What Facility Executives Expect From Cleaning Contractors - Member Content

It’s a sad reality of the cleaning industry that when budgets are cut, cleaning frequencies are one of the first things slashed. This was especially the case during the Great Recession. Building service contractors that were once asked to empty trash receptacles multiple times per day were now told to do so only once a day. Vacuuming became a task performed three times a week instead of daily. Project work done quarterly was now done once a year, if at all. This list goes on.

Yet, according to a Contracting Profits survey, 70 percent of facility executives expect cleaning to return to pre-recession frequencies.

Maybe that trend has already begun.

In the same survey, CP polled facility executives, asking how frequently 15 different cleaning tasks are performed in their facilities. The results may surprise some BSCs.

But if BSCs are performing these cleaning tasks less frequently than facility executives indicate on the following pages, it stands to reason BSCs may be leaving business on the table.

Perhaps facility executives’ cleaning frequency expectations have changed as the country crawls out of the recession. If that’s the case, it may be time for BSCs to go back to their clients and propose a return to pre-recession cleaning levels, using these industry benchmarks as proof.