Facility Maintenance 101: What Every Business Needs to Know

When you’re responsible for managing a commercial facility, your maintenance workflow is crucial to your business. Without a well-maintained building, you risk losing business—but a professional facility maintenance company can help make sure you keep the lights on and the shoppers shopping.

To properly manage your facility, you need a maintenance team; not just to fix problems as they arise, but to keep things running and eliminate headaches down the road. However, when a crisis does happen, your team needs to be available to tackle it for you. And with specific legal requirements for contractors doing certain types of work, like plumbing and electrical, finding a qualified repair person in a hurry on your own can be a hassle.

Luckily, this blog will help you learn everything you need to know about facility maintenance—from what it is to how it can help your commercial business thrive.

What Is Facility Maintenance?

At its core, facility maintenance is the way you maximize your company’s assets by making sure your physical space is functioning as it should. This includes everything from your equipment to your systems to your infrastructure and surroundings.

Typical areas of focus for facility maintenance include:

Equipment

Facilities need all sorts of mechanical equipment to keep their operations running—things like the locks on your building’s doors and your security gates. When a malfunction happens to mission-critical equipment such as these, facility managers run the risk of closing the business until repairs are complete, jeopardizing revenue and reputation.

Plumbing & Electrical

If something goes wrong with your plumbing or electrical, your business could be shuttered until it’s fixed. That’s why it’s so important to have someone on call to immediately come assess any trouble, in addition to an electrical maintenance and plumbing maintenance plan to have those vital components consistantly up and running.

Buildings

When your commercial space needs a broken window repaired, a squeaky door silenced, or a new coat of paint, let your facility maintenance team take care of it. Your building’s appearance is just as important for your brand as your appliances and systems.

Grounds

Your grounds are the first thing customers see—it’s important to maintain that space. Having a team to keep up with your exterior will help your business shine from the inside out.

Some companies have facility maintenance software to help track your data and identify trends in your projects. Using specialized software helps create visibility for arising issues, priorities for needed maintenance work, and organization of all the things that need to be done, including cost predictions.

What Commercial Spaces Benefit from Facility Maintenance?

Strictly speaking, facility maintenance only covers a specific set of buildings—commercial spaces where customers enter to do business. Residential buildings and industrial manufacturing buildings don’t fall into this category. While included facilities can vary widely, Retail Maintenance Specialists (RMS) takes care of the following (and more):

Retailers

We serve mid-size retailers, leading apparel and footwear businesses, home goods stores, and everything in between. Our focus on quality ensures the pristine look and function of display fixtures, fitting rooms, shelving, lighting, and other aspects that deliver an impressive customer experience.

Restaurants

We provide all types of restaurants with facility maintenance services. Casual dining, fast food, pizzerias, and more depend on our services every day to meet and exceed ADA and health department compliance to ensure the utmost health and safety of employees and patrons.

Medical Offices

We work with mid-size medical offices and dental franchises on safe and proper facility operations for clinicians and patients. Our team ensures ADA and health department compliance.

Financial/Hospitality

We serve financial institutions and hospitality venues like hotels and tourism centers with facility maintenance services that deliver great guest experiences. In addition to our standard maintenance services, we also support seasonal branding in lobbies and corridors with services for display rollouts, posters, holiday placards, and more.

Each of these types of buildings requires regular maintenance, and they may all occasionally have an emergency—a burst pipe, an electrical outage, or something else urgent. RMS can take care of any problem with a custom maintenance program.

What Are the Benefits of Facility Maintenance?

Facility maintenance keeps your commercial space clean and safe, preserves your property value, and reduces future maintenance costs by handling minor issues before they become major ones. When you have a facility maintenance company at your service, you have a solid system in place that not only handles emergencies when they happen but also prevents them with regular upkeep. You have someone to call that will be there, no matter what time of day and regardless of holidays. And if your industry is beholden to health codes or regulatory compliance—like restaurants or medical offices—having a specialized company involved is especially worth it for your operations to make sure nothing ever falls through the cracks in terms of your health and safety requirements.

With the popularity of social media, your brand’s reputation is a bigger deal than ever, so having a reliable maintenance provider is a huge benefit to you. From small, independently owned companies to big franchises, the cleanliness, safety, appearance, and functionality of your brand’s location all contribute deeply to its reputation. In today’s digital age, reviews and online comments about a brand spread quickly; it’s more important than ever that the building is at peak performance.

By having a facility maintenance team at your disposal, you’ll get peace of mind knowing that any problem can be handled quickly and effectively.

What Makes a Good Facility Maintenance Company?

We know what’s most important in a facility maintenance company, and our customers do, too. It’s what we do every day. At RMS, we:

• Deliver high-quality, trade-specific work from start to finish
• Take a flexible, proactive approach toward solving your problem
• Offer hands-on service by highly knowledgeable specialists
• Provide clear communication to our clients

At the end of the day, you want a facility maintenance company that treats your brand, productivity, bottom line, and physical space like its own. We’re committed to doing exactly that while keeping your facility running at peak performance.

Getting Started with a Facility Maintenance Company

First things first, identify a facility maintenance company and reach out. You’ll want to find a company that prioritizes quality of work and timeliness, along with 24/7/365 responsiveness in an emergency.

RMS handles the day-to-day aspects of facility maintenance, giving you and your facility’s team the ability to focus on strategic and proactive activities. Contact us today to learn more and schedule a consultation.