Two cleaning companies walk the same 40,000 square foot building and come back $900 a month apart. Both used the same square footage. The gap is entirely in what they asked while they were walking.
Square footage is the first question almost every commercial cleaning contractor asks, and it’s close to the least useful one. Two buildings of identical size can differ by half in labor hours, and nothing about the floor plan tells you which is which.
What separates a bid from a price is a short list of questions asked on the walkthrough, most of them about people and hours. They take a few minutes. They’re the difference between a number you can defend at renewal and a number you guessed and then have to live with for a year.
In short
- Square footage sets the floor of the estimate. Headcount, shift pattern, and floor mix set the actual labor.
- Count the restroom fixtures and set them against the headcount. A building running near the legal minimum needs a midday check, and that’s a priced line.
- Some of what the building needs is required by federal rule and doesn’t depend on what the property manager wants to pay for.
Why square footage does not tell you the price
A 40,000 square foot professional office with 60 people in it, carpeted throughout, two restroom cores, and everybody out by six is a straightforward nightly account. A 40,000 square foot building with 210 people in it across two shifts, a break room used continuously, vinyl composition tile that shows every scuff, and four restroom cores is a completely different job at the same size.
Density drives soil. Shifts drive access windows. Floor type drives both the nightly time and the periodic work that has to be scheduled and priced separately. None of those show up on a square footage number, which is why two contractors using the same rate per square foot arrive at numbers that are hundreds of dollars apart and neither can explain the difference to the property manager.
The questions that change the price
| Ask this | What it tells you | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| How many people work here, across how many shifts? | Soil load, and how hard each restroom fixture is working | Nightly hours and restroom time |
| What time does the last person leave? | Whether your crew works an empty building or around people | Crew size, and whether a second visit is needed |
| Who empties the trash today? | Whether tenants have been absorbing work the contract never covered | Whether your bid is comparable to the incumbent’s |
| What is the floor mix by area? | Where the periodic work lives | The separate line for strip, seal, extraction and burnishing |
| Which restrooms get the most traffic? | Where the complaints will come from | Frequency, and which core gets a midday check |
| What happened with the last company? | Whether you’re solving a price problem or a quality problem | Whether you should be bidding at all |
The third question is the one most contractors never think to ask, and it’s frequently the one that explains an incumbent’s suspiciously low number. If the tenants have been emptying their own desk-side bins for two years because the contract quietly dropped it, you’re bidding a bigger scope than the number you’re being compared against.
Count the fixtures while you walk, then set that count against the headcount you asked for. The ratio is what tells you where the complaints will come from, and there’s a published reference point for it. OSHA’s sanitation standard sets minimums by employee count: three water closets for 36 to 55 employees, four for 56 to 80, six for 111 to 150, and one additional fixture for each additional 40 employees above that.
A building sitting close to that minimum is a building where every fixture is working hard, and nightly service won’t hold it. That’s the argument for a midday restroom check, priced as its own line. A building well above the minimum can usually run nightly and be fine. Same square footage, same headcount, different scope, and now you can say why.
The same standard sets a floor under the service itself. Waste receptacles have to be “emptied not less frequently than once each working day, unless unused, and shall be maintained in a clean and sanitary condition.” That sentence is worth carrying to a walkthrough where somebody suggests trimming trash service to three nights a week to save money. Daily isn’t a service level the building chose. It’s the floor.
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The floor type most bids underprice
Vinyl composition tile is where bids go wrong. It looks cheap to maintain on a walkthrough because a dust mop and an autoscrubber handle the nightly work. The cost lives in the periodic cycle: stripping and refinishing, and how often the building expects it.
A contractor who prices the nightly work and stays quiet about the finish cycle wins the bid and then has an uncomfortable conversation nine months later when the floor looks gray and somebody asks why. The one who separates the two on the page loses some bids on the headline number and keeps the accounts they win.
Carpet has the same shape with extraction. Ask how often it has been done, look at the traffic lanes at the entrances and in front of the elevators, and put a frequency and a range on the page as its own line.
Questions that do not help you
Every bidder asks
- “What’s the square footage?”
- “How many nights a week?”
- “What are you paying now?”
- “When do you need the proposal?”
Almost nobody asks
- “How many people, on how many shifts?”
- “Who empties the trash today?”
- “When was the tile last stripped?”
- “What went wrong with the last company?”
Asking what they pay now is the worst habit in the list. It tells the property manager you intend to price against a number instead of against the building, and it gives away that you have no independent view of what the work takes.
When a straight price is fine
Some walkthroughs are genuinely simple. A single-tenant suite, one restroom, carpet throughout, twelve people, three nights a week. Asking six questions in a room that size makes you look like you’re performing diligence instead of doing it. Walk it, give a number, and move on.
The questions earn their keep at the size where a wrong assumption costs real money, which starts somewhere around a building with multiple floor types, more than one restroom core, or anybody working a second shift. If any of those three are present, ask the six.
See it in your market
Commercial cleaning lead generation covers who we call, what a set appointment looks like, and what you keep.
How these questions win commercial cleaning contracts
The questions are only half of it. What you do with the answers in the two days afterward is what decides whether you get the work.
Commercial cleaning contracts tend to go to the company that makes itself easiest to say yes to. That usually means three things.
- A written quote back quickly, priced per square foot so it can be compared line by line against whatever else is on the desk.
- The scope beside the number. What gets cleaned, how often each task comes around, who is in the building and at what hours, and what falls outside the price.
- Your certificate of insurance and bond attached without being asked for them. A manager who has been let down by a crew that stopped showing up weighs that heavily.
There is a longer game in it too. Property management companies keep approved vendor lists, and getting onto one is largely a document exercise. One relationship at a management company can produce building after building over a couple of years, which is worth considerably more than any single contract you are quoting today.
So treat the walkthrough as the start of that, not as a pricing exercise. The questions tell you what the building actually needs. The follow-up tells them whether you are the company that keeps its word.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you get commercial cleaning contracts?
Ask who selects vendors, offer a walkthrough, and get a written quote back quickly with the scope beside the number. Most commercial cleaning contracts are won on responsiveness and on being easy to compare, not on being the cheapest bid in the stack.
Is cold calling worth it for a commercial cleaning company?
It still works for this buyer, because property and facility managers are reachable by phone and rarely answer email from companies they do not know. What has changed is that it takes consistent volume over months, which is where most cleaning companies run out of time.
Should a cleaning company hire a salesperson or outsource appointment setting?
The in-house comparison is not a salary against a retainer. It is salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, software, ramp time and somebody to manage them. Outsourcing trades that for a fixed monthly cost and a faster start. Which is right depends on whether you can keep a salesperson busy and managed.
Keep going
- Commercial cleaning lead generation
- When to send a commercial cleaning bid
- How to get commercial cleaning contracts without underbidding
- What to say when you cold call a facility manager
- Comparing janitorial lead generation companies
About this article
Jeff Winters is Chief Executive Officer at Abstrakt. Reviewed by Neil Erker, Chief Marketing Officer. Abstrakt sets appointments for commercial cleaning contractors and the wider trades, and the patterns here come from that calling.
Jeff Winters is the CEO of Abstrakt Marketing Group, a U.S.-based B2B lead generation and appointment-setting company that books qualified sales meetings for clients across the commercial trades, IT and managed services, manufacturing, and B2B services. He has spent his career building and running outbound sales programs at scale, and he breaks down what actually works in sales and lead generation on Abstrakt's podcast, The Grow Show.
