What to Say and Not Say During a Building Walkthrough for a Janitorial Service Quote?

No, a price during the walk is often a guess. The price should come after the math.

The company can say the price comes after hours and costs are added. The price can be sent later.

Confirm each room that needs cleaning. Ask about special work. Ask when cleaning can happen.

Cleaning at the wrong time can slow building staff. A good time keeps crews from getting in the way.

Yes, if the special work is named during the walk. Add it to the hours and costs.

Hi there. Welcome back. Dan again from CleanGuru.

So, what should you say and what should you not say during a building walkthrough for a janitorial service quote?

Let’s start with what we should not say. If the person giving you the walkthrough may be the decision maker, they may be the building owner or manager. They’re taking you through the building. If they ask you, “How long is this going to take to clean, and what would be your price for this?”—and it can happen—it’s probably best not to give your final cleaning time, and probably not a good idea to give your price for the cleaning at that point, if at all possible.

Why? For a practical point, you haven’t had time to go back to the office with the information you’re gathering, work it up, calculate it, and figure out the time and the expenses, which lead to the price. Secondly, if they feel that you can just give them a price off the cuff, that doesn’t show much work going into it. What’s the point of the detailed walkthrough if we don’t use that information to figure out the numbers, right? The math. So, that’s probably a good idea not to get into, if at all possible.

Secondly, it’s probably not a good idea to criticize the current cleaning service. Sometimes that can be tempting. You see something and you think, “My gosh, that’s horrible. Our cleaning service would never do that.” You might think, “That’ll make us look good to point out that that wouldn’t happen with us.” Maybe, maybe not.

First of all, anyone can make mistakes. Maybe that was just a miss, or maybe it is a big issue. But even if it’s a big issue, it can come across—when you complain about that to the person you’re going through the building with—as kind of petty, maybe unprofessional. Also, it can call into question the judgment of the person who hired that cleaning service, the current one, which may be them. That building owner or manager, you may be going through the building with them right then. So, that’s probably another thing not to get into.

But what should you do? What should you say? During a building walkthrough, first of all, you want to show a real, genuine interest in not only meeting them. When you go through a building for 30 minutes or an hour, you can have a little bit of easy, casual conversation to get to know them, really listen to them, and at the same time show an interest in their building, to show them you really want to know the details.

You may be walking through a plant or a different area in the building and spot something. Say, “Is that conference room—should we look at that? Is that something you’d like us to do? Or are we going to go see that?” Or that training area—do you need that cleaned?

You may want to ask, for example, “Are there any special services that you need done?” All of a sudden, you’re walking through the plant and they say, “Now that you mention it, those big air ducts in the plant—every year or so we do need someone to arrange to get up there with equipment to blow down the dust and clean this up. That’s something that we would like to have done.”

You can ask them about the floor work, and when they would like, and how they would like the floor handled. They may have a quality control room that they need the flooring handled very differently in there.

You may want to ask them, “What’s the best time for us to clean so that we don’t become an aggravation or get in the way of you doing your work? We want you to be productive, and we don’t want to bother that. What would work best for you?”

You may even want to ask them, “Are there any issues that you’ve experienced, maybe not only with this cleaning service, but maybe others, and you’ve always been meaning to ask about it? Because if a cleaning service could eliminate this problem, it would be a real benefit to your company. If you could tell me any of those kinds of things, I can take a look at that as well.”

They may say to you, “We’ve always needed somebody to fix how we handle the consumable poly paper supplies.” And you can jump in, and maybe the kind of thing that you can track the inventory and resupply it. It could even be a profit center for your company, in addition to the cleaning.

So, those are some of the things we probably should not say, and certainly some of the things that we should.

Till next time, remember: you can do this. You really can.