How to Compare Commercial Cleaning Bids That Are Not Alike

You cannot compare three cleaning bids that were written against three different ideas of the job. If the numbers are far apart, that is almost never because one company is efficient and another is greedy. It is because nobody handed all three of them the same scope, so each one decided for itself what the job was, and the cheapest bid is usually the one that decided the least.

The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It is writing the scope yourself, once, before anybody quotes.

Why the numbers come back so far apart

Say you send three companies a walkthrough and an email that says nightly cleaning, about 12,000 square feet, office and a small warehouse. Every one of them now has to guess at the same dozen things.

Is nightly five days or seven. Are the restrooms getting a full disinfect or a wipe and restock. Who supplies the paper and the liners. Does the warehouse floor get swept, scrubbed, or looked at. Are the interior windows in scope, and how often. Does somebody do the glass entry doors every visit or once a week. How often do the carpets get done, and is that in the monthly number or billed separately when you ask.

Three companies make twelve guesses each. You get three prices that share a building and nothing else. The low bid is not lying to you. It answered a smaller question.

I see this most often on a deadline. We did a final clean on a medical office buildout in Monmouth County recently, the kind that has to pass a certificate of occupancy inspection, and the owner had collected bids that ranged wide enough that he assumed somebody was padding. Nobody was. One had priced the punch list clean, one had priced a standard post construction clean, and one had priced both plus the first month of nightly service. All three were honest. None of them answered the same question.

Write the scope before you ask for a price

This is the whole trick and it takes about an hour. Put it in a document and send the identical document to everyone.

• Areas and square footage, broken out. Office, restrooms, kitchen or break room, warehouse or shop, common areas, stairwells. Give a number for each if you have it.
• Frequency per area. Not one frequency for the building. Offices five nights, restrooms five nights, warehouse floor once a week, high dusting quarterly. This single change does more than everything else on this list.
• The restroom standard, spelled out. Fixtures disinfected, floors mopped not just spot cleaned, dispensers restocked, and who buys the stock.
• Consumables. Paper, soap, liners, and can liners for the warehouse totes. Say whether you are buying them or they are.
• Floor care on its own line. Carpet extraction, VCT strip and wax, buffing. Give the frequency you want, annually or twice a year, and ask for it priced separately so you can move it without reopening the whole contract.
• Windows. Interior, exterior, ground floor only, and the cadence. Most bids quietly exclude all of it.
• Access, hours and security. What time they can start, whether anyone is in the building, badge or key or lockbox, alarm codes, and any restricted rooms. A bidder who has to staff a 2am start prices it differently than a 6pm start.
• What is explicitly out of scope. Say it. Dish duty, employee desks, server room, anything you handle yourselves.

Then ask every bidder to price your document line by line and to list anything they think is missing. That last clause is the useful one. A good vendor will come back and tell you that you forgot the loading dock or that quarterly high dusting is not enough with your ceiling height. That answer tells you more about them than the price does.

Reading the three that come back

With one scope out, the bids get comparable, and the differences that remain are the real ones.

Look at labor hours before you look at the total. Most bids will tell you crew size and hours per visit if you ask. Two companies quoting the same building at 3 hours a night and 1.5 hours a night are not selling the same thing, whatever the monthly number says. The 1.5 hour bid is not cheaper, it is shorter.

Look at what they wrote back into the scope. The bidder who added three items is the one who actually walked your building.

Look at supervision. Ask who inspects, how often, and what happens after. An account with a monthly walkthrough by somebody other than the cleaner behaves differently in month nine than one without. That is the thing that decays, not the price.

Ask about turnover and coverage, specifically what happens the night your regular cleaner calls out. Most of these relationships end over continuity, not over a bad clean.

And read the term and the out. Look for the notice period, whether it auto renews, and what it takes to leave. We wrote about the whole document in what to include in an office cleaning contract, and the pricing side in what belongs in a commercial cleaning estimate.

The cheapest bid, honestly

Sometimes the low bid is just the low bid. A smaller company with lower overhead and a route that already passes your building can be genuinely cheaper for the same work. That happens and you should take it.

But when a bid is 30 or 40 percent under the others against the same written scope, something in it is not going to happen. Usually it is hours. The math on a cleaning contract is mostly labor, and there is no clever way to buy an hour for less than an hour. What you get is the same scope performed faster, which for two or three months looks identical, and then does not.

One offer

If you are collecting bids right now and you do not want to write the scope from scratch, send me the building and I will put the list together for you. Not a proposal, the scope document, the one you send to everybody including us.

I mean that even if you hire someone else. A building with a written scope is easier to clean and easier to keep, and I would rather compete against a real comparison than win because somebody could not tell the difference. If you want to talk through what belongs in yours, our nightly and weekly cleaning page covers the normal frequencies, and how to choose a commercial cleaning company covers the rest of the vetting.