Buyer's Resource
The definitive guide to questions every decision-maker should ask.
The best cleaning relationships are built on transparency from both sides. That means you being clear about your expectations, your budget constraints, and your non-negotiables. It also means the supplier being transparent about the limits of what they're quoting, and honest about whether their experience genuinely matches the environment they'd be working in.
The quality of a company's answers to the questions below matters as much as the answers themselves. Pay attention to how they respond, not just what they say. Evasion, vagueness, and excessive confidence are all data points. A company that deflects a direct question, or answers a different question than the one you asked, is showing you how they'll communicate when problems arise.
Price matters, but it's one factor among many, and it's rarely the one that determines whether a contract succeeds or fails. The contracts that last are the ones where both parties understood what they were agreeing to, had realistic expectations, and built a working relationship that could handle the inevitable rough patches.
Not every question here will be relevant to your situation. The guide is designed to be used selectively — click on the questions to expand. Work through the sections most applicable to your needs and set others aside.
A quote is a number on a page. These questions are about what sits behind it: whether the supplier has genuinely thought about what your contract involves, what will cost extra once you're committed, and whether the hours behind the price are sufficient to deliver what's been promised.
Before you engage seriously with any supplier, you need to understand the legal and commercial framework you'd be signing into. Contract terms, exit conditions, and compliance obligations aren't fine print — they determine your exposure if the relationship fails.
A cleaning contract gives a company regular unsupervised access to your premises: keys, alarm codes, and time alone outside business hours. The person you meet during the sales process is rarely the person doing the cleaning. These questions are about who those people actually are, how they were selected, and what controls are in place around their access.
Cleaning happens when you're not there. Because it's repetitive, invisible work, the standard tends to drift unless someone is actively measuring it. Consistent delivery over years comes down to systems, not just having capable cleaners.
Things will go wrong. A cleaner will miss a shift. Something will get broken. A standard will slip. A company that claims they've never had a complaint either hasn't been around long enough or isn't being truthful. What you're looking for is a company that has a clear, practised process for handling problems, and can describe it without reading from a script.
By the time you reach these questions, you should have a clear picture of each supplier's scope, commercial terms, security practices, and accountability systems. These questions are about whether the company behind those answers has the track record and honesty to back them up.
The goal of these questions is not to find reasons to distrust a supplier. It is to find one you can genuinely rely on. A company willing to answer all of these directly and specifically is telling you something important. So is one that can't.
Also read: Preparing to Go to Market