About Us

The largest part of our business is nightly janitorial services (i.e. nightly dusting, and trash removal). We service a wide array of customers and building types, including:

• Single-Tenant Offices
• Multi-Tenant Office Buildings
• Restaurants
• Bars
• Gyms
• Schools
• Churches
• Movie Theaters
• Stadiums
• Event Cleaning
• Museums
• Car Dealerships
• Manufacturing Facilities
• Biotech Labs
• Retail Stores
• Grocery Stores
• Government Buildings
• Resorts
• Healthcare Clinics
• Veterinary Clinics
• Cleanrooms
• Hospitals

This is a request we receive more and more from prospective customers. For customers with 2-6 employees, we typically can accommodate this request once we have seen the building. In order to ensure the best professional janitorial service, we are not able to provide a quote for larger buildings through e-mail.

With the popularity of our Unit Franchisees, customers frequently confuse subcontracting with Franchise Companies. There are some very important and significant differences.

A subcontractor is a separate and detached company hired by the person actually selling the service to the customer. Often the seller little or no knowledge of the actual company that is going to complete the work.

We learned this first hand in the early days of our business. We were frequently contacted by companies who had won professional janitorial service contracts and were looking for a company to complete them.

We were stunned to realize that their websites claimed that they thoroughly they “screened” their “employees.”

In truth, we almost never actually met with anyone who subcontracted us. The extent of their "thorough screening" was an exchange of paperwork through fax or e-mail.

These were not small accounts, either. All told, we have done more than a million dollars worth of this type of work.

As our business has grown, we have realized just how commonplace this practice is. So have many potential customers, hence the number of questions regarding subcontracting.

We ceased doing subcontract work in 2009. It became clear that this was not how we wanted to conduct business for ourselves or our customers.

There a several important differences in the professional janitorial services provided by franchise owners and subcontractors: quality control, the relationship, and the personal financial investment.

Quality Control
Generally, a franchise company will have substantially better quality control than a company that subcontracts.

A Franchise Owner has gone through weeks of training with their franchise company, with final exams to verify their understanding. Also, their personal backgrounds have been run through security checks.

In a typical subcontracting association, the entire process is done by phone or e-mail.

The Relationship
The Franchisor-Franchisee relationship is very close-knit and expansive.

The Franchisee has agreed to and been trained on the policies and procedures of the Franchisor, which in most cases consists of a 200 page document.

The Franchisee has typically worked with the Franchisor for years.

Additionally, if the Franchisee has quality control issues, they have contractually agreed to be removed from the account and they typically must pay operational fines and fees for their non-performance.

None of these safeguards are present in most subcontracting relationships. In fact, in our subcontracting days, our agreements were no more than two pages through a fax.

The Investment
This is a large differentiator between subcontracting and franchise agreements. Subcontractors have no investment in the success of an individual customer that they service. Generally, they are accustomed to getting and losing accounts from multiple companies. They have no particular loyalty to any particular company or customer.

In contrast, Franchisees have invested a thousands and thousands of dollars, often from their personal savings, to own a Forte Franchise. They have a personal, vested interest in purchasing the franchise, training in best business and cleaning practices, and winning the chance to service your building.

While our technology and our culture put us a cut above our competitors, it is truly the excellence of our people, whatever their role within the company, that set FORTE apart.

People
Overall our business succeeds because of the daily dedication and commitment demonstrated by our people.

Individual interaction with people and their needs makes up 100% of our business. How we interact with our customers, vendors, government agencies, and general community should be a testament to our core values.

Of course, in any business where the product is a human service there are bound to be imperfections and inconsistencies. But at FORTE, we aspire to convey perfect values even through imperfect means - ourselves.

Our Corporate Staff
Those chosen few individuals that oversee our operations and business development can tell you many a tale about the stringent process that they had to endure before they were hired.

We perform all of the standard filtering: background checks, interviews, and work history...but that it just the beginning.

Each applicant under serious consideration is interviewed multiple times by various people in our organization.

We ask probing and difficult questions about an individual’s self-awareness. We purposefully try to make applicants mentally uncomfortable in their interviews. We put them through a number of assessment tests, both of behavior and skill-set.

If they survive that (and very few do), we give them case studies to read through. We require both written and oral discussion of the case studies given out. We aren’t so much interested in the “right answer” as we are in the mental acuity demonstrated by the answers given.

Our Franchise Owners
Our Franchise Owners have played a key role in our growth from an idea to a firm servicing hundreds of businesses throughout the country.

We credit our success, in no small part, to their humility and willingness to truly listen to customers and their interest in providing the best professional janitorial services possible, every night, in buildings across the United States.

We can give you a professional janitorial services quote over the phone if your building has 2-6 employees, but we cannot provide an accurate bid for buildings larger than that.