an e-guide for managers responsible for hiring cleaning services
We put this eguide with you, professional managers, in mind…here is a quick view on the intro of this eguide and you can download the full eguide here
Introduction
This e-guide will help you and your company save time, save money, achieve your objectives, and eliminate the mistakes that too many companies make when hiring a cleaning service. Over the past three years of representing Boston’s Best Commercial Cleaning in sales meetings and contract discussions with over two hundred companies, we have noticed some very common mistakes that put companies at a disadvantage and that set them up for inevitable failure and frustration:
– Assuming that cleaning a building is just taking out the trash, scrubbing floors, and vacuuming, so they hire cleaning companies by their price and how competent the sales rep seemed to be
– Failing to analyze their cleaning needs as if they were going to manage the work themselves, so they fail to fully assess the complexity of the job and fail to approach the hire with that awareness
– By failing to use an RFP, companies not only invite vague bids, they also set themselves up to accept vague bids, and they simply set themselves up to repeat that process every time they get frustrated with their current cleaning service and start looking for a new one.
And most of them simply aren’t aware of this. If they were, they’d be a lot happier, they’d be saving a lot more money, and they’d likely be keeping their cleaning companies for many more years than they do now.
Here’s an example of how these mistakes create problems: A prospective client in the Financial District recently met with us and mentioned that their cleaning provider had just sent over the new rates for the coming year showing a 20% increase! Why such a drastic change? What went wrong that they charged ‘so little’ in the first year and then hiked the price by 20% in the next? A normal year-by-year increase is 1%-5% – but 20%? It’s likely that the cleaning service raised its rates by 20% because, when they signed the original contract, they promised the client an unrealistically low price (in order to beat out competing bids), or they simply weren’t able to accurately assess the cleaning needs in their bid and initial contract because they weren’t given an RFP or full list of cleaning needs or they failed to do their due diligence – so, in order to avoid going out of business, they raised the rates back up to a realistic level. We hear about this frequently from potential clients.
If the company that hired the cleaners didn’t provide an RFP, then they didn’t have a clear understanding of what they needed, what it would cost them, or how to compare bids from different cleaning providers.
Whether you hire us or not, this guide will help you become a better shopper for and supervisor of cleaning services. That only helps BBCC in the long run, because our services are focused on quality, integrity, and long-term growth of our company – core values that are served best by better-informed and more capable customers. We seek to have a positive influence on everyone in the cleaning sector: customers and providers.
And remember: A cleaning service is a team that ensures your office staff and clients are working in a clean and healthy environment, and that affects employee morale and productivity. The research1 on this is well-established and has demonstrated over and over that cleaning has a direct impact on a business’s bottom line.
So if you consider it from this point of view, why wouldn’t you make hiring a cleaning company an important task?
… with that in mind, let’s get started!