How to choose an office cleaning company

The failure mode to design against

Contracts rarely fail because a contractor cannot clean. They fail because expectations were never written down precisely enough to be checked.

It goes like this. A proposal describes "comprehensive office cleaning" and lists some areas. Nobody specifies frequencies. Three months in, somebody notices the baseboards have never been touched. The contractor says baseboards were not in the every-visit scope; the client says they assumed comprehensive meant comprehensive. Both are being reasonable and the relationship is now damaged.

A tiered written scope prevents that entire conversation. It is the single most important thing to look for, and a contractor who produces one unprompted has told you a lot about how they operate.

The diligence questions

Ask all of these. The answers matter, but so does how readily they come.

1. Are you bonded and insured, and can you provide a certificate naming our entity or landlord? Insurance covers accidental damage and injury; a bond covers theft. Both matter and a certificate should be routine, not an imposition.
2. Are your cleaners background checked, and when — before a first visit or afterwards? Before is the correct answer.
3. Are they employees or subcontractors? Neither is disqualifying, but it changes who is accountable and how consistent staffing will be. You want a straight answer.
4. Will we get the same team? Continuity is the difference between a team that knows your building and one that is orientating every week.
5. Will you provide a written, tiered scope before we commit? If they will not, stop here.
6. What happens when something is missed, and within what timeframe do we need to report it?
7. Who is our point of contact, and how do we reach somebody at nine at night when a door will not lock?
8. How do you handle keys, codes and alarms, and what happens when staff change?

On price specifically

Commercial cleaning is labour. A price is essentially hours multiplied by a rate, plus consumables and overhead. That constrains how much variation is legitimate.

A quote that is dramatically below the others is not usually a better company being efficient. It is fewer hours in the building, or a lower rate, or a scope that quietly omits things. Fewer hours shows up in month two; a lower rate shows up as turnover, which shows up as a different team every week and a building nobody knows.

That does not mean the highest quote is right either. It means the number only tells you something once you have made the scopes comparable, which is what the checklist and the questions above are for.

The first ninety days

Choosing well is half of it. The other half is how the relationship is run at the start, when it is still easy to correct.

• Walk the building with the contractor after the second or third visit, not after three months.
• Report misses immediately and specifically. "The breakroom floor" is actionable; "it has not been great" is not.
• Watch for the pattern rather than the incident. One missed night is a night. The same item missed three times is a scope or staffing issue.
• Confirm the same team is coming. If it is different people every visit, raise it early — it is the leading indicator of everything else.
• Review the scope formally at ninety days, and adjust it. Almost every scope needs a small correction once it meets a real building.