Plumbers
Most plumbers are one bad month away from a quiet diary, and the reason is almost always the same: every job is a stranger. The fix is not more adverts, it is a handful of accounts that call you without searching.
How cleaning companies get contracts instead of one-off jobs
One office cleaning contract is worth more than thirty domestic customers and takes less effort to keep. The whole trick is knowing who signs them and when.
Where the work actually comes from
Domestic cleaning is a churn business by nature. Customers leave when they move, when money is tight, when a cleaner they liked leaves, and the acquisition cost repeats every time. It works, but it works like a treadmill, and it is priced against a large informal market that does not pay tax or insurance.
Commercial cleaning behaves in the opposite way. An office contract is signed for a year, invoiced monthly, delivered outside working hours and reviewed only when something goes wrong. The buyer is an office manager or facilities coordinator who wants to stop thinking about it. Churn is low, revenue is predictable, and the price is defensible because insurance, vetting, cover arrangements and consumables are all part of what they are buying.
Sitting between the two is the specialist work that pays best per hour: end-of-tenancy for letting agents, post-construction cleans for builders, deep kitchen cleans with certificates for restaurants, and periodic carpet, window and jet washing. All of it is bought by businesses, all of it recurs, and most of it is booked by someone who is relieved to have found a company that answers.
The channels that produce work
- Office and retail contracts, approached directly. Every office over a certain size pays a cleaner, and the contract is held by an office manager rather than the owner. Direct approach works because these contracts turn over regularly — staff leave, standards slip, the incumbent raises prices. The proposal that lands is concrete: nights or mornings, exact tasks, staff continuity, cover arrangements, insurance, consumables, and a monthly price.
- Letting agents, for end-of-tenancy work. Every tenancy that ends needs a clean to a specific standard, and the agent needs it turned around between checkout and the next viewing. This is high-frequency, price-tolerant work with a single buyer controlling dozens of properties, and agents stay with a company that never delays a let.
- Builders and developers, for post-construction cleans. A finished build cannot be handed over covered in dust, and the sparkle clean is the last thing on a site manager's list. Contractors pay well for it because a delayed handover costs them far more, and one relationship gives you every plot on the development.
- Restaurants and commercial kitchens, on a certificate cycle. Extraction and deep kitchen cleaning is required for insurance and hygiene compliance and comes with a certificate and a due date. Once you hold the account, the renewal is a diary entry rather than a sale.
The accounts worth approaching
Every trade on this site has a commercial customer base sitting behind the public one — businesses that buy repeatedly, book in advance and pay on account. They are also, conveniently, a list: each one has a website, a phone number and usually a named contact. These are the ones worth a deliberate approach.
| Who | Why they repeat |
|---|---|
| Offices, coworking spaces and business parks | Annual contracts with monthly invoicing, bought by an office manager whose priority is that it never becomes their problem. |
| Letting and estate agencies | Continuous end-of-tenancy and pre-marketing cleans across a whole managed portfolio, booked at short notice by one coordinator. |
| Construction firms and developers | Post-construction sparkle cleans on every unit, at a premium, with the whole development following from one relationship. |
| Restaurants, pubs and commercial kitchens | Compliance-driven extraction and deep cleans on a fixed cycle, with a certificate that has an expiry date on it. |
| Gyms, salons, clinics and nurseries | Hygiene is part of their product, they are inspected on it, and they clean daily rather than weekly. |
Searches that build that list
Each of these is a business type run against the towns and cities you cover. One search per line, every location at once.
- letting agents, estate agencies
- coworking spaces, serviced offices, business parks
- construction firms, property developers
- restaurants, pubs, hotels
- gyms, nurseries, dental clinics, salons
What quietly empties the pipeline
- Pricing commercial work off a domestic hourly rate. A contract price has to carry insurance, cover for sickness, supervision, consumables and equipment, and companies that forget this win contracts they lose money on.
- One named cleaner with no cover plan. The fastest way to lose an office contract is a fortnight of nobody turning up because the regular cleaner was ill.
- Chasing every enquiry regardless of geography. Cleaning profitability lives and dies on travel time between sites, so a tight cluster beats a bigger scattered patch.
- Never asking a happy office manager who else they know. Office managers move companies and talk to each other constantly, and they carry their suppliers with them.
Questions
01 How do I get my first office cleaning contract?
Pick a small geographic cluster — one business park, one high street, one office block — and approach every occupant in it with a specific written proposal rather than a leaflet. Ask for the office manager by name. Expect most to have an incumbent and say no; what you are buying with the effort is being the person they call when the incumbent fails, which happens more often than you would think. The first contract is the hard one, and the second is much easier because it can be next door.
02 Is commercial cleaning more profitable than domestic?
Usually, and more importantly it is more stable. Domestic margins can look higher per hour but the churn is relentless and the acquisition cost repeats. A commercial contract is a year of revenue with one sale, delivered on a route that keeps travel time down, and the buyer is less price-sensitive because they are also purchasing reliability, insurance and the certainty of not having to think about it.
03 How do cleaning companies find end-of-tenancy work?
Directly from letting agents, who control the volume. Every managed property that changes hands needs a clean to an inventory standard, on a deadline. Agents are findable, concentrated on the high street, and pick a cleaner on turnaround reliability rather than price — a delayed clean means a delayed let, which costs the agent far more than the difference in your quote. One agent relationship can be several cleans a week.
04 What should a cleaning company charge for?
Everything that is actually being delivered, itemised. Consumables, equipment, supervision visits, insurance, holiday and sickness cover, and periodic deep cleans all cost money, and companies that bundle them invisibly into an hourly rate end up with contracts that only look profitable. Itemising also makes you comparable on substance rather than on the headline hourly figure, which is the only way to beat an underpriced competitor without dropping your price.
Selling to cleaning companies instead?
Cleaning companies buy consumables, chemicals, equipment, uniforms, scheduling and workforce software, insurance and vetting services, and they buy continuously because everything is consumed. It is a very large, very fragmented market with strong Maps and web presence — one of the easier lists to build at volume.
Other trades
Electricians
Electricians have an advantage almost no other trade has: a large slice of their market is legally required to hire them on a schedule. Most never build a business around it.
HVAC contractors
This trade has a structural problem no amount of advertising solves: demand arrives in two spikes and disappears in between. The businesses that survive it sell maintenance, not repairs.
Roofers
Roofing has the worst reputation of any trade and the highest-value jobs in domestic work. Both facts point at the same strategy: stop competing with door-knockers and start selling to people who buy roofs on purpose.
The commercial half is a list
The accounts above all publish their contact details. GoLeadX searches a business type across every town you cover, crawls each site for the address, verifies it, and hands you a CSV. A search takes about a minute.
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