Amidst global re-adjustments and geopolitical shifts, it’s good to find a proudly Canadian company stepping up, resolved to provide the nation with premium sanitation. Swish Maintenance Limited is a valued business partner of a breadth of Canada’s best companies, dedicated to delivering top-quality technology, products, equipment, and services together with superior customer service. Providing a smarter clean for smoother operations, the company has made large investments in its operations across the country over the past few years.
Headquartered in Peterborough, Ontario, Swish has been operating since 1956. With 13 branches from Nova Scotia to Vancouver, and with a partner serving Quebec, Swish takes its role as a local service provider to heart, positively impacting local communities and businesses in big ways. Over the past 69 years, Swish has established partnerships with a range of businesses and care providers while providing outstanding sanitation support. “It’s not about selling another cleaning product; it’s about partnering with clients daily,” says Jason Moorehead, Vice President of Sales.
The best of Canadian-made
The company’s portfolio includes more than 10,000 Canadian-made detergents. Of these, over 500 are specifically environmentally responsible. A good number are also ECOLOGO®, USDA Organic, and FSC-certified. Fabricated by its sister company, Charlotte Products Ltd., these expertly formulated sanitation materials are packaged in containers also produced on Canadian soil by another partner local to Swish.
Moreover, as a result of the supply chain challenges posed by COVID, Swish has developed robust systems to maintain its facilities and customers’ sanitation schedules at all times.
As keeping sophisticated cleaning processes operational around the clock is imperative for many of its partners, the company also ensures personalized service is available to them day and night. Moreover, it supports customers in finding alternative, locally produced products to replace any imports affected by price fluctuations resulting from tariffs, where necessary. The team also stays abreast of and develops market-leading technology.
As a result, Swish stands out in the industry for visionary innovation and thought leadership—and so does its position as a local company serving local people with quality, local products. “We’re one of the few in our industry that are truly Canadian-owned. Our owners are also in Canada; they’re active in the day-to-day business,” Moorehead says.
Toward a better industry
At the moment, the Swish team is preparing to solve a major pain point for customers of Canadian maintenance service providers: the industry-wide low levels of staff training.
When Swish discovered that a lack of skills among new employees is causing staff challenges and deep frustration for property managers, the company developed a new high-quality training program for industry use, which will soon be presented at a large global cleaning industry association event—ISSA—in the fall. This neatly illustrates the company’s approach: emphasis on education has been a longstanding part of its work.
Its state-of-the-art maintenance service, Swish Clean Checkup™, runs on SAVI software and can be tailored to a range of customer needs. It is also a popular educational tool that trains sanitation staff in effectively dealing with the realities of contamination and proliferation. Ultimately, the service helps clients audit entire buildings for sanitation quality using custom technology. The process entails thorough analysis and record-keeping, allowing for the measurement of bacterial and viral contamination and proliferation on the surfaces of furniture, doorknobs, countertops, taps, sanitizer dispensers, and even those surfaces that are often touched during the day—such as the sides of tables—but regularly missed during cleaning.
This helps guide decisions on adding shifts to ensure hygiene 24/7 and to identify and correct the weaknesses that may exist in some buildings. It provides tremendous support in organizations with fewer staff to maintain consistency and clear communication between shifts. This Swish service has become one of its most popular.
Indeed, the company ensures that it adds as much value as it can to all its offerings, making purchasing easy and cleaning a breeze. It has refined its sales process, improving its systems and the overall experience of doing business with Swish Maintenance. Moorehead is clear on the company’s overall mission: “Our intention in our sales process is to resolve customers’ cleaning challenges,” he says.
Making it easier
To achieve this, Swish offers a customer service line for purchasing and an accessible Clean-It® Centre store at each of its branches. It also makes online purchasing easy through its easy-to-navigate e-commerce platform. For those who prefer a more personalized service, the company delivers products right into their janitorial closets.
An extensive service team also ensures that equipment in the field is installed and functions optimally throughout its lifespan. With the Swish team’s attention and care, there is no such thing as boxes of equipment dropped off at customer locations for staff to deal with; the Swish team takes full responsibility for setup and staff training that covers everything from operation to maintenance, improving efficiency and the longevity of equipment through correct use and regular maintenance services.
It’s not all work and no play, however. With characteristic creativity, the company recently launched a fun campaign, No Dirty Words. While the slogan’s playful ambiguity grabs attention, the team takes this mission quite literally. “We seek to resolve our customers’ problems, like dirt and grime. But those two aren’t the only dirty words,” Moorehead says. Instead, the Swish team has researched and recorded pain points like the inefficiencies, back-orders, and delays that confront customers, and has set about eliminating them.
By ensuring that it takes care of the cleaning demands of medical, educational, hospitality, and other institutions, Swish Maintenance is also directly impacting the wellness and success of the people who use such buildings. “We commit to communities from coast to coast,” Moorehead says, highlighting that the company’s impact reaches far beyond business and even partnerships. Swish supports economic opportunity through employment and philanthropic efforts that improve the lives of the people in and around its facilities.
Standing out
By differentiating itself in such creative ways, Swish Maintenance has etched its name into local business legend. Powered by passionate people and an indelible entrepreneurial spirit, the company’s ethos of continuous improvement has proven invaluable to its longevity. “We’re always looking beyond to understand what our customers’ true challenges are,” Moorehead says.
But for relationships to flourish, introspection is as important as attention to the client’s needs. To look inward, Swish carefully examines Net Promoter Scores (NPS) that test and analyze customer loyalty throughout its organization. While the high scores given to the company are gratifying, the team’s focus is on applying the data to improve its future service model.
One area for improvement that this process revealed was the need for faster delivery. Action was immediate—an improvement in the company’s product delivery scheme, with lead times being significantly reduced as a result. By making customer priorities its own, the company has driven its evolution in meaningful ways, delivering satisfaction and securing longstanding customer commitments at the same time.
This success would not be possible without the contribution of a skilled and motivated staff. “It’s our people,” Moorehead says, “and we’re really proud of them—from our drivers and technicians to the sales team and operators.” In return, the company supports the personal and professional growth of its staff through generous investment, information provision, and skills transfer. Other ongoing care includes training, coaching, in-house mentoring, and peer support. In this way, the team remains an expert resource that customers can turn to with confidence.
Moving ahead, the mood at Swish Maintenance Limited is steadfast and positive. Customers can look forward to increasingly sophisticated service and even higher levels of customer partnership and engagement, as the company’s resolve to become the country’s premier supplier of cleaning services, supplies, and equipment bears fruit. Moorehead’s message is clear: “We’re committed to our customers and their experience,” he says. “Let us help you navigate these difficult times in the Canadian market.”
