You have to get people who have a similar desire to produce what you want to produce.

Hospitality is a tough industry: long hours, high level stress and difficult customers. You have to love the industry to be involved, especially if you are running the back of house, which presents its own challenges. These challenges include equipment maintenance and cleaning. Keeping equipment in top working order can be expensive and if something breaks down, there may be a long wait for a technician.

And cleaning is not an easy job. Unless you’re a professional cleaner, hidden grime can be hard to spot. So how can those in the hospitality industry take the stress out of back of house maintenance? They can call a company such as Coreserve.

Coreserve specialises in a multiple service stream dedicated to servicing the hospitality industry, as well as commercial and education sectors. Coreserve is the result of two engineers combining their skills to produce a professionally delivered product with a personal service. Known for their attention to detail and need to deliver the best product on the market, Coreserve continues to grow organically providing regular service programs to over 100 sites nationally along with new sites taking advantage of the Coreserve hospitality package.

The two men behind Coreserve are Barry Carter and Steve Fowler. Both bring unique skill sets: Barry comes from an electrical engineering background, while Steve has a professional cleaning background.

They started the business because Steve saw a lack of quality service in cleaning hospitality sites. According to Barry this comes down to the fact that there aren’t too many people who will put their hands up to be professional cleaners.

“It is a massive challenge to get a small hospitality site to the required level ofcleanliness. So part of our challenge when we started the business was to find people who were willing and then provide the necessary training, management and an environment they want to work in.”

Barry says building a successful team is tough. “You have to get people who have a similar desire to produce what you want to produce. So we employ engineers and tradesmen and so it’s not that difficult to get good quality staff. We then look at how tradesmen approach the job and what remedies they put in place to fix a job.”

Once the right staff was in place initially, it was a matter of systemising the business and creating a unique offering that includes not only cleaning, but equipment maintenance as well.

“It was a goal to incorporate all services at the beginning: we have catering equipment technicians, there are specialist areas and we have refrigeration and air conditioning technicians,” Barry says. “Every hospitality site has these things. We put a lot of effort into drawing up a planned preventative maintenance. The idea being that we put time into the system and therefore reduce downtime and breakdowns. The whole principle in putting those things into one business is that there aren’t many players in the catering equipment market, though there are several players in HVAC and we are not the market leader, what we can offer is a holistic service where we evaluate the site, conduct health checks and offer ongoing service.”

Where the service differs is that most technicians rely on breakdowns to keep their business going, but Coreserve is in the business of prevention.

“Preventative maintenance builds customer loyalty and when they see it works, and they are not having their fingers burnt, they jump on board,” Barry says.

If it takes staff of a hospitality site six hours to clean, Coreserve’s systems can reduce this to three hours. They look at all elements of the business that would require attention.

“Take a restaurant for example. The chef knows how to run the back of house, keep his kitchen clean and prepare the food, while the management at the front of house understands the presentation of the business and how to attract clients. So for them to spend a couple of hours chasing technicians to fix a broken refrigerator or catering equipment or to spend an hour with cleaners because they haven’t done things right, that is restrictive. So not only do we make their lives easier by taking all those services on board, we also provide a 24 hour help desk.”

Coreserve provides cleaning client service managers who carry out inspections throughout the week, so the venue doesn’t have to worry about the cleanliness of the site. Barry will himself go out at 4am if called to take care of any issues.

This is typical of the customer service that is offered and business owners love to see the managing director of their service provider willing to get his hands dirty. Coreserve’s goal is to deliver the best possible service.

And it is paying off. They have reached their profit targets easily and are now expanding nationally.

“The way we are developing, we now have the company reinvesting in itself. We have our main office in Sydney and sub offices in Brisbane, Mackay and Melbourne in the next port of call. By the end of the year we’ll also be developing in Perth and Darwin.”

Coreserve has only been in operation for a couple of years; however they have made great ground by committing to good quality service that provides strong results for their clients.