People ask me this a fair bit. Usually it's someone who took the cheapest quote, watched the service slide after a month or two, and doesn't want to make the same call twice. So here's what I'd be checking if I were the one hiring. Five things. None of them complicated.
1. Insurance and police checks. Ask for the certificates.
A commercial cleaner should carry public liability insurance and workers compensation. We do. Every person on the crew should be police-checked, with the certificate on file. Ask to see it in writing. If it can't be produced in a day, that tells you something.
This isn't box-ticking. A vacuum puts a hole in the wall, someone slips on a wet floor, and suddenly it matters a lot whether your cleaner is covered. Cheap to check now. Expensive to be wrong about later.
2. Same crew, or a rotation?
This is the one that decides whether the service stays good. A rotating crew never learns your site. They don't know which tap dribbles, which boardroom chairs get lined up a certain way, which room stays shut. So the standard drifts, usually inside a month.
Ask straight out: "Will the same crew be on my site every week?" If the answer goes vague, keep pushing. Same crew per site is the whole reason a clean holds for years instead of weeks. It's how we run.
3. No lock-in contracts
If a company needs you locked into a 12 or 24-month contract, ask yourself why. Usually it's because they're not confident they'll keep you clean by clean. Someone who backs their own work is happy to run month-to-month with fair notice, say 30 days.
You shouldn't have to sign your year away to get a decent clean. We don't ask for it. Stay because the work's good, not because the paperwork won't let you leave.
4. Written scope, written quote
Verbal quotes drift. A quick "yeah, we'll get the kitchen too" at the walkthrough turns into a missed kitchen six weeks later, and there's nothing written down to point at.
Get it in writing. What's included, what's an extra, how often, how call-outs are charged. We walk the site, then the quote lands in your inbox the same day with all of that spelled out. It's not hard to do. Anyone serious does it.
5. A real guarantee, not a vague promise
Plenty of cleaners say "we'll make it right" somewhere on their website. Ask them what that actually means. Pin it down.
- How long do you have to flag an issue?
- How quickly do they come back?
- What happens if it's still not right after that?
If they can't put numbers on it, it's a line of marketing, not a guarantee. For what it's worth, ours is 24 hours to flag it, next business day to return, no charge if we can't sort it. Numbers you can hold us to.
The honest summary
Sure, you might save a bit per clean going with the cheapest quote. You'll hand it back inside a quarter in missed jobs, patchy work, and the time you waste chasing them up. The cleaner you want shows up when they said, does the job, fixes what you flag, and charges what was agreed.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Ash