Request a quote for your building
Why a walkthrough
There is no honest per-square-foot number
A dental practice, a distribution warehouse and a twelve-desk office of identical floor area are three different jobs, priced apart by a wide margin. Anyone quoting a building from an area figure over the phone is either padding heavily to protect themselves or planning to revise it once they see the place.
Facility type
Determines the entire shape of the scope: which areas exist, which need daily attention, and what standards apply.
Restroom fixtures
The single most reliable predictor of labor on any commercial site. Fixtures, not rooms.
Frequency
Five nights costs more in total and substantially less per visit than one, because the building never gets behind.
Headcount and footfall
Twelve staff and four hundred daily customers produce very different amounts of work in the same building.
Floors and access hours
Hard floor, carpet and polished concrete each need different handling, inside whatever window you have.
Consumables
Whether we supply and manage paper, soap and liners, or you do. A real line, and often left ambiguous.
The document
What a written scope actually contains
“We’ll clean your offices” is not a scope, and it is what a surprising number of commercial cleaning agreements amount to. A scope is the document that decides every disagreement you will ever have about the work, so it is worth knowing what should be in one before you accept anybody’s.
- Per-visit tasks, by area
- What happens every single time, written area by area rather than as a general standard. Restrooms, kitchen or breakroom, workstations, common areas, entrances, floors. If a task is not on this list it is not happening every visit, and that is a decision you should have made rather than discovered.
- The rotation
- The work that does not need doing every visit and would be wasteful to price as though it did — high dusting, vents, interior glass, baseboards, appliance fronts, detail edges. A real scope names the interval for each rather than saying "periodically".
- Frequency and the schedule
- How many visits a week, on which days, inside which hours. Five nights costs more in total and meaningfully less per visit than one, because a building cleaned nightly never gets behind and each visit is therefore short.
- Consumables
- Who buys and who stocks the paper, soap, liners and hand towels. This is a real running cost and it is left ambiguous more often than any other line in commercial cleaning. Either answer is fine; not answering it is not.
- Access, keys and alarm handling
- How the team gets in, who holds what, what happens on a false alarm, and whether a site induction or a certificate of insurance needs to be on file before the first visit.
- Exclusions, named
- The work that is not included, listed explicitly rather than left to inference. Carpet extraction, floor stripping and refinishing, hood and duct cleaning, regulated clinical work, pest and mold remediation — we name these because we do not do them, and a scope that stays quiet about them is the one that produces an argument later.
Due diligence
Questions worth asking any cleaning company
Including us. These are the questions that separate contractors who have thought about your building from contractors who have a rate card, and the answers are more revealing than any proposal document.
01
Who is actually cleaning the building?
Employees or subcontractors, and whether the same people come each time. Consistency of personnel is the strongest single predictor of consistency of result, and it is rarely volunteered.
02
What happens when someone is off sick?
Every contractor has an answer for the good week. The useful question is what the building looks like on the bad one, and whether cover is a real arrangement or an apology.
03
Are your people background checked and insured?
Ask to see it rather than to be told it. Anyone carrying real coverage will produce a certificate without being chased; anyone who hesitates has answered the question.
04
How do I report a problem, and what happens then?
A named route and a stated timeframe, or nothing. "Call us" is not a process — it is what you do when there is no process.
05
What is the notice period, both ways?
A contract you cannot leave is a contract that does not have to keep earning you. Symmetry here tells you how confident a contractor is in the work.
06
Will you put the rotation in writing?
Anyone can promise high dusting. A contractor willing to name the interval in the scope is a contractor who has costed it and intends to do it.
There are jobs we say no to, and we would rather say so at the walkthrough than sub it out quietly: what we do and do not take on.
For a home
Booking a house clean is faster than a quote
Residential work is priced from the property rather than quoted, so booking gives you a real number in a few minutes. Use a quote request for a house only if the situation is unusual: a very large property, an unclear scope, or something you would rather describe to a person.