Where commercial cleaning contracts actually come from
Very few are won by cold calling. Most come through four channels, and they need different approaches.
| Channel | Typical contract size | How to access it |
|---|---|---|
| Direct approach to local businesses | £3k–£25k/yr | Walk in, ask who handles cleaning, follow up |
| Commercial property agents & landlords | £8k–£60k/yr | Relationship-led, multi-building potential |
| Facilities management sub-contracting | £15k–£150k/yr | Register on FM supplier portals |
| Public sector tenders | £25k–£500k/yr | Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, framework agreements |
| Incumbent failure | Any | The largest single source: be visible when it happens |
That last row matters more than the others combined. Most commercial cleaning contracts change hands because the incumbent contractor let standards slip, not because a procurement exercise was run. Being the contractor a facilities manager already has the number of, on the week they have had enough, wins more work than any tender portal.
Practically: introduce yourself to facilities managers in your area before there is a vacancy, and stay in occasional contact. It is a two-year sales cycle with a very high conversion rate at the end of it.
Qualifying a contract before you spend time on it
Bid writing is expensive in hours. Before starting, check five things.
- Can you actually mobilise it? A contract needing six cleaners across three sites from a standing start will damage your existing work if you get it.
- What are the payment terms? 60-day terms on a £60k contract means funding roughly £10,000 of wages before the first payment arrives.
- Is TUPE in play? If there is an incumbent, you will likely inherit their staff on their existing terms. Request the employee liability information before pricing anything.
- Who is the incumbent and why are they leaving? If the answer is "price", you are being invited to lose money. If it is "service", you have a genuine opportunity.
- What is the evaluation split? A 90% price / 10% quality tender is a race to the bottom. A 60/40 split is winnable on merit.
Pricing the bid
Two sanity checks before you submit. If labour is under 55% of contract value, you have under-resourced the specification and will fail at audit within six months. If it is over 70%, there is nothing left to fund management and margin.
Then check the resulting rate per square metre per month. For a standard office specification, £1.20 to £3.20 per m² per month is the normal UK band, roughly £0.07 to £0.22 per m² per visit. Outside it, your productivity assumption is probably wrong. The tender calculator builds all of this and flags both checks automatically.
| Cost line | Share of contract value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Direct labour + on-costs | 55–70% | The dominant cost in every cleaning contract |
| Materials and consumables | 3–6% | Higher if washroom supplies are in scope |
| Equipment and machinery | 2–5% | Depreciation, servicing, transport |
| Supervision | 4–8% | On-site supervisor hours |
| Management and overhead | 8–14% | Area management, admin, insurance, compliance |
| Net margin | 5–12% | What you keep |
What procurement teams actually score
Price typically carries 40–60% of the evaluation. The rest is where contracts are genuinely won and lost, and where a well-prepared small contractor can beat a national one.
- Mobilisation plan. Week by week, with named roles, TUPE consultation dates and a go-live date. Vague mobilisation answers lose more points than a slightly higher price.
- Compliance evidence. COSHH assessments, RAMS, method statements, training records, insurance certificates, ICO registration. Attach them. Do not promise to produce them.
- Named supervision. Procurement teams have been burned by contractors who win on price then vanish. A named supervisor with stated on-site hours is worth real marks.
- KPIs and reporting. What you measure, how often, and what the client sees. If you can demonstrate live audit scores and a compliance dashboard, show a screenshot.
- Social value. Real Living Wage commitment, local employment, training and progression. Increasingly weighted, especially on public sector work.
- Business continuity. What happens when a cleaner calls in sick at 5am. A specific answer here scores; "we have cover arrangements" does not.
TUPE: the thing that catches first-time bidders
Where an incumbent contractor already provides the service, TUPE will usually apply when the contract changes hands. The existing cleaners transfer to you on their existing terms and conditions, with continuity of service preserved.
You cannot assume you will staff the contract at your standard rates. You are entitled to the employee liability information: pay rates, hours, length of service, contractual entitlements, outstanding grievances and disciplinary matters, and you should request it before you price anything.
- Transferring staff on historic above-market rates that your bid cannot support
- Long service creating significant redundancy exposure if the contract shrinks
- Accrued but untaken holiday that you inherit
- Contractual entitlements: enhanced sick pay, bonuses. That your other staff do not have
- Live grievances or disciplinary processes that transfer with the individual
Price all of it into the bid. A contract won on the assumption of standard rates, then delivered with inherited staff on rates 15% higher, is a contract that loses money every month for its full term. Take employment law advice on your first TUPE transfer. It costs far less than getting it wrong.
The first 90 days decide whether you keep it
Most commercial cleaning contracts that are lost are lost in the first three months, and almost always for the same reasons: the mobilisation slipped, the specification was never agreed in writing, or nobody from the contractor visited the site after week two.
- Agree the specification in writing before day one. Room by room, frequency by frequency. Ambiguity always resolves in the client's favour later.
- Over-resource weeks one to three. A building being taken over is dirtier than the specification assumes, because the outgoing contractor stopped trying.
- Audit weekly at first, then monthly. Document it. A client who receives audit scores does not go looking for a replacement.
- Introduce the supervisor in person. A facilities manager who knows a name and a face will ring you before they ring a competitor.
- Report on something. Completion rates, audit scores, incidents, consumable usage. The contractors who report are the ones who get renewed.
This is the operational reason software matters at contract scale: proving you did the work is as commercially important as doing it. CleanFlo tracks compliance scores, audits and incidents per site, so the evidence exists without anyone having to assemble it the week before a review meeting.