Cleaning contracts go wrong in a specific and boring way. Not fraud, not a bad crew. The scope was vague, both sides read it differently, and the difference only surfaces around month four when standards visibly slip.
Here is what to look for before you sign anything.
1. Every task needs a frequency
The most common defect. A scope lists forty tasks and assigns frequencies to twelve of them. The rest say as needed, periodically, or regularly.
Those phrases have no meaning and cannot be enforced. As needed means as needed in the contractor's judgment, and the contractor's judgment is shaped by the labor hours priced into the job.
Every line should read like high dusting, all common areas, monthly. If it cannot be inspected against, it is not in the contract, whatever the paper says.
2. Ask what is deliberately excluded
A good contractor will tell you plainly what is not included. Interior glass above a certain height, exterior windows, carpet extraction, tenant suites, kitchen equipment, light bulbs, snow. Exclusions are not a red flag. A scope with no exclusions at all is, because it means nobody thought carefully about the boundaries and you will discover them one argument at a time.
3. Square footage alone cannot price a building
Two buildings of identical size can differ by a factor of two in labor. What actually drives hours:
- Floor materials, since stone, terrazzo, VCT, and carpet need different work and different equipment
- Restroom count and fixture count, which drive far more time than floor area does
- Occupancy and density, because a full floor generates far more than a half-empty one
- The available window and whether crews can work uninterrupted
- Access, badging, escort requirements, and elevator availability
- How many separate spaces the same total area is divided into
A quote produced from square footage and nothing else was produced without seeing the building. Sometimes it is low, and you will feel that in the staffing.
4. Find out who is actually in your building
Ask directly: are the people cleaning this building your W-2 employees, or subcontracted?
Subcontracting is common and it is the root cause of most of what facility managers complain about. Crews that change weekly cannot learn your building. Accountability is diffuse, because the company you signed with is not the company on site. Training and background checks become somebody else's responsibility, which often means nobody's.
If the answer is yes, subcontracted, ask who screens them, who supervises them, and who carries the insurance.
5. Supervision should have a name
Ask who inspects, how often, against what document, and what happens when something fails. Then ask for the supervisor's name and whether that person will be reachable directly.
A contract with no stated inspection cadence has no quality control. It has hope, plus a monthly invoice.
6. Understand the transition
If you are replacing an incumbent, the changeover is where it usually goes wrong. Ask for the start date, whether there is a joint walkthrough, what happens to supplies and equipment on site, and who covers the gap if the incumbent walks early. That last one happens more than you would expect.
7. Watch for a price that is too good
Cleaning is roughly seventy percent labor. There is no clever efficiency that makes one bid dramatically cheaper than the others. A bid well under the field means fewer hours, fewer people, or lower-paid people. That does not show up in month one. It shows up in month four, which is exactly when the story becomes "the service declined after they got comfortable."
It did not decline. It was priced that way from the start.
A janitorial contract that cannot be inspected is not a contract. It is a hope with a monthly invoice attached.
The short version
Ask for the scope in writing, by area and frequency, before you talk about price. If a contractor will not produce one, that is the answer. If they will, you now have something you can hold two vendors to and compare honestly.
More reading
What ice melt does to a stone lobby, and the six weeks it takes
It is the most predictable damage in commercial cleaning. It happens on the same schedule every year, to the same six feet of floor, and it is almost entirely preventable.
Your lobby floor is failing and nobody made a mistake
There is rarely a single bad decision. There is a sequence of reasonable ones, and the floor is gone at the end of it.
Start with a walkthrough
Fifteen minutes in the building tells us more than any form would. Call, or send the property address and we will arrange a time that works around your operation.