1970s: Cleaning Contractors Create World Congress

This is the second part of a five-part article from Contracting Profits' BSCAI 50th Anniversary Section.

NABSC called the 1970s  the “Dawn of New Era.” The association renamed itself the Building Service Contractors Association – International or BSCA-I (though it was most commonly known simply as BSCA). Besides a name change, the association moved from Washington, D.C., to Virginia.
 
With its goal to raise professional standards in the contracting industry, BSCA launched its Certified Building Services Executive standard (CBSE). Certification was open to applicants with a minimum of five years of field experience with three of those years being in a management position. Almost 60 contractors graduated in the initial 1976 class with association founder James Purcell named as the first certified building service contractor.

Two years later, the association introduced its second standard, the Registered Building Service Manager, or RBSM, to formally recognize managers and supervisors with a high degree of expertise. More than 25 participants graduated in the first class.

The initial goal was that every association member would have at least one person on staff with the CBSE and RBSM designation. Throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the decades that followed, BSCs were tested by the thousands. Training and education were in high demand. Recognizing that 80 percent of revenue went to labor costs, BSCA offered a travelling Supervision Seminar to teach employee issues. This popular event crisscrossed the country and was held in upwards of 15 times a year.

Near the end of the decade, with membership from 25 different countries, the board felt there was a need to “increase the exchange of information between contract cleaning firms worldwide.” BSCA took a leadership role in forming the World Federation of Building Service Contractors (WFBSC), with then BSCA president David Meiers as its first president. The first World Congress was held in 1979 in Berne, Switzerland. Of the 138 attendees, more than a third were BSCA members.