Most buildings that are unhappy with their cleaning company stay with it anyway. Not because the service improves, and not because anyone has changed their mind.
They stay because of a date.
The clause that decides everything
Before you shortlist anyone, before you write a scope, before you have a single conversation with a prospective provider — find your current cleaning agreement and read the termination clause.
You are looking for three things:
- The notice period required to terminate. Thirty days, sixty, ninety.
- Whether the agreement renews automatically at the end of its term.
- If it does, the window in which notice must be served to stop it renewing — which is frequently a specific number of days before the renewal date, and not a day later.
Write that date down. Every other date in this plan works backwards from it.
We raise it first because it is the single most common reason a switch does not happen. A facility manager decides in February that the cleaning is not working, spends a few weeks being busy with other things, starts looking at options in April — and discovers that the notice window closed in March and the agreement has rolled for another twelve months. The decision was made and then quietly expired.
If you are reading this because you are considering a change, go and find that clause now. The rest of this page will still be here.
Before you go to market: fix the document, not just the provider
Here is the uncomfortable question to ask before spending any money on a transition.
Is your problem the provider, or the scope?
If your current scope says “maintain cleanliness to professional standards,” or “spot clean as required,” or gives one total square footage for the whole building, then a new provider working to that same document will reproduce the same outcome within about three months. You will have paid for a transition and arrived back where you started with a different logo on the invoice.
Two tests before you commit.
Read the scope as a stranger would. Does it say which areas, what square footage by space type, how many fixtures, which tasks at what frequency, and how many labour hours the price assumes? If a provider would have to guess at any of those, the gaps in the document are doing some of the damage you are blaming on the crew.
Plot your complaints by day of week. This one catches a lot of buildings. If the restroom and kitchen complaints cluster on your two or three busiest days and barely appear on the quiet ones, that is a frequency-pattern problem rather than a performance problem — and a new provider on the same flat weekly pattern will produce the same clustering. That is a scope fix, and it is cheaper than a switch.
Sometimes the honest conclusion is that the specification was the problem and the incumbent was doing roughly what it said. That is a good outcome to reach before a tender rather than after one.
The 30-day transition plan
Day 0 is the day the new contract starts. Negative days are the run-up.
Days −30 to −21: decide, and write the document
- Pull the existing agreement. Note the notice period, the renewal date and the notice window. Anchor everything to that date.
- Write or rewrite the scope of work. At minimum: cleanable square footage by space type, floor surfaces, fixture counts, explicit task frequencies, glass zoned by height, and periodic work priced separately from recurring service.
- Baseline the building. Photograph floors, entrances, restrooms, carpet traffic lanes, glass and anything already in poor condition. Date the photographs. This protects you and the incoming provider from later arguments about what was inherited.
- Record when each periodic item was last done — carpet extraction, floor strip or recoat, high dusting, exterior glass. If nobody knows, note that too. It is itself a finding, and the incoming provider will need to price around it.
Days −20 to −14: go to market
- Issue the scope with a pricing form you provide, rather than one each bidder invents.
- Make the site walk mandatory and record who attended. A bidder who skipped it is pricing a floor plan.
- Require three things from every bid: labour hours per visit, a staffing plan covering supervision and relief cover, and an explicit list of exceptions to your scope.
- Publish your evaluation criteria before bids arrive.
- Include your incumbent. More on that below.
Days −10 to 0: award, notify, and collect the paperwork
- Award the contract.
- Serve notice on the incumbent exactly as the agreement requires — in writing, to the named person or address, within the window. A notice served informally or to the wrong contact is the other way this goes wrong.
- Collect the compliance paperwork now rather than on day one: certificates of insurance, workers’ compensation, any bonding, and current registration with the California Department of Industrial Relations janitorial registry. And ask for the endorsements rather than just the certificate — a certificate of insurance states on its face that it confers no rights on the holder.
- Ask the three ownership questions. These cause more day-one friction than anything else on this list:
- Who owns the soap and towel dispensers?
- Who owns any equipment stored on site?
- What happens to the consumables already in the closet?
Dispensers in particular are frequently the outgoing provider’s property, and some are proprietary to their own consumable sizes. Discovering that at 7am on day one is a bad way to start, and replacing a building’s worth of dispensers unplanned is a real cost.
- Agree the handover date and time, and who will be present.
Days 1–7: access, handover and a signed baseline
- Access changeover. New keys, fobs and alarm codes issued individually by name. Every old credential revoked on the day the previous contract ends — not “when convenient.” If key control was ever uncertain, this is the moment to rekey. Start the access log on day one.
- Joint walk-through. If the outgoing supervisor will attend alongside the incoming one, that hour transfers more than any handover document. Ask for it; it costs nothing and the outgoing provider usually agrees.
- Signed baseline inspection using the form attached to your scope, countersigned by the incoming provider. Now nobody inherits blame for a floor that was already dull or a traffic lane that was already abraded.
- Hand over the building’s quirks in writing. Which door sticks. Which room gets locked. Who works late. Where the water shut-off is. The conference room that always needs resetting. Which restroom runs out first. This is the institutional knowledge that actually makes a crew effective, and it normally lives in one person’s head.
- Confirm the consumables chain: what is on site, what is on order, who reorders and at what threshold.
Days 8–14: the first full week is the whole relationship
- Daily contact with the supervisor for the first week. Not a report — a conversation.
- First formal inspection between day 10 and day 14, using the agreed scoring form, with restrooms and entrances weighted highest.
- Log every miss in writing, however small. This is the habit that makes month three different from month three with the last provider, and its absence is almost always part of why the last relationship drifted.
Days 15–30: lock in the things that decay first
- Second formal inspection, same form, and compare the scores against the first.
- Agree the twelve-month periodic calendar in writing — carpet interim and restorative cleaning, floor scrub, recoat and refinish cycles, high dusting, full-height and exterior glass. Periodic work is the first thing to quietly disappear from a contract, because nobody notices its absence for about three months.
- Set the seasonal variations. In Sacramento that means increased matting service and entry-zone attention from November through March, when 82% of the region’s annual rainfall arrives, and additional dusting through late-summer smoke season. Schedule heavy floor restoration for spring rather than mid-winter, because tracked-in grit abrades fresh finish.
- Written 30-day review against the scope, with the provider present. Address anything unresolved now, while goodwill is high and the contract is young.
- Then put a 60-day and a 90-day review in the calendar. The 90-day one matters most, because that is where quality historically starts to slide.
About the first two weeks — the honest version
A new crew in an unfamiliar building will be slower and will miss things in the first fortnight. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
They do not know that the third-floor conference room is used every morning, or that the east stairwell door needs a shoulder, or that the north restroom takes twice the consumables of the south one. They will learn it, and the speed at which they learn it is almost entirely determined by three things you control:
- Whether the scope is specific enough that they are not guessing
- Whether the walk-through and the written quirks list actually happened
- Whether somebody inspects in the first two weeks and tells them what is wrong while it is still cheap to fix
Do those three and the learning curve is roughly two weeks. Skip them and it is three months — which is long enough for everyone to conclude the new provider is no better than the old one, when what actually happened is that nobody told them anything.
Re-bid your incumbent — yes, really
Put your current provider in the tender alongside everyone else, on the new scope.
One of two things happens, and both are useful. Either they come back with a price and a commitment against a properly specified document, and you discover they were under-specified rather than underperforming — which saves you a transition entirely. Or they do not, or they decline, and you have your answer with no ambiguity.
We say this knowing it occasionally costs us a win, because the alternative is winning an account that was never really ours to improve.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to switch cleaning companies?
About six weeks end to end for a well-run change: two to three weeks to write the scope and baseline the building, one to two weeks in market, then a 30-day transition with formal inspections at days 10–14 and 15–30. The binding constraint is usually not the work — it is the notice period and renewal window in your existing agreement, which should be the first thing you check.
Will there be a gap in service when I change providers?
There should not be, provided the new contract starts the day after the old one ends and access is transferred on the changeover date. The risk is not an empty night; it is an unprepared first fortnight. A new crew in an unfamiliar building will miss things, and the length of that learning curve depends on whether the scope is specific, whether a joint walk-through happened, and whether anyone inspects in the first two weeks.
What stops most buildings from switching cleaning companies?
A notice date. Many janitorial agreements renew automatically unless notice is served within a specific window before the renewal date, so a decision made in one month can quietly expire before anyone acts on it. Find the termination clause, note the notice period and the renewal window, and work every other date backwards from it.
What should I ask the outgoing cleaning company?
Three ownership questions that cause most day-one problems: who owns the soap and towel dispensers, who owns any equipment stored on site, and what happens to consumables already in the closet. Dispensers are frequently the outgoing provider’s property and sometimes proprietary to their own consumable sizes. Also request a joint walk-through with the incoming supervisor, and the dates of the last periodic work — carpet extraction, floor refinishing, high dusting.
Should I switch providers or fix my scope?
Check the scope first. If it uses phrases like “maintain cleanliness to professional standards” or gives a single building square footage, a new provider working to the same document will reproduce the same outcome within a few months. Also plot your complaints by day of week: if they cluster on your busiest days, that is a frequency-pattern problem rather than a performance problem, and fixing the frequency is cheaper than a transition.
Thinking about it but not sure it is worth the disruption?
JAN-PRO Commercial Cleaning in Sacramento will read your current scope and your termination clause with you, and tell you whether your problem is the provider or the document. If it is the document, we will say so. We will also bid against your incumbent on a scope you control.
Call (916) 376-8977 or request a facility visit online.