Have you ever considered professional cleaning services for your business only to nix the idea because you did not want to spend the extra money? Cost is a valid concern. There are circumstances under which the financial cost doesn’t justify the benefit of hiring professionals. But more often than not, time saved offsets the cost of commercial cleaning services.
How so? By giving a company all that cleaning time back. Imagine a small business that dedicated a total of 350 employee hours per month to cleaning tasks. Those same hours could be put into core business functions. They could be dedicated to problem solving, customer relations, sales and marketing, or just about anything else that actually makes a company money.
Cleaning Is a Cost of Doing Business
Business analysts understand that there are two types of revenue drivers: direct and indirect. Some company activities generate revenue directly. Others generate it indirectly. But every business also has costs that are completely unrelated to revenue altogether. These costs of doing business are actually a drag on revenue.
Cleaning is one of those costs. A best-case scenario classifies cleaning as an indirect revenue driver for something like a restaurant or medical office, inasmuch as customers expect clean and sanitary spaces when they visit. But when you are talking about something like an industrial building, a warehouse, or even an office building that doesn’t routinely receive guests, cleaning isn’t affecting revenue one way or another.
Spending Money to Make Money
Companies spend money on cleaning regardless of who does the actual work. Hiring a business cleaning service is pretty straightforward in terms of costs. You pay your monthly bill in exchange for a clean work environment. But cleaning in-house also costs money. A company needs to pay for both cleaning supplies and the labor involved in doing the work.
This all boils down to the concept of spending money to make money. It needs to be done. A business unwilling to spend limits its own growth opportunities. Where cleaning is concerned, the real issue is spending wisely.
As we have already discussed, cleaning in-house takes time that could be put into revenue driving tasks. On the other hand, investing in professional cleaning services gives accompany that time back. Could using that time more wisely impact revenue generation enough to cover the cost of those professional cleaning services? Could better use of the time both cover cleaning and generate additional profit?
Don’t Forget the Efficiency Factor
As long as we are talking about offsetting commercial cleaning costs with time savings, it’s appropriate to touch on the subject of cleaning efficiency. It goes without saying that professional cleaning services are extremely efficient at what they do. They need to be if they hope to compete and make money.
With that said, it is also reasonable to assume that they are measurably more efficient than in-house staff who don’t clean spaces for a living. Professional cleaners have the added advantage of tools and equipment that make them even more efficient.
Efficiency always affects cost. The more efficient a service is, the less it costs over time. The opposite is also true. In-house cleaning eliminates that monthly invoice from the commercial cleaning company, but most businesses ultimately spend more because in-house cleaning is less efficient.
Paying for commercial cleaning services adds to the expense side of a business ledger. But when you consider the amount of time saved and how that time can be better utilized to drive revenue, you might discover that paying for professional cleaning is actually better for the bottom line.
