Business View Oceania | April 2021

39 40 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA APRIL 2021 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA APRIL 2021 You can rely on SuperClean to provide the best solutions for all your cleaning and hygiene requirements. We specialise in providing you the best. Always! For more information on our products: www.superclean.co.nz 06 347 6688 50 Maria Place Extn Wanganui PROUD TO SUPPORT & PARTNERWITH PPCS SUPPLIERS OF ALL CLEANINGMACHINERY, CHEMICALS, WASHROOMPRODUCTS, DISPOSABLES, AND JANITORIAL PRODUCTS... PPCS FAC I L I TY SERV I CES notes that essential services like government departments simply could not cease operating – and so, neither could PPCS. This meant that demand for its cleaning services was actually enhanced, although new approaches did have to be implemented. “Validation has become very important during the pandemic,” Sarel adds. “It’s one thing to say something looks clean but how do you actually validate that it’s being cleaned and sanitised. We’ve invested quite a bit of time and money to enable us to do swab testing and random testing on premises that we’ve cleaned. Our customers love the fact that they can have some sort of validation that the cleaning was done to a specific standard, not just a visual standard. All of this has resulted in our business accelerating to a tremendous degree over the last six to eight months. This growth is great, but it presents a challenge because we want to maintain all our existing relationships as well. We don’t want to and quality has seen it stand apart from its competitors. Sarel Bloem, Executive General Manager at PPCS, explains, “When the company started, we largely focused on the education sector, such as high schools, colleges and universities. Over the last 10 years or so we have started diversifying a lot more into government contracts, servicing a number of local councils and central government departments. Then, over the last three to four years, we’ve started working in large shopping centres, retail properties, and commercial outlets - a lot of the more traditional markets that other cleaning companies are in.” Earlier this year, with the company continuing to diversify its client base, PPCS started a new food hygiene division, signing up Synlait, one of the largest baby formula producers in NZ. The move required PPCS to enter a highly specialised field, where regulations and standards are on Executive General Manager, Sarel Bloem a completely different level to those seen in commercial or office cleaning. Still, the company was keen to tackle a new challenge. This willingness to provide a specialised service is something that PPCS is well accustomed to, having also provided cleaning services to aged care centres in NZ for a number of years. Sarel acknowledges, “As with a few of the other sectors that we’ve entered, our food hygiene clients had dealt with a lot of other international cleaning companies operating across New Zealand and weren’t getting the level of service they were looking for. That’s how they approached us. I wouldn’t say we were planning on entering this particular market but we’re always looking for the next opportunity.” Like many companies, PPCS found that its plans for expansion were suddenly disrupted last year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although revenues initially took a hit, Sarel