Eight to ten trucks a day: what a normal Tuesday looks like at Zimick Brothers

Most people picture a cleaning company as a truck. A person shows up, does the work, drives home. That is not how our route runs, and it never has been. On a normal Tuesday we send eight to ten trucks out of the Coolidge Avenue office in Englewood, each with a lead and a two-to-three person crew, each with a route sheet and a job scope in writing.

The route sheet gets built the day before. Recurring commercial accounts sit in the same crew's hands week over week, and that is deliberate. The client learns the crew, the crew learns the building, and the standard sticks. Residential deep cleans and post-construction work get scheduled around those recurring runs.

Every truck leaves loaded with the product for the day. Bona neutral for the wood floor jobs, truck-mounted steam rigs for the carpet, upholstery, tile and grout accounts (with portable steam units on the trucks going to high-rises and any site the truck-mount cannot reach), HEPA vacuums and micro-fiber for the post-construction sites, restroom kits for the janitorial routes. We do not run a lead back to the shop for supplies. If it is going out on the truck, it goes out on the truck at 7am.

A lead runs each crew. That means one person is accountable for the scope, the standard, and the walk-through with the client. If something is off, the lead sees it before the crew leaves the property. If the client changes the scope on the spot, the lead handles it in writing and it flows back to the office.

By late afternoon the trucks come back in. Route sheets get closed out. Any client note goes on the account. Product gets restocked for tomorrow. This is the boring part of the operation, and it is the part that makes forty-seven years of the same phone number possible.

The tagline is One Call Does It All. That only holds up if the operation behind it is boring, disciplined, and repeatable. It is.

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