Price the bid off the loaded crew-hour
Most of a cleaning contract's profit is decided in the bid spreadsheet, so the bid has to stand on the fully loaded crew-hour: wage, vacation pay, employer CPP and EI, WSIB, supervision time, insurance and a supplies allotment. Workload the building honestly, square footage against production rates, then price the hours at the loaded figure with margin on top. Bids priced off the raw wage feel competitive and lose money slowly, which is why a bid-or-pass rule belongs beside the spreadsheet: a minimum acceptable margin, decided in daylight, so a slow month cannot talk you into bad contracts.
Multi-year commercial contracts add a moving floor. Ontario's minimum wage is indexed and reached $17.60 in October 2025, and cleaning wages move with it, so a three-year contract without an escalation clause is a contract whose margin shrinks by law every October. We build indexation into pricing before signature, not into an awkward conversation two years in.
Route density decides the residential book
On residential and small-commercial routes, the real unit of production is the crew-day, and drive time is its silent tax. Two cleans forty minutes apart can earn less per crew-hour than three clustered cleans at a lower price each, which is why the number we watch is revenue per crew-hour with travel included, by route, pulled from the scheduling data already sitting in Jobber or whatever runs the calendar.
That one metric answers practical questions: which neighbourhoods deserve the ad spend, when a far-flung job needs a premium or a polite no, and what an unfilled gap in a route actually costs per week while it stays open. It also reframes churn: replacing a lost mid-route client with one across the city is not a replacement, it is a downgrade wearing the same revenue number. Crew utilization matters as much as the map: a four-person crew that finishes its route by two o'clock is spare capacity you are already paying for, and a bid aimed at that window is nearly free to serve.
Supplies and equipment have their own economics
Chemicals and consumables look trivial per visit and become a real cost line across a hundred sites a month, so we track supplies cost per site per month; drift in that number is the early signal of dilution problems, waste or product walking off. Dilution-control dispensing is usually the first fix we test, because it turns chemical cost from a habit into a setting.
Equipment is a financing decision as much as a cleaning one. An autoscrubber that replaces mop-hours across several contracts can be financed and written off through Class 8 capital cost allowance at 20%, with vans in Class 10 at 30%; a machine for one strip-and-wax job is a rental. We model utilization across the whole contract base before the purchase, and because our founder spent years in banking and corporate finance, the Business Financing Advisory conversation happens with the lender's questions already answered.
The dashboard we run for cleaning operators
| Number | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Revenue per crew-hour, travel included | Whether the schedule earns or just moves vans around |
| Labour percentage by segment | Commercial and residential drift differently; a blend hides both |
| Supplies cost per site per month | Dilution, waste and walk-off show up here first |
| Contract retention and churn | Every lost building costs bid time and route disruption |
| Days sales outstanding, commercial | Net-30 that behaves like net-60 must be financed on purpose |
| Bid win rate and won-bid margin | Winning cheap is the slowest way to lose |
Growth is a payroll gap before it is a revenue line
A big commercial win means weeks of payroll before the first invoice is paid: crews start immediately, commercial clients pay in 30 to 60 days, and the gap in between is cash you must already have. Step costs land the same way; a night supervisor or a second van arrives whole, while the revenue that justifies it arrives gradually. Modelling the hire, the contract and the financing before you commit is exactly what the Fractional CFO engagement is for: a monthly cadence of contract margins, route numbers and cash forecasts, scoped and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call. We work with operators across Mississauga and the GTA, where the commercial market is deep enough that the constraint is rarely demand; it is pricing and cash.
