Well, October 2016 marks our 10 year anniversary of being a limited company. We have seen a lot of changes during this time, and it’s been a hell of a ten years to look back on!

In 2006, when I started out as a sole trader and our team of office cleaners in Newcastle took their first steps, we had a total of 4 cleaners and 2 contracts for commercial cleaning in Newcastle and Carlisle. 10 years in, we’ve amassed a team of approximately 200 cleaners, 4 supervisors, 4 area managers and Head Office staff of 6. We’ve certainly grown a lot in this time.

Like any company, we’ve seen our ups and downs, but we always continue to soldier on… we’ve made it this long!

Below are just 5 of our main highlights over the last 10 years:

Purchasing our office near Cramlington was a key highlight for us, as this gave us a permanent base, and helped us to grow our Head office and Support Team.
We then expanded into two new areas – providing contract cleaning in The Midlands and Scotland. Seeing our little company grow from a cleaning staff count of 4 to an employee countable to stretch further afield was a huge success, leading us towards our goal of national coverage.
We grew our business with our largest single client from 1 office, with 1 cleaner to 25 cleaners operating across 11 factories and offices in the North East.
During this time period, we have also achieved (and maintained!) our ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and our OHSAS 18001, establishing ourselves as market leaders in this respect.
Over the last 5 years, we have managed to increase our turnover 3 fold, through our marketing efforts combined with high levels of customer satisfaction and retention.

I believe that how we have dealt with our lower points is what has determined our success. The biggest hurdle for NECS over the last decade was the economic meltdown in 2008, as it, unfortunately, forced a lot of our clients to go out of business or at least cut back on their company spend. To ride out the storm, we increased our sales effort and began to target different sectors which had been less affected by the recession. Though potentially a slightly risky move at the time, we invested even more money in our North East cleaning company, and the end result was that after a rocky 3 years, we had created a stronger and more streamlined business, operating in a more resilient sector, providing contract cleaners in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Northumberland, Cramlington and Edinburgh.

Being a cleaning company we’ve had our fair share of laughs over the years as we get to work with a whole variety of different clients and sectors – anything from cleaning office buildings, to end of tenancy student lets (I mean, can you imagine some of the states we find!), to nightclub toilets on a Sunday morning… rather us than you, I suppose! So, nothing really shocks us anymore.

My personal favourite job we carried out was for the St Thomas Parish Church. Whilst I loved the fact we got to appreciate the stunning church situated in County Durham, this wasn’t the only reason this was my favourite task! They got in touch with us, explaining that they’d been experiencing some slight issues with a build-up of (make sure you’re seated!) a total of about 800 years worth of dust and debris that was beginning to fall on the parishioners. Not ideal.

Our Employee of the Decade

We wouldn’t be where we are today without all of our staff members’ continued and unfaltering dedication to the company, so we wanted to take a moment to say a huge thank you to all of our ever-expanding NECS family. Our employee’s positive attitudes and hardworking nature is consistently reflected in the feedback we receive from our happy clients – making it a genuine pleasure to work with every team.

Our Employee Of The Decade has been with us for a total of 6 years now since we launched our North West business back in 2010. Having started off working for us as cleaning staff, he soon progressed to mobile support cleaner as he was willing to travel. As our customer base grew in and around Manchester, our Employee Of The Decade demonstrated his capabilities and was soon promoted to Supervisor, and then Area Manager for the North West not long after. He now manages a total of 60 cleaning staff, keeps the team motivated and in high spirits and is a credit to the company.

Our Employee Of The Decade

Whilst all of our managers have genuinely incredible work ethics and abilities, and consistently show their dedication to their teams and the company, we’ve chosen to award the lovely Darren Street with the accolade of Employee of the Decade, as he has come the furthest in his career progression since he became an employee six years ago.

Future Plans for NECS

We’re now looking to further our North East cleaning service’s success with increased marketing efforts and consistent maintenance of and, where possible, improvement of services provided. We’ll be transitioning to the new ISO standards in Summer 2017, to keep ourselves up to date and providing high-quality work every time. By 2020, we’d like to be working nationally, so watch this space.

Thank you again to all dedicated staff members and for the consistent support, we receive from our lovely clients.

Gary Breach
Managing Director

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