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Summit Facility Solutions |
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September 2, 2019 Issue |
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CEOCFO MAGAZINE |
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Summit Facility Solutions is a Single Source Facility Management Solutions Provider enabling facility managers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville Florida to Streamline Operations and Reduce Costs |
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Chief Executive Officer Summit Facility Solutions www.summitfacilitysolutions.com
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – September 2, 2019
CEOCFO: Mr. Marrazzo, what is the idea behind Summit Facility Solutions? Mr. Marrazzo: Summit Facility Solutions provides comprehensive facility solutions in the arena of Commercial Cleaning Services, General Maintenance, HVAC, Pest Control, Window Cleaning, Carpet Cleaning, Painting, Pressure Washing and much more. We have adopted a partnered approach to managing your facility where all facility services are housed with one vendor – this means, one phone call, one invoice, one COI, one Solution.
CEOCFO: Are facilities typically using separate vendors for all of these services? Is there a trend towards consolidating services? Mr. Marrazzo: Typically, yes. Many facilities follow the conventional route of having different vendors for each service. While this way is effective, it does post all hosts of challenges – the time it takes to source a vendor, obtaining and vetting of insurance, management of multiple invoices and dealing with different personalities. With Summit; however, once onboarded with us, we consolidate and handle all of that for you as a one-stop solution. You deal with one vendor (that’s us) in which you are assigned a dedicated account executive who works with you on the day to day management of your facility. For the most part, anything in your facility can be done in just a single phone call – best describing us as an outsourced facilities concierge service.
CEOCFO: What was the challenge in putting your solution in place? Mr. Marrazzo: I guess it would be years of building the vendor network, constantly refreshing qualified staff, and constant training to deliver the white glove service that we promise. When people sign up with us, they are expecting us to deliver at a certain level – always keeping the customer happy and the service delivery seamless is our recipe for success.
CEOCFO: How do you keep on top of if the vendors are performing up to your standard or are you going to find out quickly from your customers? Mr. Marrazzo: It’s both. We want to be as proactive as we can which means constant quality assurance and over-communication with our clients. We preach “A Partnership Approach”, so constant dialogue is happening between us and our clients all hours of the day and night. We have many systems in place to ensure seamless communication so we can dissolve problems before they become real problems (Group Email Distributions, Group Text Chats, etc). Like any business, nothing is perfect – often times things will happen that trigger a complaint and while we always try to be proactive and avoid problems, we pride ourselves on our response times and effectiveness to fix issues when they occur.
CEOCFO: What types of facilities turn to Summit? Mr. Marrazzo: The majority of our business is commercial office space; however, we have a nice sized footprint in the Residential (Apartment Buildings mainly), Fashion Retail, Retail Banking, Educational Institutions, Restaurants and Hospitality sectors.
CEOCFO: What is your geographic reach? Mr. Marrazzo: Predominantly the Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. We recently expand into Florida (Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville) and we also have a growing presence in Boston and Philadelphia.
CEOCFO: Why Florida? Mr. Marrazzo: We conduct research in different markets and our last pilot in Florida proved to be very promising; more so than other markets we tested. With the baby boomer generation retiring, Florida is hot for expansion and commerce is becoming pretty heavy there.
CEOCFO: Do your customers take advantage of the full range of services you offer or might they do some through you and still maybe keep some old relationships? Mr. Marrazzo: I would say it is 50/50. Some people like to keep control of handling all their vendors direct. As we build trust people will try us out for different things. Often times, we start off as their commercial cleaning provider and when we perform our facility walkthroughs every month, we identify things that we could help with – which is organically increasing the number of services we are providing. Where there was once apprehension to use a single vendor for all their facility services; we find that once they see how seamless the relationship is, it organically evolves.
CEOCFO: How does it work in terms of how you provide the service? Do you provide tracking software to make sure work is done and invoicing facilitated? Mr. Marrazzo: Yes, we use SWEPT as a tracking software, where we could have employees punch in/out of their shift inside of a GeoFence, Order Supplies, Communicate Multi-Lingually and perform Real Time Quality Assurance Reporting.
CEOCFO: The customer would be dealing with you and not the individual vendor. How do you mediate if there is a problem or If a customer does not like the particular person that showed up for a specific service? Mr. Marrazzo: For the most part, we self-perform many of the services we provide. We have a lot of control because it is our management team on the ground managing our processes and employees. For a specialty service, such as Pest Control, Painting or HVAC, we subcontract that piece of the business to local, vetted vendors. We are very hands on when our vendors interface with our clients and keep a very close eye on the interactions to avoid any miscommunication or issues.
We ask for pictures before and after the work is completed to validate and document completion. We always ask for signoffs by a client to validate the work and create an accountability layer in the billing process. This insulates the vendor as well as Summit as we have documented that the service was done to a satisfactory degree on a job level.
CEOCFO: How do you attract people - not everyone wants to do cleaning? Mr. Marrazzo: There is a very big supply of general cleaners. We recruit using all the major online recruiting applications such as Indeed, Zip Recruiter, Monster, and when we put ads up for cleaning technicians the number of applicants is exorbitant. We get thousands of applicants in every time we post ads. With paid training there are no barriers to entry and no special skill set required so it opens the door for a wide variety of candidates.
CEOCFO: What about the security aspect when you are hiring people and they are in someone’s office, perhaps alone late at night? How do you vet your own people to be sure there is less chance of a problem? Mr. Marrazzo: All of our employees must undergo a background check. We do comprehensive background screenings and as a result of that, it will determine their eligibility for placement in Summit.
CEOCFO: What about cleaning products, such as eco-friendly products? Where does that come into play and is that by customer preference? Mr. Marrazzo: We are a sustainable company, meaning we favor the use of green seal certified chemicals in all of our accounts. We use the Diversey line of chemicals and find them to be very effective in the cleaning and sanitization of our accounts.
CEOCFO: What surprised you as Summit Facility Solutions has gone from an idea to where you are today? Mr. Marrazzo: Our growth trajectory has surprised me the most. We are trending in a direction of aggressive horizontal and vertical expansion – it is extremely exciting to see it grow from a concept to a business that is now multi-state in such a short period of time. There will continue to be the delicate balancing act of aggressive growth vs. sustaining quality service to our portfolio of clients.
CEOCFO: What is next for Summit? Mr. Marrazzo: Next is geographic expansion. Our model has been tried and is well received. We will continue our multi-state expansion of service lines and continue to expand our vendor and client network.
CEOCFO: Many facilities already have established relationships with service providers. How do you get your foot in the door when you are going into a new area? Mr. Marrazzo: One unique thing about the commercial cleaning business is the level of attrition that lives in this space. We find that people change cleaning contractors every 6-10 months which leaves the door open for opportunity constantly. I believe that entering into an already saturated market, you have to have a leg up on the competition to win business. Summit is aligned to be the solution, offering a comprehensive suite of services that most providers cannot contend with.
CEOCFO: Why choose Summit Facility Solutions? Mr. Marrazzo: Summit is doing what very few companies are doing out there in our space; we are offering a one-stop-solution for everything facilities related. For our customers it is about scalability, cost savings and it is about dealing with the best people in the business. We are centralizing everything by offering a packaged solution – you now deal with one vendor, make only one phone call and pay only one invoice.
We simplify the facilities management process - think of us as part of the team!
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“Summit Facility Solutions is a single source solution for all your facility management needs. As our partner, you can consolidate all your facility needs into one vendor to streamline your operation and reduce costs.”- Michael Marrazzo
Summit Facility Solutions www.summitfacilitysolutions.com
Contact: Michael Marrazzo 516.418.2130, Ext 3 michael@summitfacilitysolutions.com
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Michael Marrazzo
