Should You Use Sub-Contactors?
What You’ll Learn
- Decide how much subcontracting to use
- Keep a company employee cleaner on close-contact accounts
- Call customers when subcontractors do the work
Short Summary
Subcontracting is common in commercial cleaning today. After the company has landed an account, a subcontractor may do the nightly cleaning. A subcontractor is not a company employee. That can put the company one more step away from the customer. So the owner should decide how much subcontracting fits the job and the customer. Keep a company employee on jobs that need close contact with the customer. Use a third-party cleaner only where customer contact is very light. Make customer service calls so the customer still hears from the company.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is subcontracting always a bad idea?
No. It can fit some accounts with light customer contact.
When should a company keep an employee cleaner on the job?
When the customer wants regular talk with the cleaner or owner.
What is the main risk of using a subcontractor?
The customer may only see the subcontractor and hear less from the company.
What helps when a subcontractor is in the building?
Make customer service calls so the customer hears from the company.
Can a company use both employees and subcontractors?
Yes. Decide account by account based on customer contact.
Transcript
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Hi there. Welcome back. Dan again from CleanGuru.
I’ll pass along a quick story to make a point about subcontracting. There’s an awful lot of it, and you know my feeling about it. It’s not a bad thing or a good thing. Like so many things in life, it’s in what way and to what degree you are using this mechanism of subcontracting.
Let’s take it from the position of: you’ve landed an account. Do you want to subcontract out the work? Do you want to find a sub to do the actual cleaning for you?
I remember this story I heard recently about a person that owned a restaurant. He said these food delivery services now happen all the time, where someone arrives in a car and brings your meal to your home, whereas in the past you used to drive into the restaurant to pick it up. This restaurant owner was saying this has really been challenging in some ways. Yes, it can be a source of revenue, but he mentioned he used to really have a connection with the customers. He got to know them. They became regulars. He was able to throw them in an extra appetizer or entree once in a while, and they really appreciated that. These personal connections, when he was the actual person coming in and he got to talk to them, that intimate close contact of understanding one another and getting to know each other as friends—professional friends—helped.
Now, if you don’t have your employee of your cleaning business, you can kind of talk about the training, supervision, the hours—really everything—because it’s an employee of your company representing you. A subcontractor is different, and you don’t have that much freedom to do all those kinds of managerial things.
So all of a sudden, now this third-party subcontractor is in the building, removing you one more step away from the customer. Now, I know that you can make customer service calls, and those are important. I’m just saying that subcontracting can sometimes remove you one more step from the closer contact you had when it was your actual employee cleaner there.
Till next time, remember: you can do this. You really
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