by Bruce Smith CEO UK    It must have seemed quiet in the Melbourne offices during the early part of March. It was certainly not that way in downtown Wembley as Cleanevent International descended upon us. It was good to see the likes of Webber, Arnott, Searle and Co out of their natural habitat and experiencing the delights of a wonderful English winter. When I suggested the temperature would reach 35 degrees they didn’t realise I was talking Fahrenheit not Centigrade. And they learned that it is possible for it to rain horizontally!    As part of this invasion, the UK staff took a leap by 50% with Paullette Nicholson arriving to take control of the office and Steven Searle to set up the fiscal side of the operation. No doubt the Melbourne server felt relieved but it took just two days for him to bring ours crashing down!    As significantly though was the arrival of Brian Allison (BA) to assist Pete Watts in the start of the first UK contract. Both were up early as the sun struggled through overcast skies and the first nine Cleanevent venue employees arrived to start work at Wimbledon. I don’t suppose anyone will forget that first day, seeing Cleanevent uniformed staff working their way through one of the most famous venues in the world. John Bridge has been appointed Venue Cleaning Manager at the venue and will take on more and more responsibility

in the coming weeks as BA concentrated more and more on our operational plans for The Championships. I have no doubt that everyone will be glued to their TVs at unearthly hours in both Australia and the USA looking for Cleanevent staff! I suspect also, that there will be no shortage of people offering their services to work at The All England Club!    The next few months will hopefully see us take on more contracts. Certainly we are hard at work producing tenders and that will continue into the English summer months. One of the areas we can make a real impact is by focusing on quality of service. As you may have heard, the UK has never had a good reputation for customer service, but things are changing albeit it at a pedestrian pace. Facility managers here need educating to the fact that more acceptable levels of cleaning are available to them – rather than being happy to simply accept the best of a bad situation. This is the process that we must embark on. The quality of the information that we recently circulated to a number of venues has already had a positive response. Within a day of arriving on desks, two managers at arenas had contacted us to say they were fed up with the level of service they had and were itching to see us. These people talk and as soon as the Cleanevent Way comes into force – word will spread. It may take time to work our way into many of the venues but once we are there and working to our potential, I believe we will be there for good.    One down and many to go.