Commercial cleaning, metro Adelaide · priced up front

You and your cleaner are being stuffed around by the same piece of paper.

A scope written broad enough to win the job, priced on hours that were never enough to finish it. You get dusty desks in March. They get told to lift their game on a job that never had the time in it.

Nobody set out to do this to either of you. It’s just what the document does.

Here’s a real price instead. Under a minute, no site visit, and nobody is going to ring you about it on Tuesday.

Every contractor, before they see your address

  • Police check, sighted and dated
  • ABN and entity verified against the register
  • $20m public liability, certificate sighted
  • Expiry tracked — not collected once and forgotten
  • Referees called, not just listed
  • Re-verified every 13 weeks, not just at signup

Not “fully insured”. A number, a certificate and an expiry date — because you already know what “fully insured” is worth on a proposal.

We’re onboarding the first Adelaide contractors now — and nobody sees a site, or your address, until every line above is done.

We print the exclusionsThe bits we’re not doing. On the page. Where you can see them. Radical stuff.
Photos every visitSo you can stop doing the 8am bin inspection like a detective.
Leave wheneverNo notice period, no exit fee, no awkward phone call with Dave.

Price your site

Live. No “investment”, no “from”, no asterisk.

Site type
Cleaned area
1001,500 max
Visits a week
How much of it
per week, excluding GST

That’s your price. Want it held?

We cover metro Adelaide and we’re not taking bookings quite yet. Leave your email and we’ll tell you the day we are, with that price attached.

Looking to change

One email the day we’re taking bookings. No newsletter, no sales call. Price held 12 months, provided the site is as you described — checked at the first clean, before anything is billed.

Before the jokes — what this actually is

You get a price. We find you a cleaner. They start. That’s it.

We’re not a cleaning company. We’re the bit in the middle — the pricing, the vetting, the written scope and the proof it happened. The actual cleaning is done by independent cleaning businesses from a vetted contractor network, paid properly and on time. Metro Adelaide, and we turn down what we can’t cover properly.

We price it
Off measured production rates, task by task — the same way a tender gets costed, applied to a 200 m² office nobody would normally bother pricing properly. Not off last week’s proposal with the name changed.
We write it down
Every task, every frequency, and the exclusions sitting next to them. Versioned and timestamped, so the scope you accepted is the one anything gets argued from — not the one somebody would prefer you had accepted.
We prove it happened
A confirmed arrival at your address and photographs after every visit, in your portal by morning. You don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, and that includes ours.
We move the money
We hold yours before the work starts and pay the contractor within five days of the work being verified. Neither of you is chasing the other, and nobody is waiting thirty days.

What we don’t do is the part that matters. We don’t employ cleaners, we don’t own a vacuum, and there is no account manager to be unavailable. And we won’t sell into a suburb we can’t already cover properly — which is the reason this opens slowly, and the reason it’s worth waiting for.

  1. 01

    You get a price

    Four questions, under a minute. A real number for your site, not a “from”. No site visit, no callback, nobody rings you.

  2. 02

    We source the contractor

    From the vetted contractor network — police-checked, insurances verified, already working in your suburb. You get their name and credentials before they ever set foot in the place.

  3. 03

    They start

    On the date you picked. The first clean confirms the price, and nothing is charged before that. If your site isn’t what you described, you get a revised price and five days to walk.

  4. 04

    You’re happy

    Photos after every visit. Something missed, two taps and it’s re-cleaned inside 24 hours. Change level, pause, or leave — no notice, no fee, no phone call.

The actual product

Two apps and a rulebook. That’s the whole company.

You get a portal. They get an app. We sit in the middle doing the pricing, the vetting, the money and the paperwork — and we don’t own a single vacuum cleaner.

Built for

  • One site, in Adelaide (for now), that you’re responsible for
  • Offices, clinics, venues, childcare, shopfronts, warehouses
  • Roughly 100 to 1,500 m², cleaned anywhere from once a fortnight to seven nights a week — warehouse floors up to 5,000 m²
  • Somebody who’d rather read a scope than take a phone call

Not built for

  • Houses. This is commercial only, and we won’t do yours as a favour
  • Multi-site national portfolios — you need a tender, not a calculator
  • Anyone whose main question is whether we can beat their current price. We probably can’t, and we’d rather say so now
  • Outside metro Adelaide, for the moment. Regional is quoted by hand

Not in Adelaide?

Tell us anyway. We’re starting here because it’s where we can actually put people on the ground, not because the problem stops at the border. Enough interest in one city moves it up the list — and we’d rather find that out from you than guess.

Looking to change

No price for you yet — the numbers above are built on Adelaide labour and travel, and quoting your city off them would be a guess. One email if and when we get there, nothing else.

Read this bit before the list: none of it is built yet.

This is the design, not a product you can buy today. The pricing engine underneath the calculator is real and finished — that number is genuine. Everything below is what gets built next, and it’s in front of you first so I can find out whether you love the idea as much as I do. If enough people do, it gets built. If nobody does, I’ll almost certainly build it anyway — but at least I’ll have been warned.

Your side · the portal

You can change anything, without ringing anyone

What you can do in it12 things
You can change anything, without ringing anyone
Log in with a link in your email. No password to forget, no app to install unless you want one.
Every visit, on record
Date, arrival time, location confirmed, which of your items were done, and the photos. Going back as far as you’ve been with us.
Report anything in two taps
Pick the thing from a list built out of your own scope. If it’s yours, a re-clean is booked. If it isn’t, we tell you honestly and show the price to add it.
Add, drop, or change level
Internal glass weekly, fridge out monthly, five nights down to three over summer. Price shows before you commit, effective the next full week.
Pause it
Closing over Christmas, or cash is tight for a month. Pause instead of cancelling and you keep your contractor and your price.
See exactly who’s in your building
Name, photo, police check date, insurance status. Told before they start, and told again if it ever changes.
Your scope document, always there
The version you accepted, with the date you accepted it. Not the one we’d like you to have accepted.
The person in your building tells you before it's a problem
Your contractor is there every night and can see the carpet going. They flag it, you get a price, and you accept or decline in the portal — and you can spread it across the year rather than take the bill in one hit. Nobody visits to sell you anything, because there is nobody to send.
Order the awkward little things
Paper, soap, bin liners, sanitary units and air fresheners, through the same login. Priced upfront, delivered and serviced by the supplier direct — your contractor never touches it, and you stop being too small an account for anyone to care about.
Billing you don’t have to think about
Monthly, by card or direct debit — and nothing at all until your first clean is verified. No invoice to remember, no 30-day scramble, and no month where somebody forgets to send one and then sends three.
Every site under one login
Visits delivered against visits scheduled, and each site on its own level with its own contractor.
Leave
From the portal. No notice, no exit fee, no retention call from someone named in a spreadsheet.
Their side · the contractor app

They choose the work, and they keep what they earn

Because a cleaner who is trapped, rushed and underpaid is your problem long before it’s theirs. If you’re a cleaner, this bit is for you →

What they get7 things
They see the whole job before saying yes
Your site facts, the full scope, the window, and exactly what it pays. No mystery jobs, no “we’ll sort the details later”.
They can say no
No penalty, no score, no ranking, no quietly getting fewer offers next week. We don’t operate an acceptance rate and we never will.
Fixed price per job, never an hourly
If they’re good and quick, the difference is theirs. We don’t reprice a site because somebody got fast at it.
They pick their own hours, and their own clients
You set a window. They decide when and in what order, and they work for whoever else they like, including our competitors. It’s their business, not our branch.
Paid weekly, five days
We already hold your money before they start, so there’s nothing for them to chase and no thirty-day terms.
They can hand a site back
If it’s nothing like what we described, on the first visit, no penalty. That protects you too — nobody is stuck doing a job they can’t do properly.
They fix their own mistakes
A re-clean is at their cost, not yours. Which is the fastest quality system anyone has ever invented.

You might be wondering why any of the right-hand column is your problem. Because everything you actually hate about commercial cleaning comes from the same place. The cleaner who rushes yours is doing four sites before dawn to make the week work. The one who disappears in month three wasn’t paid for eight weeks. The one who does a bad job of the dusting was never given enough hours to do the dusting.

Same person every week, not in a hurry, and not looking for something better — that is the entire quality system. Everything else is inspections and apologies.

The loop

Nobody changes cleaning company over the cleaning.

They change over the phone calls. Here is the cycle, and you have been round it at least once.

The cycle, in fullyou have been round it

Something’s not right on Tuesday morning. You want to say so. Who do you actually call?

There’s an account manager somewhere — you met them once, at the start, and you’re not certain they still work there. You ring. You ring again. Nobody picks up.

Or there’s the communication book on the kitchen bench, where you write it down and then hope three things in a row: that the page is still in the book next week, that the cleaner opens it, and that anyone ever told them it existed.

Say you want something added. Desks wiped down, internal glass, the fridge done out monthly. That’s a quote, a new contract, an outrageous weekly figure and three weeks of waiting — and somewhere in the middle of it, approval from a person in Victoria who has never seen your building.

Then half the time the cleaner is never told. So they get pulled up for missing something nobody mentioned to them. Now you’re annoyed and they’re annoyed, and neither of you has done a single thing wrong.

Eventually you’ve had enough and you go to market. New company, new template proposal, another six-minute site visit. And the whole thing starts again.

Raise a problem
Two taps in the portal, from the list of things in your own scope. It reaches the contractor the same minute it reaches us.
Add something
Price shows before you commit. No new contract, no renegotiation, no approval from another state.
Drop something
Same screen, same day. If you don’t want it, you stop paying for it.
Check what happened
Photos and a confirmed arrival at your address, on record. You don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, including ours.
Tell the cleaner
You don’t. The scope changes and their app changes with it, before the next visit. Nobody gets reprimanded for a change they were never sent.
Leave
From the portal. No notice, no exit fee. If we’re relying on a contract to keep you, we’ve already lost.

None of this is about putting cleaning companies out of business. It’s about deleting the admin sitting between two people who both want the same outcome. The contractor who isn’t running ten sites a night to break even does a better job of yours. The client who can fix a problem in two taps doesn’t spend four months quietly getting annoyed and then leave. Everything expensive in this industry is downstream of that.

Where the money actually goes

The cleaner’s pay rise doesn’t come out of your pocket.

Every hour of cleaning is split three ways: you, the person doing it, and whoever sits in the middle. The industry’s version underpays the middle one of those three, and it isn’t the middle.

We pay the person on your site a great deal more than the industry norm — enough that they can afford to finish the job properly, insure themselves, replace their own machine and still be there next year.

Almost none of that comes from you. It comes out of the middle. We take a fraction of what a cleaning company takes, and we’d rather run a bigger business on a smaller cut than the other way round. You’ll pay roughly what you’d pay anyone decent — we’re not the cheap option and we’ve said so twice already.

That’s the whole trick, and there isn’t a second one.

It’s also why an existing cleaning company can’t simply copy it. Cutting your own margin by more than half isn’t a strategy you present to a board. It’s a thing you can only do if you’re building something new and you’ve got nothing to protect.

And in the spirit of the honesty we keep banging on about: our side of that split hasn’t paid for a single thing yet. There are no clients. This is a pricing engine, a scope document and a large number of evenings. You’d be among the first, which is either appealing or alarming depending on your temperament.

Appealing, then?

Leave your email and we’ll tell you the day we’re taking bookings. That’s the whole commitment.

Looking to change

One email the day we’re taking bookings. No newsletter, no sales call — we’ve spent this whole page complaining about those.

Exhibit A

Here’s the document. You’ve had this document.

Let me tell you how that document gets made, because I’ve made it.

I’ve quoted a lot of jobs. I stopped counting years ago. And nobody — nobody — drives back to the office and writes a scope from scratch. You open Google Drive, or you search your sent folder, and you find one from a job in roughly the same industry. You change the name at the top. You send it.

If you’re telling me you write a fresh scope for every single job, you’re not telling the truth. It doesn’t happen.

And no, asking an AI to write one doesn’t count. You’ll get back the same document it has already written for the last fifty people who asked it the same thing — which is how we got here in the first place, just faster.

So here’s one. We haven’t named anyone, because we’d have to name almost everyone. Fill in the letterhead yourself — you already know whose it is.

[ YOUR CURRENT CLEANER ] PTY LTDQUALITY · INTEGRITY · ATTENTION TO DETAILRef: PROP-2019-TEMPLATE-FINAL-v4-USE-THIS-ONE.docx

Tailored Cleaning Proposal

Prepared exclusively1 for [CLIENT NAME], following our detailed site assessment2.

Thank you for the opportunity. We are a family owned and operated3 business delivering comprehensive cleaning solutions4 across Adelaide with an unwavering attention to detail5.

[ stock photograph: woman in yellow rubber gloves smiling at a spray bottle ]

Scope of Works

  • General office cleaning6
  • Kitchen and amenities
  • Dusting as required7
  • Vacuuming of carpeted areas and mopping of the timber flooring in reception8
  • Emptying of bins
  • General tidy

All work carried out by our trained and fully insured9 team using eco-friendly products10.

Your investment:$1,840 per monthSubject to annual CPI review. 12 month term, 90 days written notice.11

“Great service, very happy!” — Sarah12

What is wrong with it12 notes
  1. 1

    “Exclusively.” This document has been sent to four hundred people. The file name gave it away.

  2. 2

    The detailed site assessment. A bloke walked in, looked at the carpet, said “yeah no worries”, and left. Six minutes.

  3. 3

    Family owned and operated. Everyone is. It’s in every single one of these. It tells you nothing about whether your bins get emptied.

  4. 4

    “Comprehensive solutions.” Two words that between them commit to precisely nothing.

  5. 5

    “Attention to detail.” Every quote you’ll receive says this. Statistically, somebody in that pile is lying.

  6. 6

    “General office cleaning.” Which is what, exactly? You’ll find out at 7am on a Tuesday, and by then it’s an argument.

  7. 7

    “As required.” Required by whom? Nobody has ever located this person. Not once.

  8. 8

    You don’t have timber flooring in reception. Somebody else does. This is what “tailored” means.

  9. 9

    “Fully insured.” Lovely. Certificate? Expiry? Sum insured? Whose name is the policy in? Silence.

  10. 10

    “Eco-friendly products.” Which ones. Say the actual name of one product. Any product.

  11. 11

    Twelve month term, ninety days notice, annual CPI. Three clauses that exist purely to make leaving harder than staying.

  12. 12

    “— Sarah.” Sarah who. Sarah from where. Sarah, if you’re out there, blink twice.

And nowhere in that entire document is there a single word about what they’re not going to do. Not one exclusion. Not one frequency. No hours. So when the desks are dusty in March, there is genuinely no way to establish whether that was ever supposed to happen — which is not an accident, it’s the design.

The aha bit

It’s not that they’re lazy. It’s that the maths never worked.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

They wrote a scope big enough to win the job, then priced it on hours that were never enough to do it. So somebody has to be the person who doesn’t do the dusting.

That person is being paid less than the job costs to do properly — and out of it comes their fuel, their insurance, their vacuum and their super. You are not being ripped off by a cleaner. You are both downstream of the same document.

Which is why the answer isn’t “try harder” or “we value quality”. It’s: write down what’s actually included, cost it honestly, and pay the person enough that they can finish it.

What ours looks like

So here it is. The washrooms, on Extended.

Four lines out of 33. Every one has a second column — what done actually looks like — because “clean the washrooms” is the sentence that starts the argument in March.

What we doWhat done looks like
Toilets and urinals cleaned and disinfected inside and outNo visible soiling, staining or scale in the bowl, under the rim, on the base or on the pipework. Seat, lid and hinges free of marks. Flush button and cistern free of fingerprints. No odour on entry.
Basins, tapware and benchtops cleaned and disinfectedBasin free of soap residue, hand-cream film, hair and tipped-out coffee, including the overflow and the plug surround. Tapware and spout bright, with no water spotting or limescale at the base. Benchtop dry with no splash marks.
Mirrors cleanedNo streaks, smears or spray spotting when viewed at an angle under the room's own lighting. Frame and lower edge free of build-up.
Washroom floors swept and mopped with disinfectantNo grit underfoot. No streaks or drying marks. Corners, the area behind the door and the floor beside each pan done. No splash line up the skirting or pan base.

And the part nobody prints

There are 29 exclusions on Extended. Here are four of them, in the same words you’d find them in the document:

That is the whole difference. Not that we do more — that you can tell, in advance and in writing, exactly where the work stops.

Read all three scopes in full
What we took out

We didn’t improve any of that. We deleted it.

  • No quote requestThe price is right there. Go on.
  • No sales callWe genuinely don’t want to ring you.
  • No lock-inNo notice period, no exit fee.
  • No account managerWho only exists in renewal season.
  • No 8am bin forensicsPhotos land the night before.
  • No “that wasn’t in the scope”From a scope you never saw.
  • No 30-day termsFor the person holding the mop.
  • No invoice to rememberCard or direct debit, monthly. Nothing to diarise, nothing to chase.
  • No sparkle in the logoWe checked.

And no, this isn’t tailored to your site either. It’s a template. So is theirs. Ours just says so out loud, and ours was built by timing thousands of real jobs line by line instead of opening last week’s proposal and hitting find-and-replace.

Same rigour they’d put into a tender bid, applied to a 200 square metre office nobody would normally bother pricing properly. In under a minute. For free. While you’re reading this.

Get first access

We’re opening suburb by suburb as contractors come on. Stick your email in and we’ll tell you when we’re at yours.

  • Your price held for 12 months
  • First access in your postcode
  • The full scope — including the bits we don’t do
Looking to change

One email the day we’re taking bookings. No newsletter, no sales call — we’ve spent this whole page complaining about those.

Last word

Why I think this is worth doing

Fifteen years in commercial cleaning in Adelaide, and I’m still looking at the same two problems I saw in my first year. Nobody prices off a real scope. And nobody asks the client what they actually want.

What you get instead is a fifteen-page spreadsheet with weeklies and monthlies on it that everyone involved quietly knows will never happen. It’s too long for the cleaner to read and too tangled to work out an efficient way through, so they do what they can and hope. Then an account manager walks it, marks it eighty per cent, and tells the cleaner to lift their game — on a job that never had the hours in it to begin with.

That isn’t under-quoting. Under-quoting you can fix with a bigger number. Nothing was scoped right in the first place, so no price makes it right.

And the strangest part is who never gets asked. You’re in that building every day. You know which rooms nobody walks through and which carpet actually gets dirty. If you don’t want it vacuumed five nights a week, why are you paying for five nights? Nobody has ever offered you that choice, because the choice is what makes a scope arguable — and an arguable scope is a scope somebody can be held to.

So: let the client pick what’s in and what’s out. Write down both, including the out. Price it off what the work actually takes. Pay the person doing it enough to finish it. Then show proof it happened.

I’ve spent fifteen years proving that a lot of things can’t be done the way this industry is currently built. This might be the one that can.

JordanFifteen years in commercial cleaning, Adelaide.