Commercial Cleaning Blog

If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve had one of those clients.

I’ve had to let people go. Yes some I really liked, but let's be honest, some I've just put up with way too long. There I said what I think a lot of us are thinking and possibly doing and it is not a bad thing.

When I was a teenager, my first job was as a cleaner in an abattoir. It wasn’t glamorous, but I loved it. There was something deeply satisfying about walking into a space that was dirty, doing the work, and leaving it clean. Something had changed because I showed up.

I got a call recently from one of my suppliers. He works with a school on the north side of Brisbane. Over the last 18 months, they’ve switched their toilet paper and hand towel supplier three times.

In the last couple of weeks I had two very different conversations with two very different clients.

Have you ever gone down a path with full conviction... only to stop and ask yourself:

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.

As a business owner myself, I know how frustrating it can be when a supposed "trusted" strategic partner turns out to be anything but. And when your commercial cleaner is the one letting you down, the consequences can be costly:

I can understand that trusting a cleaning company can be very hard, especially as there are so many companies that just seem to not know how to clean or, simply put, know how to ensure the service delivery to a client is at the standard it should be.