Most offices put up with a mediocre cleaner for years because switching feels like a project. It is not a project. It is one email, one walkthrough and one overlap week. Here is the entire process, honestly, including the parts other cleaning companies gloss over.
Step 1: read your current agreement
Most office cleaning contracts run month to month after an initial term, with 30 days notice. Find the notice clause before anything else, because it sets your timeline. If you are inside a fixed term, note the end date and line the switch up against it. That is the only genuinely slow part of the process, and it is your current contract causing it, not the switch.
Step 2: get the incoming quote against your existing scope
Do not rewrite your scope to change cleaners. Hand the incoming contractor exactly what the current one is meant to be doing, and get a price against that. Like for like is the only comparison that means anything. We quote from your current scope in a single site walkthrough: frequencies, areas, consumables, periodic works like carpets and windows, all itemised so you can see what each line costs.
After a month of actually cleaning your site, a good contractor will come back with suggestions: things in your scope nobody needs, and things missing that facilities keeps chasing. That conversation is worth having after the switch, not before, when it would just be sales talk.
Step 3: send one email
The termination notice to your current provider is three sentences: we are ending the agreement per the notice clause, last service date is X, please arrange return of keys and fobs on that date. You do not owe a reason. Overlap the dates so the incoming crew starts the next service day after the outgoing one finishes. There is no gap week.
Step 4: the actual handover, which takes about 10 minutes
What the incoming contractor needs from you, once:
- Keys, fobs or swipe cards, and who signs for them
- The alarm process: code, sequence and the monitoring company's phone number for false alarms
- Site induction if your building requires one
- Where cleaning storage lives, and what stock is yours versus the old contractor's
- The one thing your last cleaner always got wrong, so it is right on night one
That is the whole list. Everything else, a professional crew works out on the floor.
What the first month should look like
The same crew every visit, learning your site. A supervisor checking the work, not just the sign in sheet. Consumables topped up without anyone chasing. And a check in at week four: what is working, what is not, what should change in the scope now that the suggestions are based on your actual site.
If anything gets missed in that first month, the answer you want to hear is the one we give on construction handovers: we come back and fix it at no cost.
We built our name on builders cleans, where the standard is a defect free inspection, and we bring the same standard to office cleaning on contract across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. After hours as standard, fixed monthly price, one invoice. Send your current scope and we will return an itemised quote inside 24 hours.
The Builders Clean team