In March of 2021, Bernie Lawson celebrated his business’ 38th anniversary. PM Building Maintenance Corp. is a business offering commercial janitorial and restoration services in the Richmond, VA area.
PM’s business model is founded on its reputation and established relationships. Hiring and finding good people is a challenge, but PM has found the right people — currently employing about 100 people.
“In our marketplace, I will tell my customers, we’re a big, small company.” Big enough to compete with other major players, but small enough to build personal relationships with their customer base.
Bernie loves CompanyCam! PM Maintenance uses it to document projects and keep all clients in the loop and updated on project progress. Follow along below to find out how Bernie and his team utilize CompanyCam daily.
What photo documentation problems did you see in the restoration or janitorial industry before starting CompanyCam?
At PM Building Maintenance Corp. we take a lot of photos and videos for each project.
Before CompanyCam, we’d try putting the photos on a thumb drive. The photos were often too big to email. It was a huge pain in the neck.
It was very problematic, but we’d try to get some drives with card names engraved on them. Again if we had to send them directly to an insurance carrier out of state — it was problematic.
Before CompanyCam we tried Dropbox but had limited success with that.
A lot of insurance carriers and bigger companies we dealt with had firewalls set up, so we couldn’t effectively share our stuff. I remember it being a hassle.
CompanyCam has been a total game-changer, both on the janitorial side of our business and the restoration side.
Since downloading CompanyCam, how has it changed your processes?
I have my supervisors and management people using CompanyCam now.
When we go out on a clean-up job, we create a project in CompanyCam. Everybody uploads photos onto that specific project. Some of the projects and images are just for internal consumption with marketing purposes.
Another reason for internal documentation would be in case something goes wrong.
CompanyCam has been a total game-changer, both on the janitorial side of our business and the restoration side.
We use CompanyCam because it allows us to proactively share projects with customers on any given job– and our customers love it.
Even for a small construction clean-up job or a water job, we send our clients documentation on all the jobs. Our customers say,“This is neat! I get to see what you did. I get to see your guy out there doing stuff.”
Customers absolutely love it.
When you guys added in the video feature, that was huge.
One of our competitors lost an account because they had a problem locking doors in one of the buildings. They couldn’t get a handle on it. And when we came in, we said,“this is how we’re going to solve that problem.”
We had a supervisor video document that showed everything. We posted those pictures and videos on CompanyCam.
There was a time when the tenant said,“Hey, the cleaning company left the house door open all weekend. I came on Monday morning and found this door open.” We were able to go back and say,“no — check Friday night’s video feed.”
We sent over the file to the tenant and they’ll see that door was locked. With that one video, the claim is completely exonerated.
You can’t quantify trust; it’s huge. CompanyCam has given us a way to enhance and develop a much stronger bond with our customers.
And, again, my customer was just ecstatic that we were able to document our work. Confidence subconsciously developed in that customer for us.
We’re living in a world now where you must have video or photo documentation. It’s a basic requirement; so you better have some documentation!
We live in a world where documentation is required and expected. Keeping track of everything is necessary.
Which feature would you say in CompanyCam provides your company the most benefit?
The ease of sharing a project. I can share a link and then add photos during the course of the job. The feed refreshes in real-time. That part is really nice.
Internally, CompanyCam is nice because it’s user-friendly. Since COVID-19 started, we’ve been doing a huge amount of enhanced cleaning stuff like disinfection services. CompanyCam helps with that.
CompanyCam makes it easy, right from the get-go, to include photo documentation of our process. We are able to reassure our customers that, when we say we’re spraying and wiping down surfaces, we are doing it.
When you come back in an after day, you don’t know what was sprayed or not. You can’t tell.
So taking photos and videos and putting them into CompanyCam, they are aware. We include written documentation and photo documentation. Customers can look up the photos and say,“Oh, they are spraying here and there.”
Our crews are cleaning with one hand and taking photos with the other.
Everyone can go back and see all the pictures and the progress that was made. Because there’s an unlimited amount of storage, we can take hundreds of pictures.
Hypothetically, after we clean an office and one of the office workers says,“I don’t think they cleaned my office.” Well, they can now open up the file and see photos of my team coming in, spraying, and treating that person’s desk.
Our crews are cleaning with one hand and taking photos with the other.
CompanyCam makes documentation effortless. With unlimited storage, what’s the difference if you take 100 pictures or 500 pictures on a job? I’ll take 500 or 600 pictures on a job.
I’d rather have more pictures than not enough pictures.
What would you say to those companies that are on the fence about using CompanyCam?
You can’t afford to NOT have photo documentation. It’s like insurance.
Once your company culture adapts to picture-taking and documentation in all the work you do, it becomes easy.
I’ve been in court where expert witnesses use CompanyCam’s time-stamped photos. CompanyCam is an invaluable asset too — it time-stamps everything, therefore eliminating the legitimacy of the documentation being put into question.
It’s only going to take one time of saving your butt to make CompanyCam all worthwhile.
It’s only going to take one time of saving your butt to make CompanyCam all worthwhile.
CompanyCam is [blank].
CompanyCam is a tool that our company uses on a daily basis. It provides me with peace of mind as a business owner.
Bernie Lawson works for PM Building Maintenance Corp., a commercial janitorial company that also does restoration work. They provide full service janitorial, IICRC certified carpet cleaning and carpet maintenance programs, and emergency flood mitigation and mold remediation.
For over three decades, they have been “providing [their] customers with industry leading state of the art equipment and methodologies.”
