Articles – Industrial Public Venues Transportation & Retail Cleaning

From the Cart to the Corporate Office

By |2026-09-30T16:26:37-05:00September 30, 2026|

Frontline turnover in commercial cleaning runs at an estimated 200% a year, and each departure costs roughly $3,500 to replace. Labor is already the largest expense for a building service contractor. Channing Johnson, president of KB Building Services in Nebraska, considers turnover the industry's biggest problem and one it rarely puts enough effort into solving. ...

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When Debt Becomes a Growth Tool

By |2026-09-29T11:50:28-05:00September 29, 2026|

Plenty of cleaning business owners take pride in owing nothing. They’ve paid off the trucks and equipment, and nobody at a bank has a say in how the company runs. Steve Mastin, chief financial officer of 4M Building Holdings in St. Louis, knows owners like that. He described a friend, a local businessman who pays ...

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The Missing Piece in Every AI Rollout

By |2026-09-29T11:49:42-05:00September 29, 2026|

New AI tools show up faster than most cleaning companies can evaluate them. The harder question, according to two speakers at the 2026 ISSA VEO Conference in Dallas, is whether the people expected to use those tools will trust them long enough to make a difference. That question drives “Leading with AI and Humanity in ...

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Immigration Pressure Hits the Cleaning Workforce

By |2026-09-28T15:07:56-05:00September 28, 2026|

Juan Carlos Cerda has lived in the United States since he was three. He grew up in Dallas, graduated from Yale University and now serves as the Texas state director for the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC), a bipartisan group of more than 2,000 CEOs and employers pushing for immigration reform. He is also a ...

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Hidden in Plain Sight

By |2026-09-23T09:43:03-05:00September 22, 2026|

The cleaning and facility solutions industry, represented by ISSA, which we are proud to be a member of, is never short on conversations about labor. We talk about recruiting, turnover, attendance, training, safety, reliability, and retention, while wondering where to find people who will show up, follow the process, care about quality, and take pride ...

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How Allan Industries Brought Robots to Work in a Union Town

By |2026-09-21T15:49:04-05:00September 21, 2026|

Allan Industries is testing what automation looks like on the ground floor of a union town. At a newly built commercial property on Market Street in Philadelphia, autonomous vacuums and a robotic scrubber now work alongside the company’s union cleaning crews, taking over the long hallways and open lobbies that used to eat up hours ...

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How Clean Is Clean?

By |2026-09-16T10:57:57-05:00September 14, 2026|

A surface can look clean and still carry significant bioload. The new Bioload Exposure Metric Index (BEMI) aims to standardize ATP sampling and move surface hygiene toward a measurable cleanliness score. If we can't measure clean, how do we know we've achieved it? When we clean a surface, we physically remove unwanted substances, whereas sanitizers ...

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Cleaning in the Age of Real-Time Data

By |2026-09-09T12:25:22-05:00September 9, 2026|

From smart dispensers and connected equipment to occupancy sensors and predictive maintenance, the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming cleaning from a reactive task into a data-driven operation. Real-time insights help facility managers optimize labor, improve service quality, reduce waste, and respond to issues before they become complaints. As connected technologies become more accessible, cleaning ...

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The Business of Sustainability

By |2026-09-08T15:14:28-05:00September 3, 2026|

When the professional cleaning industry gathers this November at the ISSA Show North America 2026 in Las Vegas, one topic will take center stage—sustainability. This year’s program goes far beyond environmental responsibility. It focuses on how sustainability helps organizations reduce costs, improve efficiency, strengthen customer relationships, manage risk, and build more resilient businesses. Simply put, ...

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Finding Customers Who Value Real -Time Health Data

By |2026-08-31T15:10:20-05:00August 31, 2026|

Health is wealth, and cleaning executives will prosper as they play a strong role in the health of indoor spaces for customers who value it. The number of these customers is growing. Healthy building construction will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.9% from 2025 to 2032 (Meticulous Research, 2024) compared to a ...

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