Employing the right type of people as cleaners and ensuring they are well trained is the way most cleaning companies operate. We were right to do that but we missed out on another important issue and that was about providing the right tools and cleaning chemicals. We learned by experience that the wrong chemicals reduced the top cleaners down to the level of an average cleaner.

We were spending a lot of time discussing how we could ensure we were meeting the standards we were promising our customers and the decision was taken to work towards ISO 9001 and then at a later stage added ISO 14001 to the programme. In one of those seemingly endless working parties someone joined us from the Glasgow cleaners officehow we had chosen to use the cleaning chemicals we were buying right across the country. We suddenly realized we had not been asking ourselves enough questions and it took a relatively new person to tell us that.

Not a single person could answer that question and then the issue really dawned on us about needing standards right across the whole spectrum.

So we went back to basics and asked what criteria over and above the fact they clean do we want in commercial cleaning chemicals to know they are the right choice. The session quickly was turn out to all present and to other people in the company about what we wanted to see in the specifications for the perfect commercial cleaning chemicals. Then the hard work of identifying the real shortlist criteria that would meet our needs for us was to begin.

Looking back we should not have been surprised but we were at that time to discover that most of our cleaning chemicals could not meet even half the criteria we were setting. It was not just a case of walking down the rows at our local cleaning supplies storeroom but practical testing on real surfaces in our customers premises to thoroughly check their effectiveness in the real cleaning world.

Prior to the practical test we studied datasheets to learn about any potential hazards to people, the local environment or to customers premises. After all we did not want to have a very clean floor that was being damaged or eaten away by strong acid cleaning materials.

There was only cleaner that met all our criteria in full even though none of the testing team had ever used it prior to the test starting. That clear winner was Soluclean by a mile. Very effective in cleaning power but top marks for safety at the same time. As it came on small dis-solvable concentrated sachets and you simply dropped a sachet in a bucket of water or trigger spray it was easy to always get a consistent strength. In addition there was no need to carry lots of water containing only small amounts of chemical from one side of the country to another. Plus they had been proved to be able to work in hospitals killing most of the most common infections which made patients ill.

We quickly decided to become the national distributor for these cleaning chemicals and now supply them to other cleaning companies across Scotland.