Your shop floor tells a story. All the stains and blotches speak to the volume of vehicles coming into your bays, as well as your attention to detail. They may also reflect your professionalism to customers and employees, indicating that the shop values safety, efficiency, and organization, and that the same attention to detail given to the floor will be given to every vehicle that comes through the shop.
"When you see the care taken right out the gate, right when you see the floor itself shining and the shelves neat and organized and the parts all in order, you're going to feel better about doing business," explained Steve Wilson, CEO of Valentine Performance Detailing
Valentine offers vehicle detailing kits and shop cleaning products including Garage Gloss, a slip-resistant floor finish that provides an extra level of luster for personal and commercial shops. It's the same as how you may feel about someone with a set of leather shoes polished into mirrors as opposed to ratty sneakers with holes and frayed laces.
“[A clean floor] builds pride as well,” Wilson continued, “and pride will translate into performance and customer service and all the other things we strive for.”
Before helping shops perfect their floor care routines, Wilson honed his eye for detail in the finest luxury hotels, eventually building a company that provided everything from valet parking to housekeeping.
“We were experts in floor care,” he said. “We were known for pristine marble, deep cut. When you look down, you can see the reflection of the chandelier.”
In such a palatial atmosphere, guests are more likely to gloss over the added resort fees and snack bar fees. In an auto or truck shop, it at least gives customers the impression you took care of their asset as well as, if not better than, the floor.
For Wilson, excellence is non-negotiable, as attention to detail sets the tone for the entire operation. “That first impression of floors is everything.”
Wilson believes the auto repair space also can benefit from such meticulous attention to detail.
The company’s Garage Gloss, for example, not only protects the floor from future spills and blemishes due to its durable polymer coating, according to Wilson, it can also be applied with just a mop. “You get sort of a high-speed shining without having the high-speed burnisher,” he said.
The PurFloor Neutral Floor Cleaner, on the other hand, can help remove existing stains on the shop floor before applying the gloss finish, and Wilson recommends using this before the gloss.
“In a lot of cases, if you don't have a lot of spills or stains, you can just use the neutral floor cleaner, and then you can apply the Garage Gloss,” he explained, “and literally within an hour, you can apply a second coat and a third coat if you want.”
Wilson usually recommends four or five coats, and has gone as many as eight or nine.
Valentine also offers FlashDry, a spill containment company known for its organic coir absorbent. The full line of pads, mats, and spill kits is designed to clean up oil, grease, gas, paint, and other liquids in an environmentally-conscious manner.
The basis of the product is coconut coir, “the byproduct of when you strip the fibers out of the inner nut of the coconut and you're left with sort of a debris,” Wilson described. “For decades and decades, that stuff used to pile up in the tropics and just sit there, until someone discovered it's an amazing absorbent,” five to seven times more absorbent than clay-based products that are on the market.
According to Wilson, FlashDry absorbs and encapsulates a fluid spill, unlike a clay base, which adsorbs it, referring to a process where molecules from a liquid or gas adhere to the surface of another material.
“If you looked at them under a microscope, all the little cracks and crevices in a clay molecule are where the spill gets trapped,” he said. “And that's fine, you can clean up the spill, but what happens when it rains? The clay dissolves and the hydrocarbon goes back.”
And not only are clay-based products less efficient, but they can also be toxic, according to RJ Valentine, founder of the company.
"After witnessing the dangers of inhaling toxic dust from clay-based absorbents on racetracks, I developed FlashDry as a safer, more effective way to clean up spills,” Valentine said. “FlashDry is 100% natural yet ultra-absorbent, making it ideal for any setting.”
About the Author
Lucas Roberto
Lucas Roberto is an Associate Editor for Fleet Maintenance magazine. He has written and produced multimedia content over the past few years and is a newcomer to the commercial vehicle industry. He holds a bachelor's in media production and a master's in communication from High Point University in North Carolina.