This is a subject that I find fascinating. Why do some carpet cleaners stick with electric machines and not upgrade at the first opportunity to a Truck Mount?
Before anyone jumps down my throat for asking the question, let me qualify my position.
I started this business over thirty years ago, at first on a part time basis and then professionally with a Prochem Steameasy 400 and a little later a CheyenneIII, twin vac and that along with a rotary scrubber saw me through to my first national contract with Etam Ladies Wear. We used to combination clean shop carpets up and down the country using only portable machines. My first Truck Mount was a Prochem 100A,16 hp Briggs & Stratton engine with a diesel fired burner, costing £7,500 + vat which was an absolute fortune back then.
Obviously everything I had done up to that point had been acceptable to my clientele but with the advent of the Truck Mount my business changed dramatically in almost every department. Quality went up. Drying Times went down. Cleaning times went down and my repeat and referral work shot up, why? Because people began to trust me as a committed professional and I had never had that sort of respect from my customers before. And I found that telling prospective customers about Truck Mount cleaning my conversion rate from quote to job went through the roof. Likewise I found that people told more of their friends about their carpet cleaning experience and the huge machine we’d used and soon I was getting pre-qualified, ready to buy people ringing me wanting to know when I could fit them in.
I am not suggesting that you cannot do a good job with a portable, because obviously you can because I built my business on them, but would my business be where it is today if I’d stayed with portables, absolutely not. By contrast there are people around today who have made very successful businesses with portables, Ken Wainwright is a prime example of that and I am sure that it was as conscious a decision for him to go down that road as was for me to go down mine.
The truth is there are few and far between portable operators who don’t in their heart of hearts aspire to own a TM and I wonder what it is in their minds that stops them from making that leapt when an entry level TM still costs on £7500, in some cases less, which is peanuts in comparison to what there is to gain for the outlay of so little money.
I’m not trying to start the age old TM versus portable argument, or being elitist or deliberately controversial but I just wonder...why?
Simon