Website for office cleaning that wins the written comparison
Nobody buys office cleaning off a page. They buy it after a walk round the building and a document that goes in front of somebody who has two other documents beside it, and your whole job is to be the one that is easiest to read and hardest to argue with.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.
A tender, from the inside
This is a contract business. One signature is worth two years, and the person signing has never met you and is looking at three sets of paperwork on a Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday, ten past four, the walk round
Two floors, sixty desks, a kitchen that does more work than the whole of the ground floor, two washrooms and a reception that has to look right at half eight in the morning. The facilities manager walks you round in twenty minutes and mentions the last contractor twice, both times unkindly.
Everything you need to price is now in your head and in three photographs. The offer has to be written tonight, because he said he wants them all in by Friday.
Wednesday evening, the same document again
You open the last one you sent, save it under a new name, and start changing the numbers. The square metres, the frequency, the hours, the consumables, the periodic work.
Somewhere in it is a paragraph naming a building you cleaned in the spring, and if you miss it you will send an offer with somebody else's address in it. You have done that before. It is the sort of mistake that ends a tender in one glance.
Two weeks later, silence
No answer. You do not know whether they went with somebody else, whether the decision has moved to a director who has not looked at it, or whether the attachment never got past their mail filter in the first place.
Ringing feels like chasing. Not ringing feels like losing. Either way you are guessing about a contract worth two years of a cleaner's wages.
Four things a contract cleaner uses every week
The site matters here mostly as somewhere credible to land, and the offer matters more than the site. Both are in the same system.
An offer built from lines, not a document you retype
The offer is assembled from cost lines: the daily clean by area and frequency, the washroom consumables, the periodic deep clean, the window work, the holiday cover. A facilities manager comparing three of these can see which one has left something out, and it will not be yours.
He approves it on its own page rather than by replying to an email, and what he approved is recorded with a date on it.
You know when the offer was opened
The difference between an offer that has never been opened and one that was opened three times on Thursday morning is the difference between a wasted call and a well timed one.
The same statistics tell you which pages the enquiries read first. If everybody who contacts you has been on the page about out of hours access, that is what belongs at the top of the next offer.
Every building and every renewal date in one place
A contract cleaner does not have many customers, but each one is worth a great deal and each one has a renewal date that decides your year. The record holds the site, the contacts, the offers, the periodic work and the history.
When the facilities manager moves to another firm and takes his phone number with him, the building is still on the record where his replacement can be found.
A specification a buyer recognises
Daily office clean, washrooms, kitchens and touch points, periodic hard floor work, internal glass, a builders clean after a fit out. Each with the frequency and the pricing basis stated.
It is not a price list, because you do not have one. It is a service list that shows a buyer you work to a specification, which is the thing he is actually checking for on a first visit to your site.
The service list a facilities manager will read
Everything here is quoted rather than listed at a price. The value is in showing the scope clearly, because that is what the comparison is made on.
Sort them the way a buyer thinks: what happens every day, what happens periodically, and what happens once. That is also the order the offer should be written in.
Questions contract cleaners ask
Because the facilities manager looks you up before the walk round and again before he signs. A site with your specification, your buildings and your written offer behind it is the reason he treats you as a supplier rather than a man with a van.
Yes, and that is the sensible way round. The service list states that the daily clean is priced per square metre and per frequency; the actual figures only appear in the offer written for that building after you have walked it.
The offer lives on its own page rather than as an attachment, and you can see when it was opened. That turns the awkward fortnight of silence into a call you make on the day it was looked at.
It is worth a page. A buyer changing contractor is worried about the handover more than the price, so setting out how you manage the transfer of the existing cleaners and the first month reassures the person whose neck is on the line.
From €49 to €199 a month plus VAT. Every plan carries the site on your own domain, SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support, and the offer module with online approval is in the plans from €149.
No. You rebuild the good one once as a template of cost lines, and after that each new offer is that template with the areas and frequencies changed. The old documents stay on your machine; nothing depends on them any more.
More trades
- Window cleanersA fixed interval that repeats without a call.
- Removal companiesEnquiries that arrive with size, floor and lift.
- Pest controlAn inspection booked in writing, discreetly.
- Cleaning companiesRecurring visits the customer moves themselves.
- End of tenancy cleaningFixed price per property size, on a date you can see.
- Garages and MOT centresBooking per ramp and mechanic, with reminders.
- All trades
Make the written offer the reason you win
Describe the buildings you clean and how you price them, and you get a first version with a specification page, a service list a buyer recognises and an offer template made of cost lines you can send the evening after the walk round.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.