A well-managed business always finds ways to keep costs under control, but the best-managed businesses know how to identify the complete and full costs of the choices they make.
Before putting a custodial staff on the payroll at your business, consider these ways that a cleaning service can get the job done for you at a cost that’s lower than an in-house worker.
1. Emergency Availability
Most businesses eventually experience some type of off-hours cleaning emergency. It could be the result of damage from a fire or thunderstorm or as minor as a leaky pipe. No matter the size of the threat, you may not be able to get your custodian to the scene, and the job may be too large and too specialized for your in-house team to handle anyway.
The result is a cleanup that takes too long and costs too much, eating away at the savings you realized by putting custodial workers on staff. Hiring a professional emergency cleaning service would be the best route to take when it comes to making sure your business is always sanitized and disinfected for employees and guests who come in and out on a daily basis.
2. Cheaper Supplies
Whether your inputs are rolled steel or reams of printer paper, you know that volume purchasing is the best way to go. It saves you on your per-unit cost as well as shipping, and it gives you bargaining power with your supplier, making you a priority customer ahead of the box-by-box buyer.
The same is true of cleaning supplies. You could certainly buy those items in bulk, but you’d pack your storage area for months at a time as the supplies are slowly used up. A cleaning service will buy those bulk quantities (and store them elsewhere) while passing their savings along to you in the form of a lower overall cleaning cost.
3. Specialized Skills
Most custodians are very effective at the routine tasks of cleaning bathrooms, mopping floors, dusting surfaces, and cleaning windows. However, other tasks may be far beyond the scope of their skills. The advent of COVID has changed everything about the cleaning industry, and many custodians are unable or unwilling to perform the specialized work needed to comply with many corporate and public health guidelines.
A cleaning service will stay on top of those demands for you. As CDC recommendations evolve, the service will stay current and be sure to equip, supply, and train their field personnel to perform required tasks properly and safely, eliminating the need for you to double as a custodial trainer.
4. Easier Staffing
When you only have one custodian, what do you do when he or she calls in sick? What about when there’s a problem like one of the emergencies we described above? Regularly calling somebody in on weekends or evenings to deal with unexpected cleaning projects is a good way to lose an employee and be back at square one by hiring a custodian.
With a cleaning company, you simply make a phone call and report what’s going on. The company will contact their on-call staff and get them on the way to you quickly and efficiently so that you can get the problem dealt with faster and more effectively, quickly restoring normal operations.
5. Training
When you hire your own custodian, you’ll probably look for someone with experience, but that may not be possible in a tight labor market no matter how much you pay. More than likely, you’ll be bringing in a custodian with little to no experience and no veteran staff to show them the ropes. Your new employee may not know proper sanitation procedures, the use of specialized equipment, or simple things like how frequently to perform a given task.
A cleaning service will bring in fully-trained people who have experience operating equipment like air sanitizing equipment and floor buffers. You’ll simply orient the team to the building’s layout and your preferred schedule, then watch them work.
Many businesses are tempted to reduce overhead by hiring a custodian to keep the building clean, but this logic fails to capture some important considerations that will have an impact on the bottom line. If you do not take these factors into account, you’ll miss some significant costs that will erode the benefits of hiring a custodian and could make it more expensive than hiring an outside contractor.
