What is a Commercial Carpet Cleaning Company?

What is a commercial carpet cleaner?  What do commercial carpet cleaners do?  What is the difference between commercial carpet cleaners and residential carpet cleaners?  These are all good questions. The difficult part of the explanation is that commercial carpet cleaners can clean residential and residential carpet cleaners can clean commercial carpets.  The question is, “who is best suited for each and why?”

• Commercial carpet cleaners have more powerful equipment that gets far hotter than most residential companies because this is necessary to release the grease and oils that are often on commercial carpets.  That heat also does far better to release dyes in the carpet such as coffee.
• Commercial carpet cleaners have more powerful vacuum strength as well.  This is because most businesses, especially restaurants, can’t have their carpets cleaned until their business day is over and that can be as late as 2:30am.  The carpet then needs to be dry by the time they open in the morning.  The stronger vacuum strength supplied by an 8 cylinder engine cuts the drying time down considerably.  This vacuum strength also increases the percentage of debris and particles that are removed from the carpet fibers.
• Commercial carpet cleaners have a responsibility to do more thorough background checks and pay substantially more than residential carpet cleaners to ensure that they always have clean cut, professional personnel.  Government agencies and other secure businesses often require background checks on the vendors that will be entering their buildings.  Also, residential carpet cleaning relies on advertising to bring in a steady stream of new clients and commercial carpet cleaning companies rely on repeat business as the bulk of their business.  The quality of employees is the largest key factor in this equation.
• Residential carpet cleaners hire and train salesmen because the person holding the checkbook is usually on hand to talk to.  Commercial carpet cleaning companies hire and train for quality instead because the decisions are usually finalized in a board room weeks before the job is completed so there is no point in trying to sell anything during the job. This is why commercial carpet cleaners train for cleaning, not for selling.
• Residential carpet cleaning companies usually work a normal 9-5pm schedule.  Commercial carpet cleaning companies understand that the normal business model for residential carpet cleaning companies won’t work well for businesses. Commercial carpet cleaning companies may do a job at 5pm in Plymouth Minnesota and then head down to Apple Valley Minnesota for another job at 8pm.  A crew may finish a job in Roseville Minnesota at 7pm and have to wait for 2 hours to start a job in Shakopee Minnesota at 9pm.  Residential carpet cleaners want to use broad time frames like am or pm time slots in specific areas of the state.  Businesses simply need it to be done when they need it done.

The truth is that all of these characteristics that successful commercial carpet cleaning companies should possess are better for both commercial and residential carpet cleaning.  The difference is that these standards are absolutely necessary to do a great job in commercial carpet cleaning where as they are a luxury in residential carpet cleaning.  Personally, I would prefer a commercial carpet cleaning company at either my house or my business, but then again I am a little biased as one of the founders of the Commercial Steam Team in Burnsville Minnesota.