Just before the start of the bidding season, Swept Founder Michael Brown had a chance to chat with Ricky Regalado about scaling the Bidding Process in the janitorial industry.

Ricky is the owner of Rozalado Services and founder of  Route, a software platform for the building services industry that empowers companies with data, sales, and human capital management tools.

Both Ricky and Michael spoke at great lengths about how the bidding process has changed from then to now, the current trends in the cleaning industry, best practices when conducting a walkthrough, how to bid in a way that makes the most sense for your cleaning business and much more…

For those who missed it, below are some highlights for you from the webinar

Q. When it comes to bidding, there are two common ways to get a sense of the scope of work or effort required to keep a space clean:  1) sq/ft and 2)  by the hour. Which one do you use? How do you know when to pick one over the other?

Standardization is what we should ideally be doing,  but it is tough. A 3000sq/ft restaurant is different from a 3000sq/ft office. So you have to do things differently. It’s an agile approach. I prefer to quote hourly, but to get a sense of the hourly you need to understand the production rate. The approach may also differ from business to business.

Q. How would you define production rate?

In basic terms, think of how many hours it will take for you to service a particular account. Take into consideration things like location, time, frequency, staff, etc. 

Q. How do you deal with clients that ask you to cut down your hours considerably and say they are ok with average-level cleaning? Will you take such a contract if it is profitable but it’s not really the level that you want? 

Early days we would take on such contracts but now that we are past that stage, we have an operations and quality control team in place to take care of these things, we would not take on such a contract.

Q. What’s the best practice for estimating supply costs?

Early days we would use 3 to 5% of the monthly service charge and also took into account the occupancy in the cleaning location. But it is tricky- what if the consumption changes, what if the prices of the products change, etc.

So we summarize/categorize all expenses as a line item on the bid and send that to the client, just so that they are aware of what’s being charged on what basis, and if you do end up having to increase the price, it’s easier for them to understand or for you to explain the ‘why’. 

Q. If you were starting a company in a new city, how would you figure out what to charge?

Mostly, it is learning from what other players in the market are charging at the time.

Q. How fast do you get your proposal turned around and do you offer tiered pricing?

Depending on the size of the client, what they are looking for, we have turned-in the proposal as quickly as within an hour — that’s because I was confident in the pricing we had come up with.  We always provide more information than asked. We include all the cleaning services we offer (that we think might be of interest to the client) and the price points for each in our quotes. They can always pick which service they want or don’t want. 

The key is to show them you are flexible.

You can watch the entire webinar on our YouTube Channel.

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