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commercial cleaning

I run a small commercial cleaning company and we are busy but barely profitable — what should I change first?

Short answer

Check your two or three largest contracts first — in most small cleaning companies one or two accounts are being serviced at close to cost, and they are usually the oldest ones, priced years ago and never revisited. Work out the actual hours on site per month against what you bill for that account. If the effective rate is below your fully-loaded labour cost plus about 35%, that single contract is where your profit went, and repricing it moves more money than winning two new clients.

A contract that looks fine and is not
Site cleaned 5 nights a week, 2 cleaners, 2 hours each = 20 hours/week
20 hours × 4.33 weeks = 86.6 hours per month
Fully-loaded cost £13.50/hr → £1,169 per month to service
You invoice £1,250 per month

Margin: £81/month, about 6.5%. That contract pays for nobody’s overhead. It needs to be around £1,580 to clear 35%.

Cleaning is almost entirely labour, which means margin is decided at the moment you quote and almost never recoverable afterwards. A contract quoted in 2022 against 2022 wage floors is structurally loss-making now, and no amount of efficiency on site fixes a price that was set against different costs.

The reason this hides is that revenue looks fine. A busy company with £40,000 a month coming in feels successful, so the owner assumes the problem is overhead or admin. It usually is not — it is two accounts out of thirty consuming a third of the labour hours at a rate that has not moved in three years.

Do the arithmetic per contract rather than across the business. Total monthly hours on that site, times your fully-loaded hourly cost — wages plus employer contributions plus holiday accrual plus insurance, which is typically 1.25 to 1.4 times the bare wage — and compare it against what you invoice. Anything under about 1.35 times cost is not paying for your overhead, let alone profit.

The fix is a conversation, not an operational change. Reprice the worst contract with 30 days notice. Expect to lose some of them, and understand that losing a contract you were servicing at cost is a margin improvement, not a loss.

Want this worked out for your business specifically?

Everything above is the general case. Describe your business in one sentence — what you sell, roughly how many customers, roughly what you charge — and you will get three specific moves back, each priced per month with the arithmetic written out so you can substitute your own figures.

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Give me three moves

People also ask this as

  • Why is my cleaning business busy but not making money?
  • How do I improve margin in a commercial cleaning company?
  • Commercial cleaning company not profitable, what to do

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Figures are typical ranges for small businesses in the UK, US and Canada, given so you can check them against your own books rather than take them on trust. They are arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a forecast, and not financial advice.