Orlando—About 20 to 25 percent of the Fuse Commercial Flooring Alliance members are successfully diversifying their businesses through maintenance divisions, according to a recent member survey.

Abby Reinhard, owner and president of GP Flooring Solutions in Brockport, N.Y., is part of the Fuse maintenance committee, and she rolled out a maintenance division for her business about 18 months ago.



“Maintenance has been a really positive and promising aspect of our business,” Reinhard said as she addressed membership at the organizations annual convention this week. “First of all, it’s high margin. Second of all, it gets our foot in the door with customers we might not otherwise be able to get in with as easily. It keeps us in front of our customers on a regular basis, and someone in our committee meeting said it also makes us a little bit more valuable to vendors and suppliers because they can recommend us with confidence if an end user comes to them with a floor care issue.”

One of the benefits of Fuse membership is collaboration among the independent business owners, and Fuse’s maintenance committee is working to define and refine their goals and help more members get into maintenance. They have been establishing standard operating procedures and creating a business plan to help owners set guideposts, such as how to get to a $1 million in maintenance.

“Our business plan is to make it easier for those of you who are not involved with maintenance to get on board with maintenance," Reinhard said.

The committee is improving the training for maintenance across the network. They did this by drawing a map of where they have experts—someone with at least 10 years experience working in the category—who can become mentors to other Fuse members. The committee found that they have potential mentors in every region of the United States.

“Our call to action is to anyone who wants to get into maintenance, reach out and we will refer you to one of our regional experts," Reinhard added.

For more information, visit www.fusealliance.com.