Finding the Best Janitorial Service

If one of your pending tasks is hiring a janitorial service, you will need a quick lesson on making the right choice. There is a huge diversity of cleaning services. Some do residential. Some do commercial. Some do industrial, and some do specialty jobs like medical offices and restaurants. One of the other factors is that some are small services with a few accounts and others are large services with hundreds of accounts. It is not as easy as picking up the Yellow pages and selecting an attractive ad.

The fact is that a small or a large cleaning service can do the job for most normal buildings. Smaller janitorial firms will generally be less expensive, but larger janitorial firms promise more in support and associated services. It is easier to check the track record of an existing firm, whereas smaller firms may have only a year or two of business to research. Looking for quality of workmanship is an important factor in any company that you hire, and you want more than a spurt of good service at the beginning. Few firms will do more than check references (which are hand picked from their best customers), but it would be good to know how they handle a company like yours before you make your choice.

Large companies often have a sales force or account managers. This adds to the cost because larger companies have overhead to maintain the operation of a firm that may have 50-100 accounts. The challenge of the large firm is to stay in touch with the people on the job. One lost deal is not as dramatic to a big firm as it is to the smaller service because the sales force will replace that business. Large firms must look at the big picture in gross business which can leave the client feeling disconnected from issues that concern them.

Conversely, the small company struggles to provide a level of service compared to the bigger operations. They may not have the depth of manpower, training, and equipment that you will find in the large services. If the key people are ill or out of commission, the business is directly impacted. As you can see, it is often a trade off between pricing and support. The company that can span both issues will be the winner.

Choosing a janitorial service is therefore not as simple as sending out an RFP (Request for Proposals), doing a walk-through with vendors, and selecting the lowest bid. There are a variety of important decisions that must be made before choosing a janitorial service. In my opinion, taking the lowest bid is the wrong way to select a company even though they claim to be able to service the account as described in the RFP.

It’s time to change the process. Although price will always be a part of the consideration, it is important that you discover the quality and reliability of the cleaning service that you hire. To help you understand this better, I have prepared a ten page report called “How to Hire a Janitorial Service.” It includes a sample RFP and offers some needful advice on a subject that few people really understand. You’ll find this report at www.GreenJanitor.net.

There is another issue that must be including in any janitorial choice. States and cities are now pressuring area companies to “Go Green.” This start, quite frankly, with your janitorial service. In conjunction with your other considerations, you must insist on a janitorial service that does more than mouth service for Green services. In the report found at www.greenjanitor.net, I include an important section on how to determine if your janitorial service is really Green, or a Green pretender. Believe me, the pressure for companies to Go Green is going to be a huge issue, and your cleaning service is an important key to the solution.