Cleaning Up the Bottom Line

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You know, there's sometimes, you know, we look at a lot of companies, but there's sometimes you see a company you say, yeah, I understand what they do, but I had no idea that was necessary, but then you look at it and you say, that really is necessary. That's sort of what I might take on Invisible Sun technology. What they do is they keep, they keep offices clean, and it's a big expense, but how do you know when you're getting what you pay for, if you're an donor, and what happens if half the office is not being used? Just some of the dilemmas that I

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think have been solved by John Kunzier, the company's co-founder and CEO who joined us right now. It's good to have you with us. Well, thank you, David, for having me. It's great and hopefully we can explain why we do what we do. Well, I mean, I understand the concept of cleaning an office, and I know it's a great expense, and I know if it doesn't get done, you get mad because [unclear: trash-can example], but I guess it's different now that not as many people are working in offices. So tell me exactly what Invisible Sun does.

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Well, we help our clients that are facility companies, real estate companies, understand what happens within the building and what we call soft facility services. Right? Those would be janitorial security, groundskeeping or landscaping type activities where you've got independent workers who are given a task that they're supposed to do, and there's no real data that validates what they did and were they there? Were they not there?

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How long were they there? And we help our clients understand what that is to get the value of the contract. But my premise also is, is do they need to be there? I mean, if you've got businesses that are, you know, if it's worked from home Mondays and Fridays, do you really need the expense of, you know, all the maybe, well, I guess you do, you know, security, but I don't need office cleaning. Well, you know, with the kind of get back to the office

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initiatives, a lot of organizations are really focused on not only, hey, you know, making sure that there are desks, but making sure that the hygiene is there. One of the big pushbacks from people going back to the office is, hey, is it clean enough? I'm very comfortable in my own space. And I want to know that I'm not going to get something when I get back to the office, right? So that is, you know, kind of the focus of a lot of our organizations. For example,

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we are doing a project in the UK in a headquarters of a major bank. And that's really the focus, understanding and providing that visibility so that people feel comfortable when they are in the office. Realistically, the client said, we don't want any excuses of why you can't come back. So this is in a post COVID environment. Absolutely. Right. So again, we're now comfortable, you know, behind a screen in our own homes. But now you're going to bring me back into a kind of a commingling

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environment. And you know, I want to make sure that the cafeteria is clean. The restrooms are clean and make sure that things are happening in the building that make sure it's hygienic. Well, how do you do that if you don't have somebody walking around and, you know, touching desks and looking in waste baskets and see if they're clean? This is not something you could just do with surveillance cameras, is it? Well, unfortunately, certain aspects of that, we're not sure that we can put a surveillance camera in a restroom, right, which is one of the biggest areas where cleaners are important, right? Because let's face it, we've all gone to a

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a restaurant, a fast food, you know, a, you know, a stop, a truck stop. And we're we're disgusted by the restroom areas. We do it a little differently. I mean, you can do some surveillance with that with if you have cameras. We happen to use IOT or Internet of Things devices, so a Bluetooth beacon, a smart card, and then a Wi-Fi gateway will allow us to capture the

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movement of person, whether it's a piece of equipment or whether it's a human being. And then we compare it to a task list. Did you actually do what you were contracted to do and expected to do and make sure that it's clean and then we see the gaps, right? And what we really do is provide visibility to the gaps of what's not happening. So you don't do the cleaning. You do the monitoring to see that the cleaning was done. That is correct. So I can see why management would like you and I and and actually probably

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save him some money and certainly lawsuits. What about the on the other hand? What about the cleaning services? Well, it's a cultural shift, right? You've got some folks that are used to being independent, but there are, you know, a lot of issues with independent cleaners. We've all seen, you know, and heard of instances of different things happening within a building with a cleaning staff. But as a cultural shift, they slowly begin to realize that we're there to help.

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And the other side of that is there's a lot of cleaners that are overworked, right? They don't have enough cleaning staff to do what is required because of budgetary issues and we help organizations kind of right size what that cleaning staff should be or reset expectations. You know, the other thing we're seeing and I've seen a lot of it just the last couple of weeks, is companies quote, right sizing, you know, downsizing, artificial intelligence. You know, the promise of artificial intelligence has been to replace some jobs and they seem to be doing it

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at an escalating rate right now. So what does that do for your business? Is this are they eating away at your business? Not yet. Honestly, in the United States, facility management is a few years behind the technology curve. And until we get robots that are that agile and cost effective to clean an intricate space like a restroom, it's coming,

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it's going to happen. But I don't see it happening in the next 10 years. And ultimately, our clients are kind of preparing for that. We see in the future an environment where we have a robot cleaner that is doing a floor, mopping a floor vacuuming. You have human beings doing certain elements to it. We're also adding what we would call occupancy driven cleaning, meaning, hey, I've got a really busy bathroom or local space where I want to clean it every time 25

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people get through. And I want to signal to go out so that those individuals that are responsible now know that, hey, it's time for somebody to get there. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. We've connected all of this together. So a scenario is, hey, look, we've got somebody here. Your number 25, a signal goes out to a cleaner, a cleaner comes in. We understand that they were there for 10 minutes cleaning or five minutes. It then updates the system and there's a placard on the wall that says, hey, David Johnson was the last one here. If something's wrong,

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give me a happy smiley face or a frown and tell me what's what's not happening. And oh, by the way, we are also putting sensors in soap dispensers, towel dispensers and bins so that we always know that there's fresh supplies in that particular restroom. So we're automating that side of the business because ultimately it's done primarily the same way it's been done for the last 50 years. Somebody walks in, there's a piece of paper. So who's your client? Is your client the people

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who rent 10,000 square feet to space at an office building or is your client the office building? Our client is the office building owner or property manager primarily. We will have some janitorial type companies that are progressive that'll look at it and say this is pretty cool. But it's also when we think about the demographic, let's say, University of Texas, right? I got a campus. I got an X number of buildings. I've got a staff of 200 that are cleaning this.

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We want to make sure that those folks that we have a handle on what's actually happening. I mean, that that expense is in the millions in the per month, right? When we kind of think about how much these people are spending on this type of service with very little visibility. And that's what we raise up. And we're finding that in, especially in places like health care, where hygiene isn't just a nice to have. But hygiene can reduce infection and the cost of

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infection in a hospital is between $20,000 and $40,000 per incident. And you've got about a 17% chance if you go in to get something like [unclear: infection names] or other kind of infectious diseases. So again, our solution helps at least identify the gaps where this isn't happening. And we have some really gory stories, which I won't get into. I believe you I believe so you operate in the US, but also you were talking about you operate in the UK. So is this portable? I mean,

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you operate in the UK exactly as you operate in the US? Yes, there's a little bit more regulation in the UK around cleanliness and actually the requirement to document what's happening. There's also a province of Ontario has the same kind of requirement, which would, you know, again, require someone to document electronically that they actually clean a facility. But generally, the process is the same. We see the same problems. We have the same

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challenges with staff. We have the same lack of visibility. And ultimately, we can drive, you know, 20% out of the budget or redirect it to get more, you know, you could drive 20% out of a budget, really? Yeah, because ultimately it. So what happens is we measure this by what we call compliance and compliance in the US as a word is a negative word, right? But compliance means, hey, we have a set of activities we're going to do. And on average, we see across the globe between 60 and 70% compliance, right? So which means 60% of the 60 to 70% of the work is actually

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being done. So there's a delta of about 40 to 30 to 40% that isn't getting done. And the solution is we just add more people. But if we're unproductive at 60 to 70%, right, for every three people, we get the work of four if we're monitoring what they're doing. So those are areas where when we think about this type of technology, that visibility allows us to see where we can actually tighten our belt without really tighten our belt. It's a fascinating business. And again, it is a business

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that I didn't know existed. I didn't know needed to exist. But I now understand that that both are the case. John Kunzier is the co founder and CEO of Invisible Sun Technologies. Good spend some time with you. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Thanks for more of a conversation. Go to krld.com slash CEO of David Johnson news radio today.