When to Walk Away from a Janitorial Bid Opportunity

Yes, some jobs lose money from day one. A bad job can block better work.

Check hours of labor first. Then add supplies cost and equipment cost.

The schedule may not match the company work hours. The site may be too far away.

The client only wants the lowest number. The work details do not matter to them.

The work list is not clear. The tasks can keep growing after the bid.

Well, hi there. Welcome back. Dan again from CleanGuru.

So, should you ever walk away from a bid opportunity and not submit a proposal? It sounds kind of crazy. To me too, when you’re first trying to grow, or really anytime you’re trying to grow, you want jobs so badly. So to think about not bidding on it seems hard to imagine.

But there may be several times when you want to do just that. Let me give you three examples of times you may want to consider respectfully not submitting a proposal.

Number one: when you simply can’t make the numbers work. You can’t make the math work. You look at it, you find out what they need done, and you know from experience what it’s going to take in terms of your team, the labor hours, supplies, and equipment. You work it out and you say, “Boy, there’s just no profit margin here.”

You may want to even work with them and say, “Listen, can we cut back on this or change that?” You may even think to yourself, “We’re going to get more efficient in month one, two, three, four down the road.” But even after you think about that, you go, “I don’t think we can. From the production on this rate, I don’t think we can do better than this.”

The thing that gets you is sometimes there may be a large account and it’s so attractive because you’d like to land it, and I get that. So if you can, great. But if you really have gone through it and you can’t make the numbers work any way you look at it, it may be time to consider walking away. If you can pick up several other accounts that are profitable, it beats a larger one that’s not profitable.

The second thing would be when you can’t make that job fit your company. We want to be flexible. We want to try to change to be able to grow and handle new kinds of services, and maybe even service new areas. Sometimes we do, but sometimes a job may be so unusual.

Maybe it’s out of town. Maybe it’s at a time—we do everything at night, we have all our supervision and management at night—but they have to be in the middle of the night or early morning. And they have very unusual requirements, and it’s out of town at a place you don’t even know if you’re going to be able to actually hire there, let alone get supervision there on a regular basis.

And the more you look at it, you go, “This account would be nice,” because again, maybe it’s a nice size revenue, a monthly charge every month. So it’s attractive to you. But you look at it and you go, “I think it’s going to take us away from the normal rhythm or pattern of how we grow.” So it may be worth walking away, because it would derail your hiring, your management, your training, your supervision. So many things could come off the rails based on taking this unusual job, especially if you don’t plan on growing in that kind of niche in the future.

And then the third thing would be something a little bit weird, but you may have experienced this. Have you ever gotten the feeling after several visits—maybe your marketing visits, stop-bys, your walkthrough during working with a client, the presentation, going through the proposal with them—the more you go through this with a prospective client, you can tell that they seem like a problem? Not just a little problem.

In fact, if you only pick up accounts from prospective clients where you think they’re just wonderful, I don’t know how many you pick up, because everyone’s not perfect. We’re not perfect. But if you get several indications that there’s a problem, what kind of problem?

Well, maybe they only care about price. They don’t even want to talk. They may not even care about the job specs so much. They say, “We just want to pay what we’re paying the last guys. Now they just fired the last guys.” But they want you now to take their place at the same price.

They may not want to talk about job specs. They may say, “Listen, we’ll figure out the job duties later on. We’ll figure it out.” Well, you know how this can go, right? Job specification creep. All of a sudden it creeps: more and more is required. They want more done, and you can’t nail down exactly the work that needs to be done.

Or maybe they’re very disrespectful, possibly even to you, maybe even to the prior cleaning company. They’re so disrespectful to the prior company, you begin to think, “Maybe this isn’t unusual to just them. They may be this way to me, or maybe lots of folks.” Maybe they’re a problem.

Again, none of these things are perfect, but when several of these things line up and you get a strong feeling, you go, “I think we’re walking into a problem.” You may want to consider saying, “Let’s walk away from this and pick up some accounts that fit better who we are and what we’re trying to do.”

The most successful companies don’t go after every bid. They don’t bid on every job, and they don’t try to land every job. They try to go after the right jobs, and then they try to win the right jobs. And that’s something that we can do too, by evaluating who it is, the building, and what’s going on at that location.

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