Welcome to the first issue of Cleanzine for 2023! I hope that if you celebrated Christmas and the New Year, you had everything you needed. And since New Year is the time many of us resolve to make positive changes to our lives, may I ask you to consider a work-related one that could make a welcome difference to both your company and your potential clients? Could you please resolve to share your news with me, so I can, potentially, share it with our industry, in the form of some 100,000 Cleanzine readers worldwide? 

 

There’s an age-old saying about ‘not hiding your light under a bushel’. If you’re not familiar with it, a quick Web search (I use Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees – 165, 507,263 last time I looked from just over 4,000 when I joined a few years back) you should see exactly where I’m coming from!

Posting pictures or videos of your successes on social media is only a great way of sharing them with your network and friends if they happen to be on social media too, at around the right time. Even if we’re following another person or organisation, the algorithms in place now mean we’re going to miss most of their posts. If you have something important to share, why take the chance that many of those you’re trying to reach, will miss seeing your time in the spotlight and perhaps a demo of your latest machine or other equipment and the impressive before-and-after pics? 

With the growing number of popular social media platforms now, very few of us can devote the time needed to look at them all, so sending me those videos or pictures with a few notes about the job or machine involved, along with contact details and perhaps a brief quote from your happy client, will allow me to highlight your successes more widely and may – as has been proven so many times in the 21 years Cleanzine’s been broadcasting, give your business a much needed boost! They don’t have to be beautifully written and word-perfect; I can put them into shape for you. Why not give it a go? 

 

Finally, if you’re in the UK you may be working from home because of the train strikes. In keeping tabs on what’s going on, I’ve come across a publication issued by the RMT rail union 18 months ago that I’d not previously seen. I’d love your comments please on ‘Cleaning up the railways: Why a safe railway must mean the end of outsourced cleaning’. You can read it at https://issuu.com/rmtunion/docs/rmt_20report