When you run a business, unless it is one that involves working outdoors, such as wall-building in Yorkshire or sheep farming in Wales, the fact is that most of the time you will be working within a building of some sort or another.

That is all well and good, but all buildings suffer from problems from time to time, and that can interrupt your business. For instance, if you have a fault with your electrical wiring (it can happen) you may have no lighting, no heating, no internet, in fact, virtually no nothing, which is going to bring your business to a grinding halt in very short order.

You might have a plumbing issue which means you have no water. OK, that means no tea at the office tea break, but it could also mean that you have no way of flushing the toilets and no way for your staff to wash their hands.  

Even assuming nothing serious goes wrong, your business is going to need cleaning and, unless you decide to roll your sleeves up and do it yourself, you are going to need the services of a cleaning company.

Perhaps you run a restaurant which operates with gas cookers (always the chefs’ preference) and you have a problem with your gas supply. You are out of business for as long as that continues, so you need someone who can come and fix it fast.

Now some businesses don’t plan for any of this sort of thing, and that means that when something goes wrong, they get hit hard. Others look ahead and do plan which means that they always have a fall-back situation when things go wrong. They have an electrician that they use for various services, but that electrician may not offer a 24-hour service, so even if they thought they had allowed for things going wrong it might not work. For instance, if your restaurant uses electric cookers and something happens at 7.30 pm, your usual electrician may not be on call.

That means that you have to search on Google (assuming there is sufficient power in the battery of your laptop) for an electrician that DOES provide a 24-hour service.

Maybe there is a severe storm such as Ciara or Dennis with which we have had to contend recently. Tiles get blown off the roof and you need to get that fixed fast. Yes, of course, you have insurance, but you may not be able to wait until the insurance company has instructed a roofing company. 

All of the foregoing gives just some of the idea why there has been a rise in the use of total facilities management companies in the last few years. Total facilities management companies take over the responsibility for looking after your premises no matter what may happen. They will look after your regular cleaning, which every business needs, and carry out all the necessary maintenance which is required on an ongoing basis.

That maintenance could be almost anything. For example, you might own a golf club. During the spring and summer, you are going to need a lot of grass mowing, and you will need trees and shrubs pruned in order to keep them looking as they should.

You might own a hotel. Now you could employ your own cleaning and maid staff with all of the paperwork and admin that it involves, or you could hand the whole thing over to one of your local total facilities management providers instead. That total facilities management provider can also look after all the ongoing maintenance that you need, in addition to providing emergency services if, or more probably when, they are required. 

Total facilities management companies can do such a lot for you, from regular cleaning to emergency repairs to painting and decorating when required, and the beauty of it is that you don’t have to worry about any of it. This means that you can get on with running your business, whatever it is, and doing what you do best, and which is what makes you a profit, rather than fiddling about spending time sorting out problems when they arise, or dealing with the day-to-day mundane tasks which don’t actually make any profit, but which are simply part of your overhead.  

That makes a considerable amount of sense.