Should I send these as a written RFP?

You can, and for larger premises it helps you compare answers side by side. For a single floor, asking them out loud at the walkthrough works just as well and tells you something extra: whether the person in front of you knows their own operation well enough to answer without checking.

What if a company refuses to answer one of them?

That is an answer. None of these seven touches anything commercially sensitive. They are questions about how the company runs, and a company that will not describe how it runs is telling you something worth hearing.

Is a long contract ever a good idea?

Occasionally, where you have negotiated something specific in return for the commitment. What should make you pause is a long term offered as the default, with nothing on your side of the ledger.

Seven Questions to Ask Before Signing a Cleaning Contract

Key Takeaways

Seven short questions will tell you more than three proposals will.
Ask how many labour-hours the figure is built on. Everything else follows from the answer.
Ask who inspects the work and how often. Daily and monthly are not two points on one scale.
Ask what the initial term is and what happens after it. A long lock-in is information.
Ask what they do not hold. A company that volunteers its gaps is telling you how it behaves.

Buying commercial cleaning is difficult because the product is invisible. You cannot inspect it before you buy, the proposals all describe the same tasks in the same words, and the only real difference between companies shows up months later.

These seven questions surface that difference early. All have short answers. None require you to know anything about cleaning.

1. How Many Labour-Hours per Visit Is This Figure Built On?

The most useful question you can ask, and the one most rarely asked. A cleaning contract is a fixed fee buying a variable quantity of labour, and without the hours you cannot compare two proposals at all.

Once you have the number from each company, a lower figure resolves into one of three things: better efficiency, lower labour cost, or fewer hours. The first two are legitimate. The third is a problem you will meet in month four.

2. Who Supervises the Work, and How Often Is It Inspected?

Cleaning happens unobserved, at night, by people you will probably never meet. Supervision is the only mechanism that keeps an unobserved service at standard, and frequency is the whole question.

A company inspecting monthly discovers in week six what a daily inspection catches on the first night. By week six the lower standard has already settled in as normal. Ask who inspects, how often, and what happens when they find something.

3. Are the Cleaners Employees, and What Happens Before Their First Shift?

Three short questions inside one. Were background and reference checks completed before engagement, or after? Was training completed before the first shift, or is the first shift the training? Are the operatives bonded?

The training question is more revealing than it sounds. A good deal of this trade trains on the client's floor, which means your premises are where the learning curve happens while you pay a contract rate for it.

4. Are You Already Badged in My Building? If Not, What Will My Agent Need?

This question tells you your real start date. Most managing agents require a Certificate of Insurance naming specific entities, a vendor registration and a named roster before badges are issued, and none of it moves quickly.

A company already working in your building can start soon. One that is not cannot, however much they would like to. What matters is whether they tell you that upfront or discover it afterwards.

5. What Is Explicitly Excluded From This Scope?

Nearly every dispute in this trade is a scope dispute, and nearly every scope dispute traces to something discussed at the walkthrough and never written down.

Ask for the exclusions in writing. Interior glass above reach, inside the refrigerator, the stockroom, carpet extraction, high-level dusting, anything needing furniture moved. None of those are unreasonable exclusions. All of them are unreasonable surprises.

6. What Is the Initial Term, and What Happens After It?

A short initial period followed by a month-to-month arrangement puts the burden on the company to keep your account, which is where it belongs. A twelve-month lock-in offered as the default puts the burden on you.

Ask specifically whether the agreement renews automatically and what notice is required to stop it. That clause has cost more people a year than any other line in a cleaning agreement.

7. Which Industry Certifications Do You Hold, and Which Do You Not?

Ask both halves. The second half is where the information is.

Green Seal certifies cleaning products and procedures against a published environmental standard. ISSA CIMS certifies that a company's management systems conform to an industry framework. Both are real, independently assessed and worth something. If your specification requires either, say so at tender so that suitable companies are approached.

But notice what you learn from the answer regardless of its content. A company that states plainly what it does not hold has told you how it will behave when something goes wrong at two in the morning. A company that implies a credential it cannot produce has told you that too.

Take the List With You

Seven questions, short answers, no cleaning knowledge required. What they do require is that the person answering knows their own operation. The ones who do not will become obvious inside ten minutes, and that is the whole point of asking.