With clients not always understanding the amount of work and expertise that goes into cleaning a building, your work can be seen as largely utilitarian and the same as your competitors. Because of this, you’re stuck in a race to the bottom unless something helps you stand out. 

We’ve talked with some of the most innovative leaders in commercial cleaning about what’s worked for them. While they range in size from medium to large janitorial companies to some of the largest commercial cleaning franchises, their advice is universal.

Here are some of the best ways to go from industry standard to industry frontrunner.

By sharing occupancy data with your clients, you’ll give them a better way to do their jobs, and provide more value than your competitors. Property managers want to know who’s in their spaces and how they can make cost-effective decisions on space allocation.

Impact Cleaning Services has found this approach helpful for their own businesses. According to VP Yiannis Boutsalis:

“For one of our customers, reports were helpful with the reopening of their buildings. It helped them see what floors are being visited and then allocate their resources appropriately. Our clients are getting info that helps in their operations as much as we get info for ours.”

Providing regular reports on occupancy can change how they perceive you. You won’t be just another cleaning company, but an asset to their business.

1. Bring extra value by providing added services

Many companies are adding separate services to give extra value to their customers. By providing more than just cleaning, you can attract clients who have a wide range of needs. 

To give an example, Impact Cleaning Services has found success by adjacent services focused on tenant experience including a food and beverage business that sells into its existing client pool. By providing coffee and food for tenants, they upped the level of service they offered to their clients.

They are also providing support services like backroom, front desk, and mail room staffing to be the backdrop in the event of emergencies and staff shortages for the property management company.

No matter what you choose, being able to fill multiple niches in how a building operates will give you an advantage over companies that only provide standard janitorial services. 

2. Provide data to help your client's operations

Many companies are adding separate services to give extra value to their customers. By providing more than just cleaning, you can attract clients who have a wide range of needs. 

To give an example, Impact Cleaning Services has found success by adjacent services focused on tenant experience including a food and beverage business that sells into its existing client pool. By providing coffee and food for tenants, they upped the level of service they offered to their clients.

They are also providing support services like backroom, front desk, and mail room staffing to be the backdrop in the event of emergencies and staff shortages for the property management company.

No matter what you choose, being able to fill multiple niches in how a building operates will give you an advantage over companies that only provide standard janitorial services. 

3. Make use of occupancy data to create custom proposals

“If you come in with a boilerplate — you’re just taking your chances.”

— Jason Lee, Director of Special Services at The Budd Group

The commercial cleaning executives we’ve talked to outlined three levels of customization that organizations can use when creating contracts.

1 - The first is a cookie-cutter submission. Build out a price per square foot, multiply it by the size of the property, agree on tasks to be completed — and then move on. There are pragmatic reasons for this. It’s efficient for your salespeople and it’s simple. But it doesn’t let you serve each individual client’s specific needs.

2 - The second is building 5-10 standardized contracts for different building sizes. This can help your business be more flexible in servicing potential clients with proposals that suit their needs.

3 - The third, and best method to build contracts that combines thorough due diligence, a deep understanding of how the building operates and occupancy data to create and adjust a scope of work.

The Budd Group has found success by following these steps:

1. Set up sensors to determine average building occupancy and flow of traffic.
2. Take note of times and places when the building is most occupied.
3. Build an SOW that takes into account the real occupancy of the building as well as times of higher usage.
4. Continually monitor their data to develop their SOW should building usage change.

The Budd Group is not alone in seeing the benefits. John Selkow, Director of Integration at Office Pride Cleaning Solutions had this to say about a more consultative approach:

“I don’t want to use visual cues to determine if a building is clean or not, we’re past that. It’s not a safe way to do business. So at the end of a pilot period where we measure occupancy data, we can adjust the scope down to maintain our margins, and reduce the money they spend — making it a win-win situation.”

— John Selkow, Director of Integration at Office Pride Cleaning Solutions

4. Provide proof of service with detailed audit trails

‍What PMs really care about is seeing they’re getting their money’s worth. They want hard data proving that areas have been cleaned. 

To accomplish this, track your cleaners as they move through each of the buildings you service and note how much time is spent in each area. By understanding their movement, you can see where they’ve been, what tasks they’ve completed, and how long it took.

This gives you an auditable log of your cleaners’ that you can share with property managers. You can also improve your own cleaning practices by seeing what works for each building and changing your workflows to accommodate that. 

Having this data available to you is helpful for these reasons: 

1. Nothing builds trust with a client better than providing them with consistent reporting on how you’re cleaning their space.
2. It can help manage PM expectations about what’s possible with the level of service they’ve paid for.
3. You can use data on what your cleaners are able to accomplish to expand your scope of work.

Let’s look at an example of how Mero provides you with this data:

First, install Mero base stations in key locations of your building where work orders are completed. These create geofences around each area where your cleaners will be working.

Your cleaners then carry a small fob that pings the stations when they are nearby, automatically confirming their presence in a room without their manual input.

Then, after uploading your scope of work, shifts, and cleaners — you can track every unfinished task and validate completed work. 

This all takes place automatically, letting you see where your employees are going, what they’re doing, and when was the last time they cleaned each area.

The data is stored in fully auditable logs which are then used to review cleaner performance. This information is easily sharable so you can prove the quality of your service. Automated reports show your work has been completed down to the level of individual rooms.

5. Increase productivity by deploy labor based on usage

“Having our buildings with smart sensors shows us how many people are coming into the building, and where they’re going at what times”

— Chris King, Senior Vice President, Hallmark House Cleaners

The industry norm is cleaning floor by floor, or room by room, with no consideration for actual usage.

Instead of following a set pattern, you can clean areas based on their real usage. This can be done by installing occupancy sensors that track building traffic. You can then use this data to build out scopes of work based on occupancy.

This level of demand-based cleaning has been a great success for one of our customers, Hallmark Housekeeping. In an interview we did on our podcast with Senior Vice President, Chris King he discussed the success that using sensors for demand-based cleaning has brought to his organization.

The benefits they found included:

• Less time was wasted cleaning areas that were not being used
• More cleaning in washrooms, the largest source of complaints
• Better preservation of washrooms

Additionally, if your clients still aren’t happy with the level of service that you’re providing, you can show them objective data that your cleaners are completing their work. You can use this to start conversations about adding more cleaners or services.

Joel Craddock, President of Doc’s Facility Solutions, had this to say about a method to increase sales with usage data:

“If the client is being cleaned twice a week, it might only be 70-75% clean. If they want it higher you can share physical data that shows that their frequencies don’t match up with their traffic.”

— Joel Craddock, President of Doc’s Facility Solutions

6. Use detailed evidence to prove your cleaning effectiveness

“Customers are getting better at recognizing good cleaning and bad cleaning”

— Mike Sawchuk, Owner of Sawchuk Consulting

With clients increasingly demanding higher levels of validation, it’s critical that you can prove your level of cleaning is up to par. The best way to do this is to back up your cleaner tracking with objective data that you’re fully removing soils and pathogens.

Combining high-level verification with methods like smell and visual inspections, ATP meters, black light checks, or even more advanced technologies like backscatter scans or UV light testing can give your client the confidence that you’re cleaning well.

While this sounds expensive, it doesn’t have to be. Any one of these is better than nothing. What matters most is providing consistent and transparent data on how well you’ve been cleaning.

In our podcast, we invited Mike Sawchuk to talk about how to differentiate yourself as a janitorial company. He had this to say about providing effective cleaning validation:

“What’s most important is that the data is transparent, you can show the findings and review it with your cleaning staff and your customers. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it has to be continuous, that’s the key.”

— Mike Sawchuk, Owner of Sawchuk Consulting

In other words, use evidence-based methods to measure your cleaning, then consistently show the results to your clients.

7. Build better management practices to retain employees

“This is a business where the person at the bottom who makes the least amount of money has the most effect on the client. Management can sit here with our suit and ties in a boardroom but ultimately, the cleaner is the only one that affects the clients.”  

—  Executive Vice President, Service Delivery and Innovation at City Wide Facility Solutions, Ryan Sklar City Wide Facility Solutions

In order to keep their employees they provide benefits and give them reasons to stay for the long term.

Having more employees on full-time hours and matching full retirement savings plans have been used by many cleaning companies to make sure that their talented workers stay.

For employees with children, a tuition reimbursement program so their kids can more easily afford college has also been a popular choice.

Other non-monetary perks that companies provide include workshops to help their employees with long-term goals.

For example, Doc’s Facility Solutions ran a successful program where they brought in real-estate professionals and bankers to help their employees learn strategies to save and buy a home.

“I bring in real estate agents, and I bring in real estate attorneys so that our employees can understand what they have to do to get all their ducks in order so that they can meet their goals” — Joel Craddock Docs Cleaning services

On the professional side of development, giving employees a career path with access to classes in management or gaining special certifications can help you build a workforce who are invested in staying with your company.

For example: When buildings were shut down and many of their workers wanted to keep working full time, the Budd Group quickly pivoted in line with its people-first values to cross-train their employees to become Global Biorisk Advisory Council (GBAC) certified technicians. They then created a branded mobile route-based disinfection service to keep their employees working and providing service to their communities.

As offices started to open back up with reduced staff or variable occupancy, The Budd Group was ready to pivot again. Realizing that their clients may not need cleaning as much or as often, the company kept up with their route-based cleaning, allowing their employees to service multiple locations within the same week. This helped keep jobs available and let their cleaners keep working.

8. Share your knowledge within the company by focusing on bottom-up innovation

Too often commercial cleaning companies have their knowledge siloed. This leads to tacit knowledge and industry know-how not being effectively distributed throughout your organization.

It’s critical that you make sure that all voices of the company are being heard and that there is a central bank of knowledge available to management.

City Wide Facility Solutions takes this to heart. Every 1-2 years they organize a corporate retreat to bring their franchisees together. This helps them launch new products and services while keeping everyone on the same page.

They also gain insider knowledge from franchise owners across the globe and find out what’s working for them in different niches.

One company might have new techniques to better clean car dealerships. Others may have found new ways to clean a hospital more effectively. Innovation can often come from the bottom, and franchise owners who have found new sales techniques and better cleaning practices get to share what they’ve learned.

Your company should be doing the same, harvesting knowledge from wherever you can and centralizing it into a single corporate playbook.

Takeaway

There was a time when janitorial companies could survive and even thrive by just doing their jobs.

That era is over.

Leading companies are already taking steps to stand out from the rest, and they’re seeing the increase in profits that come with their innovation.

You either have to take your company to the forefront of providing extra value for your customers, or be outcompeted.

What will you do?

To learn more about the best way to differentiate yourself, check out our demo here.