H&C News meets with suppliers regularly to keep up to date with the latest product and service innovations, aiming to get the inside track on what companies offer to the market and how it is delivered.
This week, we met with Barry Osborn, Managing Director at TWO Services who specialise in the maintenance of Catering Equipment and the cleaning of commercial kitchens to gain a better understanding of the business.
TWO Services is a family business that has been running for over twenty seven years and we wanted to understand where it all started and where it’s going.
So where did it all start?
TWO Services was founded by my father, Alan Osborn in 1986. He had worked as chef and in catering management, so had seen how important deep cleaning was to the smooth running of a professional kitchen. He saw an opportunity to capitalise on this at a time when there were few people providing these types of services. When he started the business he had a phone, an orange crate for a desk and very little else!
Since then TWO has expanded, growing into a national business and one of the few firms in the UK offering both cleaning and maintenance. TWO is still essentially a family business with myself and brother Jon (Finance Director) at the helm and a loyal directly employed workforce. Over the years we have invested in the things that matter; recruitment, training, health and safety and the environment. We have been ISO 9001 accredited since 1994 and are committed to quality operating standards and customer satisfaction nationwide. TWO Services is one of the only commercial cleaning businesses with an integrated management system which ensures that we have some of the most rigorous quality standards in the business and an impressive client list ranging from FM and catering companies, to blue chip city firms, local businesses, schools and healthcare providers.
You are now a national business how do you cover the whole of the UK?
Our headquarters are in Basildon, Essex but we have operational centres in London and Leeds, from which we can provide a national service using our own direct workforce. Our mobile maintenance engineers are based in a variety of locations meaning they can respond quickly to call outs within a set radius of their base. If your premises are in Scotland or Northern Ireland we operate the TWO brand through our local service partners. Wherever our customers are located, they receive the same quality of service from our highly trained staff.
Sustainability is something that more and more businesses are very conscious of, are the chemicals you use to clean sustainable?
TWO is an environmentally friendly cleaning business and have won business awards for environmental awareness. Our green commitment is recognised by our ISO 14001 accreditation and an award of match funding from Low Carbon Business.
The cleaning chemicals we use are food safe, non-caustic, alkaline based, over 98% biodegradeable and conform to EU legislation.
We can also help our clients with sustainability by supplying eco-friendly janitorial supplies.
We see that you have a new website, what prompted the re design?
TWO services are best known for commercial kitchen cleaning but we offer so much more and in this highly competitive market we wanted to ensure that our clients and potential customers realised the breadth of our expertise. As our customers are often time pressed, the new website is designed to showcase our full range of services at a glance.
Not only do we do deep kitchen cleans, including ductwork and ventilation, but we offer maintenance and equipment supply. Also, many people probably don’t realise that we can take care of anything from fire or water damage to window cleaning and carpets or upholstery. We provide daily cleaning services and also do one-off builders’/ sparkle cleans on behalf of large contractors. We can even provide fog sanitisation which is especially popular at this time of year with closed environments such as schools and healthcare establishments. It takes just 15 minutes but provides lasting infection control for up to 30 days by eradicating nasty bugs such as C Difficle, Norovirus, MRSA and E.Coli, helping to prevent epidemics.
You offer a wide range of services how does a kitchen operator begin to look at combining them if currently using multiple service providers?
Using one provider for your cleaning and maintenance has obvious benefits. You get the simplicity of dealing with one point of contact, one phone call and one invoice, which saves you time, plus you benefit from cost efficiencies and savings that offer value for money.
The process itself also makes things more streamlined from an operational point of view. It takes just one visit from a member of our skilled sales team, who will discuss your needs then assess your kitchen from a cleaning point of view as well as producing an equipment asset list. This then enables us to provide you with both cleaning and maintenance quotes – for which we offer a variety of plans. Once the contract is underway, technical issues that have become apparent during your deep cleans can be recorded and easily dealt with by the maintenance team, or monitored closely, with steps taken to ensure problems are nipped in the bud.
To maximise efficiency and ensure optimum performance from their kitchen equipment, we recommend that clients schedule their planned equipment servicing directly after their deep cleans.
The business is enjoying growth what’s the next step forward?
We believe that maintenance will form a large part of our future business as we are one of the few businesses who can offer clients the convenience and simplicity of having one point of contact for all their kitchen cleaning and maintenance needs. Due to the current economic climate, we are seeing customers increasingly recognising the need for regular servicing of essential equipment in order to prolong its lifespan and minimise downtime. TWO Services have always provided scheduled maintenance and reactive emergency repairs, but this increased demand has led to us taking on another engineer and we will continue to increase our staffing in this area as demand grows.
In the long term we also see equipment supply as a growth area, as we are often asked for advice by our customers in the course of their cleaning and maintenance schedules. TWO sources and supplies from a wide range of manufacturers and because we are completely independent with no affiliation to specific brands, there is no hidden agenda. We simply seek the best solution for our customers at a competitive price. Our clients like the fact that we provide an unbiased view and that we can even install the equipment for them if they wish.
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For general enquiries and National Sales, call: freephone 0800 22 44 33
For your requirements in the North, call: 01132 727 523
For your requirements in the South, call: 01268 727 603
Or email your enquiry to hq@two-services.com