The cleaning industry, like every other service business, is highly competitive and offers the public the opportunity to do business with a privately hired employee or a business. However, before you hire a private contractor or a business to do cleaning services for you, here are a few pros and cons to consider before pulling the trigger. But first, let me point out that data on the percentage of private home and office cleaners vs company provided service providers  is highly inaccurate and nearly impossible to determine. The difficulty is in tracking down the “independent contractors” that only accept cash and do not report any income. Some research suggests the cleaning industry is dominated by companies as a whole by a percentage as high as 80% company - 20% private hire. While others suggest it is about equal.  After about 10 years working with clients and contractors in this industry, we’d have to say it is closer to 75% company dominance in this industry.

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Now, since our business model is a marketplace, we might be a bit biased towards recommending most people to hire a service provider that has some ties to company vs an independent service provider. However, after reviewing hundreds of client interviews and complaint logs, doing business with an entity that meets the basic legal requirements to operate and offer services to the public, has several advantages.  Here’s a quick comparison of the two.

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Professional Standards

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Company Advantage:

From our research, over 90% of all companies in the cleaning industry will offer a basic training period to all new hires. This may include anything from proper use of solutions and tools, to work techniques to maximize efficiency. The ones that learn the material and work according to the procedures taught will be kept as part of the team, and given enough time can be promoted to team leader or territory manager. So if you are lucky enough to be assigned a team with the correct training and experience through a company, then you’ll probably be a customer for a while. The problem arises when one or more new cleaners without enough understanding of the basic procedures are assigned to take the lead over a number of houses. These situations will likely lead to substandard service and unhappy customers.

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If you are lucky enough to find and hire a private employee, that not only has been trained on the proper cleaning procedures, but also has the proven experience, then you might be on the winning side. However, if the person lacks the proper training, either form a company or a qualified mentor, you will probably end up cleaning after the service each time or even training them yourself. From our experience, the chance getting a higher quality service comes from Service Company vs a private person unless the person meets very specific criteria.

 

The bottom line is, if you hire a company be sure to request an experienced team. If you hire a private cleaner, go through the steps to determine what level of training and experience the person has. Unfortunately, checking out reviews for private people or companies is unreliable at best. There are a number of reasons for this and we’ll just touch on a few. Many well know social and review sites have trouble sorting out “real” reviews from fake ones. This applies to both “fake” positive and negative reviews, as well as “real” positive or negative reviews.

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The other issue is dealing with the small percentage of clients that are NEVER satisfied. A company or private employee might have 100 satisfied clients, and it will take just that one highly demanding client to put into question the workmanship of the entire company or the employee. Next, well talk about consistency.

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Service Consistency

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Company Advantage:

One of the biggest complaints from people has to do with the consistency of the service provided. When you hire a private contractor you rely on that individual’s ability to remain consistent over a long period of time. The predictability will allow clients to plan around the service and keep better track of other activities. So what happens when your private employee is sick, injured, has a family emergency, is on vacation, or has transportation problems? That’s right; the service will be interrupted until further notice. On the other hand, most medium to large companies have the staff to accommodate when one or more staff is out for any reason.   By having a larger base of associates, most companies can get through most of these challenging situations without a sweat.

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Once again, from our experience, the chance getting a higher level of consistent service comes from an established Service Company vs a private person, unless the person meets very specific criteria.