KPIs for commercial cleaning companies
Most cleaning companies watch revenue and labour cost and not much else. These are the eight numbers I would want on one page for every site, and what each one tells you before the customer does.
When I sold my company we had hundreds of recurring customers and more than 150 workers. You cannot run that from memory. For years I tried to anyway, and the result was that I knew a great deal about the buildings I had visited that month and almost nothing about the rest, which is how you end up surprised by a cancellation letter from a customer you thought was happy.
There is an old line I have always liked: people do not run businesses, systems run businesses, and people run systems. A system needs numbers. The eight below are the ones I would track, in roughly this order.
1. Inspection score by site
Passes divided by passes plus fails, with N/A lines left out. Our goal was to be 90 percent or higher at all times, at every site. Track it per area as well as per site, since a site average hides a failing restroom. The janitorial inspection scoring system guide covers how to set the scale up so the number means something.
2. Inspections completed against plan
If a site is due for an inspection four times a month and gets two, that is a 50 percent completion rate, and its score is two data points old. This is the number that tells you whether your supervisors are supervising. It also becomes the first line of a renewal conversation. We were in your building 26 times this year is a sentence a property manager remembers.
3. Time to fix
How long a failed item takes to get fixed by the cleaner, measured from the moment it is assigned. This one measures your crews.
4. Time to confirm
How long a supervisor takes to verify the fix and close it. This one measures your supervisors. In most companies I have looked at it is the slower of the two, often by days. The customer only feels the total, so a fast crew with a slow supervisor still reads as a slow company from the other side of the desk.
5. Repeat failures
The same line failing on two inspections in a row at the same site. A repeat failure means the fix treated the symptom, or the cleaner does not understand the standard, or nobody told them it failed. It is the earliest warning I know that a site is drifting, well ahead of the score itself.
6. Complaints per site
Count them per site per month and read them next to the score. Rising complaints with falling scores is a site in trouble. The worse signal is falling complaints with falling scores, because a customer who stops complaining has usually stopped expecting you to fix anything. I wrote more about that in how to keep cleaning clients.
7. Customer retention
The accounts you had at the start of the year that you still have at the end, divided by the accounts you started with. Put a dollar figure beside it. I had one customer paying about $10,000 a month who stayed with us for 25 years. That is roughly $3 million in revenue from a single relationship, and it lasted because we kept earning the renewal every year. Every account you lose in month four takes its own version of that number with it.
8. Sites per supervisor
How many sites each supervisor is responsible for, read next to their completion rate and time to confirm. When a supervisor’s numbers slip as their site count grows, you have found their ceiling. Hiring a supervisor is one of the largest overhead decisions a growing company makes, and hiring your first cleaning supervisor covers when to do it.
The financial numbers you already watch
Labour hours per visit against the hours you bid, gross margin by site and revenue per cleaner all matter, and your bookkeeper probably produces them already. The eight above explain why those move. A site running over its bid hours with a falling score is a site where something changed and nobody wrote it down.
Review the site numbers weekly with your supervisors and the company numbers monthly. Then bring twelve months of them to every renewal, and the conversation about price gets a lot shorter. The quality control guide covers the program that produces these numbers in the first place.
Common questions
What KPIs should a commercial cleaning company track?
Inspection score by site, inspections completed against plan, time to fix, time to confirm, repeat failures, complaints per site, customer retention, and sites per supervisor. Track the first six per site, and review the last two at company level every month.
What is a good inspection score for a cleaning company?
Aim for 90 percent or higher at every site, calculated as passes divided by passes plus fails with N/A lines left out. The number is only as good as the checklist behind it, so write lines as observable states and score them the same way every time.
How do you calculate customer retention for a cleaning company?
Take the accounts you had at the start of the year and count how many of those same accounts are still on contract at the end. Start with 40, keep 36 of them, and your retention is 90 percent. New accounts signed during the year do not count toward it.
What is the difference between time to fix and time to confirm?
Time to fix is how long a failed item takes to get fixed by the cleaner once it is assigned. Time to confirm is how long a supervisor takes to verify the fix and close it. They measure different people, and the customer experiences the total of both.
How often should cleaning KPIs be reviewed?
Site-level numbers weekly with your supervisors, company-level numbers monthly with your managers, and twelve months of site numbers at every renewal.