Choosing a commercial cleaning company is really a question about the next two years, not the next visit: who will still be executing the scope at month eighteen, communicating when something goes wrong, and carrying the insurance that protects your business the whole time? We're a cleaning company, so read this with that in mind — but everything below is what we'd check before hiring anyone in our own industry, including us.
Verify Before You Compare
- Licensing and insurance: Ask for certificates of insurance — general liability and workers' compensation — sent from the insurer or broker, not screenshots. Uninsured labor in your building is your risk.
- Actual commercial experience: Facility types matter: an office specialist isn't automatically ready for your warehouse, restaurant, or medical suite. Ask what they clean today that resembles your facility.
- Local references: Two or three current commercial references in similar facilities, and actually call them. Ask what goes wrong and how it gets fixed — every service has issues; the response pattern is what you're buying.
- Who does the work: Employees or subcontractors? Either can work, but you want to know who's in your building, how they're trained, and who supervises them.
Questions That Reveal How a Company Actually Operates
- "Walk me through the written scope you'd propose for this facility" — a pro talks tasks and frequencies; a red flag talks adjectives.
- "How is quality inspected, how often, and by whom?" — listen for checklists, named supervision, and a cadence, not 'we stand behind our work.'
- "When something is missed, what happens?" — you want a concrete correction path with a timeframe.
- "Who is my point of contact, and how fast do you respond?" — communication failure is the most common reason contracts change hands.
- "How do you handle keys, alarms, and access?" — documented procedures, not improvisation.
- "What's excluded from this price?" — the honest answer is specific; every scope has exclusions.
Red Flags Worth Walking Away From
- A price quoted before anyone has seen the facility or defined the scope.
- An outlier low bid — it predicts a thinner scope, rushed labor, or a price that climbs after signing.
- No written scope of work, or resistance to producing one.
- Vague answers on insurance, or certificates that never quite arrive.
- No supervision structure — crews with nobody inspecting the work.
- High-pressure long-term contracts with no performance exit.
Comparing Bids Fairly
Bids are only comparable against an identical scope — so write the scope first (our office cleaning checklist works as a template), require every bidder to price that list at stated frequencies, and then compare. Price differences against an identical scope reflect labor time, supervision, and margin; price differences against different scopes reflect nothing at all. Weight the decision toward verified insurance, reference quality, and the concreteness of the quality-control answers — those predict month eighteen far better than the number does.