Walking a tightrope is a balancing act.
Lean too far one way or the other and disaster awaits.
Your business is the same way. You’ve got two demanding managers: your bottom line and your facility.
Your bottom line often depends on keeping your expenses in check.
But when you ask your commercial cleaning company for a lower price, you usually end up with a lower quality of service as well.
The whole point of hiring the company in the first place is to get your building cleaned well, so your challenge is finding the balance between keeping costs low and service quality high.
Here are two possible solutions:
#1 - Modify the Scope of Work
In the janitorial industry, about 60% of our expenses are related to labor. Lowering costs, then, requires reducing labor hours.
One way to do this is by modifying the scope of work. You may have told your cleaning company to clean certain areas with a specific frequency just because that’s the way you’ve always done it. Maybe you’ve never stopped to ask if it was the best way.
For instance, your janitorial program might call for cleaning specific offices in your facility every day. But on a second look, you realize those offices don’t get very much foot traffic, so you could drop the cleaning frequency to once a week.
Action Item: Take another look at your facility and figure out the true cleaning needs of each area. Can you lower the frequency of any tasks? Maybe the only daily vacuuming you need is in the common areas, while office vacuuming can move to weekly.
You may want to check with a qualified cleaning contractor, who can give you suggestions on the most efficient way to keep your building looking and feeling clean.
#2 – Eliminate Project Work from the Monthly Bill
Many companies spend way too much money on their cleaning contracts because of project work (such as stripping and waxing floors, washing windows, etc.). These tasks are all critical to a quality cleaning program, but some contracts specify a certain amount of projects per year and include this in the monthly bill.
Often, you don’t actually need this work at the intervals prescribed or it just never gets done. In either case, you’re throwing money away.
Action Item: Establish a unit price for those extra services, then schedule them as needed. This is certain to save you money over the course of a year – sometimes a significant amount.
Everyone is relieved when a tightrope walker reaches the end of the rope, especially if things got hairy along the way.
Think you might be losing your balance?
We’ll help you stay on the rope.
Just contact us for a free consultation on your commercial cleaning needs!
