“Spring cleaning” was a thing long before it’s expanded to recent decluttering trends like Swedish “Death Cleaning” and Marie Kondo’s mantra of shedding material goods that “don’t spark joy” anymore.
So, since it’s March and people will be thinking about decluttering and reorganizing, it’s a good time for custom integrators to do the same. The concept of spring cleaning came up several times on January’s CE Pro VIPeer2Peer call — our monthly group discussion with 10-14 dealers — when we discussed 2025 business resolutions.
Warehouses Provide an Immediate Option to Start
Warehouses are obviously the most glaring place to start with what could be a mighty decluttering project for some integrators. CE Pro ran an “Oldest Gear Contest” a few years back and the winner had equipment from the 1970s in his storage.
“It’s just like a house you’ve been in when you get to me my age, which is 60. You just accumulate a lot of stuff,” says Phil Joseph, principal of AVT in Northern California. “We have been doing just a blitz of cleanup. I threw away stuff in our server room — I found Windows 95 CDs.”
One of the biggest benefits of decluttering is opening up opportunities to tighten efficiencies in operations. With building space at a premium, creating space to optimize each room in your office/showroom, especially the warehouse.
Think about how eliminating inventory gathering dust can be repurposed for something like a rack-building area for outfitting and prepping an equipment rack that’s fully ready to roll when the techs arrive for pickup the next morning.
Or perhaps you can transform newly freed-up space into a media room or expand and upgrade the conference room.
But How You Dispose of That Old Equipment Matters
How to get rid of that old/overstock inventory is probably the biggest conundrum, though. Do you help other integrators with replacement parts for legacy systems? Do you open an Ebay store, post on Craigslist/Facebook marketplace, or hold clearance sales events to liquidate?
“When you have space it’s just like, put it in a drawer and we’ll clean it out later,” Joseph adds. “What happened is we took on these new product categories, and we have all this warehouse space, but things are just jammed up and inefficient because we have crap that’s from 2008 that we thought, well, we’ll get our money back out of it someday.
“And so, we’re just having a new mantra of just anything that we sold to a client, either try and sell it sideways and get it to a competitor that could properly use it. Just not keeping anything in the warehouse that we can’t use in the next 12 months and using that space for efficiency and organization.”
Other Areas of Your Business That Could Use Some Spring Cleaning
Of course, there are other areas that can use some spring cleaning. Examine your business processes, documentation, contract forms, proposal builders, sales strategy, etc., and ask if anything needs to be cleaned up and updated with fresh technology, software, or even legal consultation. Plus, any improvements should work out well in the long run if an integrator wants or has to sell the business.
“We’re doing some cleanup as well. We’re in the process of building a new warehouse, that should be completed in the next 3-and-a-half months, so we’ll be moving some of our office location to that,” notes Craig Colvin, owner of San Antonio-area Branson Design Group. “Really, my goal for 2025 is I want to prepare for growth, but I need to stabilize a little bit. with our current processes before we take on too much change.”
