staffing the position with employees who you’re actually going to have to work with!
It might be one of the only fixed expenses you have!
The economy is an up and down roller-coaster right now. Gas is one price now, and tomorrow it’ll be another, and in a couple of months from now we’ll all be cycling to work. Or hopefully racing each other on our Vespers to the office. Electric Vespers, that is.
But with supply chains being crushed beneath the weight of supply and demand variables, which are themselves constantly changing, by the way, prices are invariably going to fluctuate. The price of goods, services, and labor will be rising and falling month by month for the foreseeable future. Many different factors will affect this fluctuation – government regulations, health situations, corporate reactions to the proceeding two point. With these inevitable continuing changes to prices, it is going to be increasingly difficult to budget. With larger corporations having to consider fluctuations in prices, the trickle-down effect will be that no one will know how much something will cost in the future.
In steps the signed agreement with a janitorial company.
With most janitorial contracts being a fixed monthly price – outsourcing this item will at least give you a breather when it comes to budgeting for the future. Unless, of course, you picked the cheapest vendor and they do a horrible job (So horrible you find yourself sending out RFPs again after only a couple of months).
Where you can fix expenses – you should! The coming years, maybe decades, will be filled to the brim with ebbing and flowing prices. Fixed expenses are your friend. Janitorial is almost always a fixed expense. One monthly set amount.
(For more information on the types of prices models for janitorial contracts, please click here.)
Supplies could be cheaper.
It is no secret that the bacon sandwich restaurant gets cheaper bacon than the average joe buying bacon in the store. It is the same with janitorial supplies. You may have been buying janitorial supplies yourself over the last two decades. But as iterated in the point above, supply and demand are having a squeeze on EVERYTHING. Meaning the price of cleaning chemicals may become more noticeable on the P & L.
“How much did you say hand soap cost?”
Before these unprecedented times, you may have conceded that, yes, I do pay more in cleaning supplies than a janitorial company, but I save in janitorial spend because I don’t outsource. And that may have been true prior to any soft cost analysis (things like how much labor time you spend fixing problems, or trying to staff janitors, or purchasing cleaning supplies). But now that little loss margin might swell a little larger and be a little more noticeable. By outsourcing this commodity, despite spending a little more because of the mark up the janitorial company would spend on you, you might actually save money because of the vendor’s prices as they buy through associations.
The three factors above may prove to make staffing and funding the janitorial expense in house far too much of a burden to continue doing. You may find that going forward, it will be easier outsource services such as janitorial so that you can focus on your own job and your own team members.
