Facilities management, hard and soft, delivered by one in-house team.

Facilities management without the layers

Most facilities management in the UK is sold by companies that do not actually carry out the work. A contract is signed, a management fee is applied, and the jobs are pushed down to whichever local subcontractor is cheapest that month. The result is familiar to anyone who has managed a building: a helpdesk that logs tickets beautifully and a site that never quite gets fixed.

Deeside Management Services works the other way round. We are a 12-strong in-house team of tradespeople based at Engineer Park in Deeside, trading since 2010, and the people who quote your work are the people who turn up to do it. There is no management layer skimming a percentage off a subcontractor's invoice, and no ambiguity about who is accountable when something goes wrong.

That structure suits a particular kind of client. If you are running a national estate of four hundred sites, a large national FM provider is probably the right answer. If you are looking after a regional portfolio, a handful of commercial units, a managed block or a cluster of buildings across North Wales and the North West, you will almost certainly get faster response and lower whole-life cost from a direct contractor who is on the road in your area every day.

Hard services: keeping the building itself working

Hard FM is everything physically attached to the building, and it is where failures cost the most. Our hard services are delivered by qualified in-house trades, with Gas Safe registration on heating work and NICEIC standards on electrical work.

The bulk of it is unglamorous and essential. Boiler and heating faults, hot water systems, leaks and blocked drainage, electrical faults and distribution board work, emergency lighting, roof leaks and flashing failures, guttering, doors, locks and building fabric. When something in that list fails on a commercial site, the clock starts immediately, because a cold office or a flooded storeroom stops people working.

We also carry out the periodic testing that keeps a building compliant, and just as importantly we hold the renewal dates. Fixed wire testing, EICRs, emergency lighting checks and gas servicing all have expiry dates that are easy to lose track of across a portfolio, and an expired certificate is a live insurance problem rather than an administrative one.

• Electrical repairs, EICRs, distribution boards, lighting and emergency lighting
• Heating, hot water, boiler repair and full plumbing systems, Gas Safe registered
• Roofing, flashings, flat roof repair and gutter and valley clearance
• Building fabric repairs, doors, locks, board-ups and security response
• Internal and external redecoration programmes

Soft services: how the site looks and feels

Soft FM is what your tenants, customers and staff actually notice. Nobody walks into a building and admires the condition of the distribution board. They notice the state of the car park, the bin store, the entrance planting and the communal stairwell, and they form a judgement about the whole organisation from it.

We deliver soft services on scheduled cycles agreed in advance: grounds and grass maintenance through the growing season, hedge cutting, seasonal planting and pruning, communal and washroom cleaning, waste and fly-tip clearance, and hard surface cleaning. For retail and hospitality sites the frequency is usually driven by footfall. For industrial estates it tends to be driven by fly-tipping and boundary vegetation.

Fly-tipping deserves a specific mention because it is the single most common unplanned soft service we deal with on commercial and industrial sites. We clear it under licence, photograph it before removal, and provide the documentation you need if you want to pursue the matter or evidence it to an insurer or landlord.

• Grounds maintenance, grass cutting, strimming and hedge cutting
• Seasonal planting, pruning and shrub bed care
• Communal, washroom, stairwell and end-of-tenancy cleaning
• Licensed fly-tip and bulk waste removal with photographic reporting
• Car park, walkway and hard surface cleaning

Reporting, evidence and the audit trail

Facilities management lives or dies on evidence. If you cannot show what was done, when and by whom, you cannot defend a service charge, justify a budget or close out a compliance query.

Every visit we make is photo-documented. You receive before and after images, a description of the work carried out, and a note of anything we spotted that will need attention later. Planned works are issued on a schedule in advance so you can share dates with tenants, and reactive jobs are reported back with the same evidence pack.

For agents and managed portfolios we set up a reporting workflow that matches your existing process. If you run a helpdesk or CAFM system, we feed into it. If you prefer email and a monthly summary, that works too. What we do not do is ask you to change how you operate to suit our paperwork.

Commercial terms that make sense

Surveys and quotes are free, and we issue a fixed written price on the day of the site visit. For planned programmes that means an annual schedule with a known cost, rather than a day rate that quietly expands. For reactive work it means you approve a number before the work happens.

There is no minimum contract term and no lock-in. Most of our long-standing FM clients started with a single reactive call-out and expanded from there once they saw how the jobs were handled. We would rather earn the next site than tie you into one.

Insurance and accreditation documentation is provided up front. Public liability and employers' liability are in place on every job, our teams hold CSCS and IPAF where required, and we are working through Safe Contractor accreditation.

Coverage across North Wales and the North West

From Deeside we cover the whole of North Wales including Wrexham, Rhyl and Bangor, and reach east and north across Cheshire, Liverpool, Manchester, Lancashire and Cumbria. Because our vans are already working across that footprint daily, multi-site portfolios can be routed efficiently rather than each visit being priced as a separate journey.

If you are consolidating several contractors into one, the simplest starting point is a walk round one of your sites. It is free, it takes an hour, and you will get a written price before we leave.