Commercial Cleaning Blog

"Does it really matter if my commercial cleaner uses contractors?"

“What questions should we be asking when we meet with a potential commercial cleaning company?”

Look, we all fall into this trap, right? You sign up with a vendor (in your case a commercial cleaning company), and you just keep going. You stick with them year after year; not because everything’s perfect, but because, well… it’s easier to just leave it. You don’t really think about it.

I want to talk to you today about RFQs for commercial cleaning. Now look, before we get into it, I need to be honest with you. I’m probably going to upset a few people here. Procurement teams, facilities managers, or whoever’s usually responsible for pulling these things together within your organisation... this might ruffle a few feathers. But what I'm about to share with you all needs to be said.

When I talk to new potential clients, one of the most common complaints I hear is:

I was on-site for an audit when the receptionist pulled me aside.

We’ve never engaged in sham contracting. But I won’t pretend our past didn’t have its complexities. There was a time when our practices (while technically compliant), were close enough to the line that I’m not proud of how they looked from the outside. And that’s something I think business owners need to be honest about. Because hiding from it doesn’t help anyone—not the clients, not the industry, and certainly not the workers.

When organisations such as yours consider psychosocial hazards (things that make workers feel stressed, unsafe, or undervalued), if you discuss them at all, you likely think about them within the context of your own employees—your office staff, your frontline workers, your management teams. As a result, you’ve probably got policies in place, maybe even a dedicated HR team, who is tasked with making sure your people feel supported, respected, and safe at work.

If you’re in food manufacturing, you already know cleaning isn’t just about making things look tidy—it’s about compliance. And compliance isn’t optional. If your cleaning team isn’t getting it right, you’re risking failed audits, contamination, production shutdowns, and even losing major customers.