The case for in-house is real
A porter on your payroll is there all day, answers to your service manager, can be redirected in thirty seconds, and never has to be phoned about. For a store where the cleaning need is mostly presence rather than production — restroom rounds, lounge resets, spills — that is genuinely hard to beat, and dealer trade publications recommending an in-house daily rotation are not wrong.
What each side leaves out of the comparison
| In-house, usually forgotten | Contractors, usually forgotten |
|---|---|
| Payroll burden: taxes, workers comp, benefits. The wage is not the cost | You lose the ability to redirect somebody instantly |
| Coverage when they are sick, on holiday or quit. Turnover in this role is high | A bad contractor is worse than no contractor, and switching costs a quarter |
| Equipment: an autoscrubber is capital, and it needs servicing and a place to live | Anything not in the scope will not happen, and rightly so |
| Chemistry, training and the liability when the wrong product meets the wrong floor | You are a small account to a large contractor and it will show |
| Supervision. Somebody has to manage them, and that somebody is paid more | Night work means nobody watches it happen |
Where the line usually falls
In-house tends to win when the need is daytime presence, the building is small, floor care is light and you already have somebody who does it well. Keep them.
Contract tends to win when there is real production work — machine floor care, bay scrubbing, periodics on a cycle — or when you have multiple rooftops and want one standard across all of them, or when coverage keeps failing and the service manager has become the scheduler.
The hybrid is common and sensible. Keep your porter for the day. Contract the night route and the periodics. Most of the stores we serve run exactly that, and it is usually cheaper than either extreme done badly.
How to compare honestly
Take your current in-house cost and add payroll burden at roughly a fifth to a quarter of wages, plus equipment amortisation, plus chemicals and consumables, plus the supervision time somebody is actually spending. Then compare against a contract quote with its hours shown.
If we lose that comparison at your store, we would rather you knew it than found out in six months. Our side of the arithmetic is published so you can run it without talking to us at all.