Outsourcing your building cleaning services means more than just finding quality contractors to clean your facilities. It’s a strategic business decision with many great benefits. But it all comes down to a single bottom-line: making your business better. Outsourcing your facility services can give you a competitive advantage by providing both the time and the additional investment you need to help you grow your business and outrun your competition.

Focus On Your Core Competency
Your business provides specialised products, goods or services. Each business function that does not directly support, develop or improve your products or services – like facility services – can be outsourced. For example, outsourcing your business’s cleaning needs to a specialist cleaning contractor allows you and your team to concentrate on your core competencies and mission-critical objectives, not cleaning your facility. “You look after your core business while we look after the chore business”

Reduce Costs
Cost-savings alone can be a good enough reason for businesses to outsource tasks like cleaning to contractors. As you well know, retaining in-house employees is a very expensive endeavour, and in-house facility services personnel are no exception. What value do these employees add to your core business function? The answer is most likely little to none. But you still have to pay for those individuals’ national insurance tax, salary and benefits package (Public and employees liability insurances, holiday and sick pay, etc.), not to mention numerous indirect costs like tools and equipment, management, recruitment and training.

Outsourcing your cleaning services to specialist contractors and other similar services to a contracted facility services provider can help you control operating costs and establish a budget, freeing up capital that can be invested in your core business at a greater rate of return. Also, in a rapidly changing world, the contracting out of your non-core services to a specialist can allow the introduction of new work practices and methods overnight. Even with the complexities of TUPE it is possible to agree with your incoming contractor that after a defined period of say within 6 or 9 months of the contract commencing that you want changes to your service levels implemented that will generate financial savings of “x” % of your original cleaning budget. It is then up to the contractor to manage the process of redefining staffing levels, introducing more efficient cleaning processes and with your support, redefining the end users expectations of the visible cleaning outputs to give you the financial savings agreed as the target from the outset.

A Cleaning Contractor Offers Expertise
Just like your company has expertise in a particular field, outsourced facility service providers are highly specialised companies, whether they are cleaning contractors, grounds maintenance or industrial cleaners. They have the experience and expertise to manage your facility better than you do because it’s what they do, day in, day out. And they are always at the forefront of technological advancements in their industry, ensuring that clients are receiving the best efficiencies in facility operations. Also as specialists they are able to offer a career path within their industry, which enables the retention and growth of exceptional staff, which an in-house service provider just doesn’t have the scope to provide.

An outsourced facility services provider, such as a cleaning contractor, affords you a higher level of service at a lower cost, bringing best-in-class capabilities to your facility not otherwise available from in-house resources.

Scalability
Another word for scalability: flexibility. Outsourcing lets you easily adjust the level of staffing for facility operations on an as-needed basis, helping you control operating costs and easily adjust for changes in staffing and service requirements as your needs change.