As all premises are unique it is almost impossible to give you an answer in straight monetary terms. But if you have followed our suggested route for tendering your cleaning contract as detailed in our earlier blog, you now have three or four cleaning proposals for your site sitting in front of you that should meet your defined criteria. This means that broadly speaking you should be comparing apples with apples.

What are those “apples” made up of in monetary terms?

Labour: Quite naturally the costs of the staff that perform the cleaning operation are the largest expense. Including any working supervisor and all statutory costs such as National Insurance Tax, payroll costs will make up anywhere between 65 – 75% of the cost of your cleaning service. The large variation depends on the size of the job i.e. a one cleaner job would be nearer 65% than a ten cleaner job. Also the degree of mechanisation of the job influences this percentage. For example a job that predominantly involves the cleaning and polishing of a large sales shop floor would probably have a low labour content but a balancing increase in equipment depreciation and maintenance as auto scrubber driers and ultra speed burnishers would be used to increase productivity.

Management and nonworking supervision: Area Management costs equate to 3-5% of the value of your cleaning operation. On a larger job, say anything over five or six operatives, there will probably be a requirement for a non-working site supervisor to organise and manage the staff and liase with you. While day to day management will be by the site supervisor there is also a requirement for an external Area Manager who is the working link between your business and your appointed contractor. On smaller contracts where there is no non-working site supervisor, the Area Manager’s role is more visible as they will perform more of the site supervisor type duties. It is helpful to consider that if the average quote you have to clean your premises is say £300 per week then the Area management element represents just £780 per annum. If an Area Manager’s salary is say £16k p.a. by the time you add statutory costs, transport and administration you are looking at an overall package cost of £30k p.a. This indicates therefore that you are paying for just over 2.5% of your managers time or an alternative way of looking at it is that your Area Manager has to look after 40 sites the same size as yours!

Equipment: As noted previously equipment costs can vary dramatically if your site is capable of increased mechanisation. But usually the higher this percentage is there is a larger corresponding reduction in labour costs. The average cost is probably anywhere between 3-5% of your cleaning charge. It is important to realise the time frame that the equipment will be depreciated over to avoid your site being equipped with old decrepit gear which is long past it’s sell by date. Realistically vacuums will last 2-3 years, floor polishers four years and ASD’s (auto scrubber driers) approximately 5 years. NB equipment costs should include all maintenance; spare parts including new batteries every 6-700 operating hours and an annual PAT test.

Cleaning materials: It is often thought that the larger the cleaning company the bigger the discounts they will get purchasing cleaning materials therefore you will get a lower cost service from them. But with the cleaning materials the cleaning staff will use, not the consumables that your staff use such as hand soaps and lavatory papers, only equating to 3-4% of the cleaning service costs, it can be seen what a pointless exercise it is constantly chiselling material costs down by pressurising suppliers and lowering the quality of the products in use. Customers would actually be far better of paying 50% more for better quality materials and consumables such as micro fibre cloths as the improved cleaning results achieved by less manpower inputs have the potential to generate far larger savings.

P.P.E: Personal protective equipment costs are mandatory, period. There can be no cutting of corners in ensuring the cleaning staff working on your site are protected against infection and accidents. But these costs only equate to a maximum of 1% of the job value in the majority of cases. Some entry-level companies try to reduce their costs by making it their staff’s own responsibility to supply safety shoes and hard hats. Did you realise hard hats are date stamped and have a shelf life? We strongly advise that your original tender request defines responsibility for the supply and management of P.P.E. as resting solely with the contractor.

Training: Training costs in any half decent cleaning company should equate to 1-2% of turnover. Historically though cleaning has been looked upon as an unskilled occupation as anyone can do cleaning, can’t they?

The introduction of the national minimum wage, increasingly high standards of health and safety and the drive to mechanise cleaning where possible are slowly but surely dispelling this myth. It should be noted though that training has to be a continuous process as labour turnover rates within the cleaning industry are usually notoriously high. Experience has shown that probably the best form of training that your contractor can give their staff is functional on-the-job training based around the BICS operator training programme. We would strongly advise you to resist any entreaties and bribes of financial assistance to introduce cleaning NVQ’s. As the first assessment centre for Building Cleaning Interiors NVQ in the UK we found that while temporarily motivational for the cleaning staff that could understand them, they did not result in improved cleaning standards as they were too paper based.

Overheads: Overhead costs are the costs of administering, managing and financing the cleaning business itself and usually average between 10-20% of turnover depending on the size of the contractor. If you want a contractor who operates a Quality or Environmental Management System, for example, you have to be prepared to pay more towards overheads than you would to a one man band operating out of a back street garage. At the end of the day the purchasing decision you make will be based on you being comfortable that the cleaning company is capable of delivering what you want and that you feel there is a good fit between both your cultures.

Profit: The average cleaning contracting company in the UK generates net profits of circa 5-6%. But consider the fact that if your cleaning contractor isn’t making a profit how long do you think they will remain in business?

Cleaning is a hard, unremitting service to provide with the contractor’s reputation resting in the hands of a largely part-time, ever changing workforce. The low levels of profit generated and unrealistic customer demands to continually reduce costs have created an industry full of scams and schemes to save pennies at whoever’s expense. By carefully comparing your competing contractors quotations and sales documentation with the above you should now be able to identify areas where costs have been cut to the detriment of your service just to win your business. By doing this analysis now you should be able to weed out the quick-buck commission salesman who just wants to make the sale.

Success will have been achieved if the same workforce and Area manager are cleaning your premises over the next twelve months. Conversely, if you’re cleaning staff keeps changing review your tender against the checklist and speedily identify where the failure is occurring.

Columbus Dixon

Or how to get more bangs for each of your cleaning bucks

It doesn’t matter whether your premises are cleaned in-house or the service is contracted out, one simple way to ensure you are getting the maximum value from your office cleaning service that is so simple it always gets undervalued is the work specification!

Work specification? When you initially either set up your own DIY cleaning plan for your premises or when you employed a contractor you will probably have set down on paper what you wanted cleaned and how often. Didn’t you? Well have you ever revisited it? Have you ever checked that the cleaners that you have now have even seen it?

What’s my point? Well in time everything changes. Not only have your cleaners probably changed many times since you implemented your initial cleaning programme but so will have the layout of your building and probably the importance you attach to cleaning certain bits which were once considered high profile. If the work specification is up-to-date and relevant it both ensures your cleaning staff know what is expected from them but also allows you to factually respond to those clients who always want more and more squeezed into their cleaning programme but aren’t willing to pay extra for it.

We have all experienced client ‘management staff’ who glibly talk about adding extra duties onto the cleaners with the full expectation that this should quite simply just be included within the present cleaning shift. We had one retail client who decided that instead of their sales staff sweeping the sales floor daily our two staff who had a 90-minute cleaning time slot should take over the responsibility of doing it. What’s the big deal? Well if you have 180 minutes to maintain a highly polished vinyl sales floor and it’s 31,000 square feet that is one heck of a lot of extra sweeping work to absorb into your cleaning shift!

Because our work is carefully detailed by area, the regularity of cleaning determined by both Health and Safety implications and by the prestige that the client attaches to certain areas of their customers shopping experience and because we tell our clients up front how the sales floor should look just after cleaning and also at the end of their trading day we were able, in simple no-nonsense language explain to this junior manager that we were more than happy to sweep their sales floor for them but that it would require additional cleaning time of 3.25* hours every day even allowing for the fact that the floor under the fixtures didn’t need sweeping, to do it. They of course were gob smacked that it was possible for us to tell them factually what labour input was required to sweep their floor and this made their decision to keep their own staff sweeping the floor a no-brainer.

When your cleaning programme is detailed, timed and the expected results are known it is easy to make someone with no cleaning experience understand the ramifications of such requests so that you aren’t giving your cleaning staff totally unrealistic cleaning stints and just storing up complaints and higher labour turnover rates for the future when they struggle to manage.

Next week I will discuss how to make your specification your first step in your own quality audit system so you can prove you have done a good job.

* ISSA standard time of 9 minutes a thousand square foot with a 2’ dust mop

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.