How Benchmarking Aims to Address Industry Blind Spots
What it could mean for forward-thinking cleaning and security providers – a discussion with Scott Somma, CFO, Janitronics
As CFO of Janitronics, a 2,000-employee facility services company operating across multiple states in both cleaning and security, Scott Somma manages the kind of complex operations that require constant strategic decision-making. With decades of enterprise finance experience, including time at GE, AMRI and GlobalFoundries, he’s built a successful track record of optimizing operations and driving growth.
In any business, however, Somma notes that there is a universal challenge when it comes to understanding and measuring how one company in the industry compares to another in terms of operational structure and strategic approach.
“There are so many opportunities when it comes to industry benchmarking,” Somma explains. “As a private company, we don’t always know where we stack up on certain data points versus others in the sector. Benchmarking could allow us to find missing opportunities and outliers in our operations that could really make a difference.”
The information gap affects decisions large and small. When Somma evaluates his organizational structure, he’s working without benchmarks for how companies of similar size and scope staff their accounting teams, structure their HR departments or scale their regional management. When Janitronics considers expansion into new markets, they can’t easily learn from peers who’ve already tested similar strategies. This is one of the biggest reasons why Janitronics is championing sophisticated benchmarking tools for the industry’s collective benefit and participating as an Early Adopter in WorkWave’s Wavelytics™ development program.
Thin Profit Margins Create Massive Room for Opportunity
In facility services, labor represents roughly 80% of costs for many companies, meaning for companies with over 100 employees or more, small inefficiencies in hiring, retention and operational structure can compound quickly. As these companies also deal with razor-thin profit margins, making improvements that can lead to even single-percentage-point gains can translate to much larger efficiencies when multiplied across the entire business. Industry benchmarking offers a chance to identify some of these opportunities for gain in ways never before accessible.
In the facility services industry, the stakes are particularly high as companies deal with operational challenges that generic business benchmarks don’t capture. Managing distributed workforces across dozens of client locations, dealing with turnover rates that can approach 100-200% in some service lines, optimizing scheduling across varying client requirements – these are industry-specific challenges that require industry-specific intelligence in order to make any meaningful strides forward.
“There’s a million things that could benefit any company to know how other companies are doing it, if they’re doing it better or not,” Somma notes. “Turnover rate, attrition rate – if you see how we stack up versus the industry or versus some of your peers in a similar market, a few points in this industry makes a very big deal.”
Consider customer concentration risk, which affects nearly every commercial cleaning or security company. It’s commonly understood that it’s important to manage the risk of having too much revenue concentrated in a single client, typically keeping individual clients below a certain percentage of total revenue. Benchmarking data could take this practice one step further, showing businesses that companies successfully maintaining client diversification allocate specific percentages of their sales budget to new client acquisition, target particular types of contracts when expanding or use specific pricing strategies to avoid over-dependence on large accounts.
The same methodology could be applied to something like recruitment efficiency. Instead of wondering whether its cost-per-hire numbers are competitive, companies could see that top-performing peers spend X% of revenue on job boards, maintain recruiting teams of Y amount of people per 1,000 employees, or achieve better retention by adjusting their initial screening criteria in specific ways.
Benchmarking for Forward-Thinking Strategy
Somma’s interest in benchmarking extends beyond current performance comparisons. He wants to understand the trajectory of growth – how companies structure themselves at different stages of maturation.
“How does a company our size with 2,000 employees compare against others that size, or more importantly, others that are now double the size? What does that path look like?” he asks. “Being able to map out this journey can help us understand where we can tweak our own operations to better hit those milestones in a way that makes sense for our unique business.”
This forward-looking perspective addresses one of the most challenging aspects of growing facility services companies: knowing when and how to add operational infrastructure. At what point do you need regional management layers? How should back-office functions scale relative to field operations? What operational challenges consistently emerge at specific growth stages?
Effective benchmarking could help show Somma not just where Janitronics stands today, but what successful companies with 4,000 employees have in common and where they differ. How do they structure their regional management? When did they add specialized roles? What operational challenges consistently emerge at specific growth stages and how did successful companies address them?
This kind of forward-looking intelligence helps companies prepare for growth rather than react to it. Instead of making structural decisions based on internal experience alone, executives can implement strategies that have proven effective at scale.
Tapping Into Collective Industry Knowledge
The facility services industry holds an enormous wealth of operational knowledge accumulated over decades. Companies like Janitronics have developed sophisticated approaches to workforce management, client retention and operational efficiency. Multiply that institutional knowledge across hundreds of successful companies and the potential for shared learning becomes significant.
Solutions like Wavelytics are being built specifically to tap into this collective intelligence. By aggregating operational data from facility services companies while protecting individual company confidentiality, these platforms can surface insights that benefit the entire industry. Companies can contribute their decades of experience while gaining access to the accumulated wisdom of their peers.
For companies already operating within integrated software ecosystems, this represents a natural progression from basic reporting to strategic intelligence. Executives can access industry-specific benchmarks that reflect the real operational challenges and solutions developed by successful companies over time.
Interested in learning more about the future of benchmarking with WorkWave’s Wavelytics? Contact us today for more information.