1-800-SWEEPER

1-800-SWEEPER Welcomes Prosweep Central Florida, LLC

sweeper1 — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:46:34 +0000

1-8800-SWEEPER is pleased to announce the addition of our newest partner, Prosweep Central Florida, LLC. Prosweep Central Florida was started in July of 1998 by Rick Robinson with a single parking lot sweeper truck, ambition, and hard work. One day, while working for American Airlines, Rick saw a truck sweeping a nearby parking lot and he decided to investigate starting his own business. His first sweeper, a used 1993 Tymco 300, helped him with his first parking lot jobs, and eventually opened the door to municipal and county street sweeping work as well.

In the early years, his marketing consisted of a one page flyer distributed via fax. “I looked for commercial properties with signage and wrote down phone numbers. When I got back to the office, I would call and get the fax number, and send over my information.” Although his early marketing efforts may seem unsophisticated in today’s internet world, they worked, and he built a successful book of business that continues to grow to this day. With the rise of the internet, he continued building on this growth via an optimized website and a Google PPC program. Rick initially found out about 1-800-SWEEEPER while doing Google searches looking for local competitors in the Orlando area. According to Robinson, “It took me a while to warm up to the idea of putting someone else’s number on my trucks, but I finally saw the value and decided to give the program a shot.” Rick takes advantage of our United Rotary Brush group discounts and is looking forward to checking out our tire deal when it is finalized too.

Hard work, technical aptitude (Rick seldom runs into something he can’t fix) and marketing savvy have helped Prosweep Central Florida blossom into a well equipped shop with 30 trucks and clients throughout the Central Florida area. Prosweep will provide parking lot and street sweeping services to the Orlando, Florida area.

Please welcome Rick and extend a 1-800-SWEEPER welcome to the entire crew at Prosweep Central Florida.

How to Get a Months FREE Area Code For Every Sweeper You Run

sweeper1 — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:44:04 +0000

Talking to owners in the 1-800-SWEEPER network I’m often surprised that not everyone is taking advantage of our cost saving opportunities. The only explanation I’ve come up with is that we are a “Hard Headed Bunch” or the perceived saving are too small. It may also be that savings stated as a percentage just don’t have the same impact. So I did a little exercise to generate some real numbers:

I made a list of all the filters needed for one basic filter change for a Tymco 600.
I purchased a set from my old supplier (Wix)
I purchased the exact same filters from my new supplier. (Baldwin)
I compared the prices and found I’m saving $52.72 per oil change.

My actual numbers are shown on invoices that are available by clicking here. We change our oil about every 150 hours. So about 10 times per year.

$52.72 savings times ten oil changes = $527.20 per year savings PER TRUCK.

It’s actually a little better than that, because we also need to change hydraulic filters and transmission filters at some point (just not every time). So the annual savings is even higher. Running twelve trucks I just put well over SIX GRAND in my pocket! This year! I should save the same or more next year and every year I’m a member. How much sweeping do you need to do to pocket $6K? Make the switch, it works.

To find a distributor near you: http://www.baldwinfilter.com/distributorlocator.html

We happened to choose Grainger. During the initial setup, we needed the Baldwin representative to run interference for us as the local Grainger deals with thousands of dealers and they were not familiar with the 1-800-SWEEPER program. It took a few weeks, but now everything runs very smooth. It is a set it, and forget it process. The savings just keep coming.

If your savings are even greater, let us know. Let us all celebrate with you.

Enjoy the savings!

Mark Carter
Bill’s Sweeping Service, LLC
1-800-SWEEPER Partner

From the 1-800-SWEEPER Newsroom: New Initiative To Recognize Military Service

sweeper1 — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:43:12 +0000

Although we often focus on the equipment and technology that forms the backbone of our fleets, at the end of the day, the sweeping business is a service oriented endeavor, and the most important part of our businesses is our staff. Without the right people in place, even the most modern and up-to-date equipment is of little use. And while we all have numerous talented and gifted employees on our payrolls, there is one special group of employees that deserve extra thanks: our veterans. To this end, the board of 1-800-SWEEPER has adopted a new initiative to recognize the service of our veteran employees.

Each month, we will honor the contributions and sacrifices an employee has made to protect our freedoms and highlight how skills learned while serving our country translate to civilian life. For those of us making hiring decisions, we encourage you to read this portion of our blog on a regular basis, and consider hiring a vet. Their leadership skills, work ethic, and can-do mentality get things done. These character traits make for excellent employees. In addition to finding a valuable new team member, you’ll be paying it forward and quietly thanking a special group that has done so much for us all.

If you would like to nominate one of your employees for their military service and explain how this individual makes an impact on your day-to-day operations, feel free to drop Carolyn Bell a quick note and we will make arrangements to include your employee in this regularly featured column.

1-800-SWEEPER Welcomes New Partner Clean Sweep, Inc. of Tennessee

sweeper1 — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:29:35 +0000

1-800-SWEEPER is proud to announce another new partner, Pete Phillips of Clean Sweep, Inc., of Chattanooga, TN. Founded in 1984, Pete’s company is a second generation, family owned and operated business whose origin’s lie in his mother’s inability to find a reliable, local sweeping service company. Back in the day, Pete’s mom was working as a property manager, and her frustration over finding a company to help with sweeping prompted Pete’s father to start Clean Sweep. The local construction boom of the early 90’s saw Clean Sweep cleaning up job sites for nationally known, big box stores such as Target and Best Buy. According to Phillips, “We went in for the contractors to clean up and never left.” In fact, Clean Sweep still services many of its original customers the company attracted when it opened its doors back in 1984. Although the company’s initial book of business was built largely by word of mouth, Phillips has come to appreciate the marketing power of the internet, and he supplements leads generated by search engine optimization and Google Pay-Per-Click advertising with participation in 1-800-SWEEPER. Pete’s explanation for joining 1-800-SWEEPER is pretty concise and to the point: “Once I understood the program, I saw the value. Bottom line, I didn’t want any of my competitors to gain the rights to service my area code.”

In addition to the marketing benefits, Phillips is leveraging his investment in 1-800-SWEEPER membership by securing discounts on supplies too. “I used to get my brooms through Keystone, but now I used United Rotary because of the member discount….I get a lot of my supplies through 1-800-SWEEPER now.”

Clean Sweep will offer parking lot sweeping and street sweeping to Chattanooga, TN (area code 423). Be sure to welcome Pete and all of the team at Clean Sweep to the 1-800-SWEEPER family!

Upcoming May 23rd Webinar: Clean Streets Mean Clean Streams

sweeper1 — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:54:57 +0000

To many contractors, municipal planners, and property managers unfamiliar with our industry’s best practices, a freshly swept street that looks clean is clean. Like many things in life, appearances can be deceiving. Did you know that using the wrong type of sweeper can leave behind up to 50% of the heavy metals and other pollutants attached to dirt particles? What’s more, the pollutants left behind don’t just make for dirty streets—they represent a major threat to the water quality of our nation’s streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans.

The North American Power Sweeping Association (NAPSA) is promoting an upcoming webinar presented by internationally renowned sweeping expert, Roger Sutherland, who will explain how to select the proper sweeping equipment and demonstrate how an effective street sweeping program can significantly reduce pollutants found in storm water. Webinar attendees will learn more about the following topics as they relate to street sweeping and storm water run-off:

Review the results of the historic Nationwide Urban Runoff Program’s assessment of the storm water quality benefits of street cleaning, and why those 1982 conclusions are no longer valid today.
Learn about the contaminated sediment-like material that accumulates of streets and highways and why its effective control results in a reduction of the pollutants normally found in storm water.
Identify the important elements of a street cleaning program that can be controlled and learn how these elements should be managed.
Acquire the knowledge needed to test the pickup performance of street sweepers and the evaluation of the results and why this matters.

As new environmental regulations are implemented and existing measures are more strictly enforced, each of our companies must become better informed and better equipped to deal with the environmental challenges presented by storm water run-off. Simply put, we aren’t just in the business of sweeping to keep streets and commercial property neat and tidy any more…we are being asked to become better stewards of the environment. Attending Roger’s webinar will help you do just that.

This post just happens to coincide with a Google Doodle celebrating Earth Day. Folks who use Google may on occasion notice special artwork when they land on the search page. Today’s Doodle reminds us about the importance of clean water. In case you missed it, we have included a screen capture:

If you are interested in learning more about how an effective sweeping program can have a positive impact on water quality in your area, you won’t want to miss this important webinar. Here are the details:

Presenter:
Roger C. Sutherland, P.E.
AMEC Environmental and Infrastructure
Thurs., May 23^rd @ 2 p.m. EDT / 11 a.m. PDT,
1-1.5hrs*
1 PDH / 0.1 CEU
$79.00

Additional information on this webinar can be found here and attendees can register for this educational presentation by visiting Forester University’s website here.

Cleaning the Colors of a Rainbow: Immaculate Power Sweeping Profiled in the April Edition of North American Sweeper Magazine

sweeper1 — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:04:06 +0000

Regular readers of our blog may remember a story we ran about the Color Me Rad Race in Boston last summer. Color Me Rad is a nationwide 5K race venue that travels city to city. Runners start the race with a clean white t-shirt, and as they make their way through the course, they are doused with brightly colored cornstarch. By the time runners hit the finish line, they sport a colorful rainbow of colors from head to toe. We ran this story in part because race director Jessica Hall contacted 1-800-SWEEPER for post-race clean up assistance, and in part because she wrote a glowing testimonial that spoke to Immaculate Power Sweeping’s ability to leave the venue looking pristine in just a few short hours after the conclusion of the race.

This month’s edition of North American Sweeper Magazine has a fascinating interview with Immaculate’s Derek Grieco. In this feature story, Derek explains in great detail how his company managed to clean up after the race, and how his conversations with race director Jessica Hall helped to create a new job spec for cleanup efforts for other venues in the Color Me Rad race circuit.

The colored cornstarch is very light and silky and the material will stain pavement if it comes into contact with water. According to Grieco, “If we sprayed water on the initial sweep, it would’ve instantly stained the entire parking lot. We couldn’t use a mechanical broom to sweep it up because it would’ve created a massive dust bomb. It had to be done with a vacuum sweeper.” By running the sweeper just above idle, and dry vacuuming first, much of the colored cornstarch could be easily removed from the pavement surface. For the second phase of the cleanup, Grieco hired a company with a water truck used to fill pools. Once on site, the Immaculate crew attached a 1- 1/2” hose to the tanker and washed the stained areas. The water suspended the staining starch suspend, which was vacuumed up with a second pass of the sweepers. If you are wondering how Grieco’s equipment fared when it got back to the shop, the news was a pleasant surprise: Derek’s hoppers were spotless. The starch actually dissolved into water placed in the hopper before heading to the jobsite and the exterior of the trucks just needed a quick rinse.

One of the most interesting parts about coming to work at 1-800-SWEEPER each day is that when the phone rings, we never know who will be calling. Sure much of our work is of a very ordinary variety, but we get some unusual calls too. From hurricane cleanups to race venues and Mardis Gras….we hear (and sweep) it all. To read the rest of the story about how Immaculate Power Sweeping saved the day for the Color Me Rad folks in this month’s issue of North American Sweeper Magazine, click here.

Reasons to Join 1-800-SWEEPER : Testimonial From Randy Hite of Piedmont Property Services

sweeper1 — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:23:51 +0000

Sometimes when we finish giving 1-800-SWEEPER presentations, new prospective partners say, “The benefits of being involved in 1-800-SWEEPER sound good…..I like the idea of the cooperative internet marketing, the search engine optimization, the sales leads, and the potential savings I might receive from your buying group, but how do I know if it will really work?” As business owners, we have all been pitched on the “next big thing”……the “no brainer idea” that will help us grow our companies. Sometimes these ideas are home runs….sometimes they are fall short of the mark. At 1-800-SWEEPER, we think some of our best reasons to join come from our actual partners. Randy Hite’s recent testimonial is case in point. Here is what the owner of Piedmont Property Services has to say about belonging to 1-800-SWEEPER:

“We joined 1-800-SWEEPER about a year ago and it’s more than paid for itself,” says Hite. “It’s been a good experience for us, because we were looking to expand into the industrial side. It almost instantly put us in that business and it was much more cost effective than doing a lot of additional marketing and advertising on our own.”

Do you have a testimonial that you would like to share with us? If so, please contact Carolyn Bell and we will share your positive experiences with the rest of the group.

Partner Spotlight: Clean Sweep, Inc of Chattanooga, TN Profiled In North American Sweeper Magazine

sweeper1 — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:18:19 +0000

Pete Phillips of Clean Sweep, in Chattanooga, TN is the latest of our partners to be profiled in this month’s edition of North American Sweeper Magazine. Like many sweeper companies, Clean Sweep is a second generation, family owned and operated business. Pete’s mom was a property manager who found reliable sweeping service companies were hard to come by, so his father decided to take the plunge and get into the business in the 1980’s. Clean Sweep did the initial construction clean up sweeping for local area retailers such as Target and Best Buy, and his company never parted ways with these and other big stores. When the company was first starting out, the new business leads were primarily from word of mouth and the yellow pages. Since this time, Phillips has come to appreciate the power of the internet too, and his word of mouth referrals are complemented by leads generated by search engine optimization, Google Pay-Per-Click advertising, and participation in 1-800-SWEEPER.

In addition to the marketing benefits, Phillips takes advantage of his 1-800-SWEEPER membership to secure discounts on supplies too. “I used to get my brooms through Keystone, but now I used United Rotary because of the member discount….I get a lot of my supplies through 1-800-SWEEPER now.”

Phillips even shares some thoughts on how to maintain an adequate inventory of spare parts…but for that, you’ll need to take a peek at the rest of the story in this month’s edition of North American Sweeper, which can be found by clicking this link.

Be sure to welcome Pete and all of the team at Clean Sweep to the 1-800-SWEEPER family!

From the 1-800-SWEEPER Newsroom: Construction and Street Sweeping Calls Prompt New Equipment Purchase

sweeper1 — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:37:07 +0000

Movie buffs may remember the “If you build it, they will come” line from Field of Dreams. It is a great line from a fantastic movie….a quote that can apply to a lot of things in life. It may be a stretch of the imagination to use lines from baseball movies when writing about the sweeping industry, but today is the first day of spring, baseball is in the air, and the snow that has blanketed much of the country this winter will soon be a fading memory. The spring cleanup season will soon be upon us.

When we began work on the 1-800-SWEEPER website in the summer of 2011, a core group of companies rallied around a shared vision of a cooperative business alliance to generate sales leads and create the collective buying power of a $50 million dollar a year business. Although nobody uttered the phrase, we believed “if you build it, they will come.” We did build it…..and the business did come.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this analogy is Jim Larko’s decision to invest in a reconditioned Stewart-Amos Starfire S-4 sweeper. Katsam Enterprises has been a 1-800-SWEEPER partner since we launched in the fall of 2011. Katsam has received a good number of service requests calls from the website, but beginning in the spring of 2012, Jim Larko noticed a lot of calls for street sweeping and construction sweeping. Problem was, Larko no longer had the equipment to service these requests. “When the construction business dried up in 2010, I had a business decision to make. I could keep making payments on sweepers that left the garage once a month, or I could sell the equipment. I’m not all that good at math, but it wasn’t a hard decision to make.”

“We started getting a steady stream of service requests for construction sweeping and street sweeping after the 1-800-SWEEPER site went live. I was giving away business opportunuties to competitors each month. Then I looked at the numbers. It reached a point where investing in a new sweeper to handle the street sweeping and construction sweeping calls made good business sense.” Larko purchased his used Stewart-Amos sweeper from fellow 1-800-SWEEPER member, Mitch Barkman, who has a business (Broom and Vac Inc) that restores used sweepers. “I paid a fraction of the cost of a new sweeper and I couldn’t be happier with the equipment or the service I got from the folks at Buckeye.” Larko sent the sweeper out on its first job last week-end and it performed like a champ. “We are really excited to be able to service street sweeping and construction sweeping leads generated from our advertising on the 1-800-SWEEPER website.” As the saying goes…..If you build it, they will come…..

If you have a similar equipment story that you would like to share with our members, please contact Carolyn Bell and we will post your news in our blog.

1-800-SWEEPER Welcomes Buckeye Sweeping, Inc.

sweeper1 — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:15:08 +0000

For those not already familiar with our newest partner, Buckeye Sweeping’s Mitch Barkman has been involved in the sweeping business since 1985. Although a native of Northeastern Ohio, Mitch headed south in the early 80’s to work in the booming Texas construction business. When the oil business fell on hard times, Mitch left the construction industry and started his first sweeping company, which he sold in 1989. Mitch then moved back to Ohio, and founded Akron-based Buckeye Sweeping.

According to Mitch, the sweeping industry has seen many changes since he first broke into the business, but advertising and promotion has always been important. For years he relied on phone directory programs, but when property managers and contractors migrated to the internet, he knew it was time to make a change, so he partnered with NAPSA to create a company website. Because Mitch has had positive response to his website, the decision to join 1-800-SWEEPER seemed like a “no brainer”.

The strength of the buying group was another factor prompted his decision to join 1-800-SWEEPER. Both the United Rotary Brush and Baldwin Filters deals were attractive. The group discounts and substantial savings on tax and shipping encouraged Mitch to take a close look how membership in 1-800-SWEEPER could generate leads and save his company money. As for the leads, since joining in March, Buckeye has already had 8 service calls generated by the 1-800-SWEEPER website and the snow is still flying in Northeastern Ohio.

Buckeye Sweeping will offer parking lot sweeping, street sweeping, and construction sweeping for the Akron, Canton, and Youngstown areas included in area code 330. Please welcome Mitch and the entire staff of Buckeye Sweeping!