Why You Need a Retail Facility Management Company
Retailers Across All Categories are Expanding Their Footprint
Retailers across every sector are increasing their store counts in 2024 and beyond — from grocery and convenience brands to eateries. If a store expansion is part of your retail brand’s growth strategy, ensuring proactive upkeep of those locations — as well as existing stores — is going to increase in priority for you and your team, increasing the need for a retail facility maintenance company.
If you’re like most retail brands, however, you likely outsource at least a part of your facility management responsibilities — to better manage costs, gain access to outside expertise, and benefit from greater efficiency. However, not all partners are the same. You may even be working with multiple partners to support specific locations.
While outsourcing retail facility maintenance is certainly helping you streamline your overall program, consider this: what benefits and value would you receive in working with one company for every location in your footprint — whether regional or nationwide?
Advantages of Working with One Retail Facility Maintenance Company
Complete Coverage for All Locations
Let’s start with the obvious. Managing facility maintenance for multiple locations is no simple task. Even with outside partners helping you, it’s probable that you’ve run into coverage gaps for some areas or individual stores. Capability gaps are often an issue as well. You may find a partner for electrical and plumbing maintenance, but that partner may lack skills in signage maintenance, for example. Finding new partners takes time and effort that should be spent elsewhere.
- A national retail facility maintenance company has established relationships with field partners across multiple service disciplines in every state, ensuring you have the coverage you need for wherever you do business.
Reduced Administrative Complexity
Managing quotes, estimates, invoices, product documentation, asset warranties, reporting, and the countless other documents and materials that come with maintenance for each location is an administrative nightmare. Even if you already have a centralized facility maintenance solution for capturing this material, managing it on a daily basis is a time sink for you and your team. Once again, is handling this where your time should be spent?
- Working with a national retail facility maintenance company takes this administrative responsibility off of your shoulders and reallocates it to your partner’s program management team. Whether they’re using your tools or providing solutions of their own, managing this work is what they do best — which allows you and your team to do what you do best.
Consistency in Work Quality
This is particularly important because inconsistencies across your locations can translate into negative customer experiences, damage to your brand, and lost revenue. Even if you have a few companies managing facility maintenance for multiple regions, it’s likely that the quality will at some point dip or work execution will be inconsistent. And when your partners can’t be that first line of defense for your team, you will get dragged down into addressing issues that prevent you from achieving other goals.
- This is why working with a national retail facility maintenance company is so important. One company understands what your brand stands for and what kind of work needs to be done. They manage it with their field partners and ensure everything is unified and executed accordingly.
Consolidated Reporting
Imagine dealing with multiple reporting formats, inconsistent reporting schedules, data that doesn’t match other sources, and other frustrations — on a daily basis. Again, even if you have multiple partners handling this, the chances of inconsistency in your reporting and data management are higher. This creates confusion for you and your team and makes it difficult to report up to leadership. Additionally, it’s likely that different partners will use separate facility management tools — creating more administrative hassle for your team in having to learn multiple systems or access them as needed.
- Working with one retail facility maintenance company ensures all reporting, metrics, KPIs, and other important information is all gathered by one team and stored in one place. They’ll gather all analytics in the same fashion so you get consistent, understandable, and reliable data for all of your own internal reporting needs.
Let’s Make Your Retail Facility Maintenance Program a Lasting Success
For decades, Stratus has been helping retailers nationwide and virtually every sector implement stronger brand and facility maintenance solutions. From helping you maintain your signage assets and ensure lighting systems are working properly to keeping interior and exteriors looking their best, all while reporting on progress and showing you your return on investment, we’re the team you need to help you keep every location in your footprint doing exactly what it needs to be doing: generating revenue for your business.