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Your clients may feel unsure about after-hours cleaning. Here’s what you can do to help them feel at ease. 

After-hours cleaning definitely has some pros and cons. There’s so much you can do without worrying about working around other people or making sure no one walks down the hall you just waxed. You can work more efficiently, and you can feel comfortable knowing you’ve done a good job without someone spilling coffee in the breakroom ten minutes after you made it shine. 

At the same time, clients may have security and liability concerns. They may be sharing keys with you. There could be confidential information or sensitive equipment that they need to protect. They worry the cleaning team may not show up or do an adequate job. And even if you do a great job, some building managers may have difficulty understanding that when they don’t physically see your team there working. 

What’s a commercial cleaning service to do? Whether you have one or one hundred after-hours cleaning clients, some simple steps can go a long way in putting clients’ worries to rest. 


Easily stay in touch with employees and clients, bid on jobs, manage projects, and more with Janitorial Manager. Check out a free demo to learn about all the great features! 


After Hours Cleaning

How to make after-hours cleaning work for your clients

These client concerns around after-hours cleaning are easy to understand. After all, they are essentially inviting people they don’t know to roam around their business unattended. So what can you do? A lot, actually. 

1. Share your insurance info. Make a point of highlighting the fact that your business is insured. Add it to your website and your social media tagline. When you submit a bid, include proof that your business is currently insured. Being upfront about this may help your clients relax, but more than that, it could help you win bids! 

2. Share proof of bonding. While liability insurance will cover your clients if there’s an accident or you break a window, a bond is an additional coverage that takes care of things like employee theft. A bond tells your clients that if, by some chance, someone on your team steals from them, you can make them whole. 

3. Perform a criminal background check. A criminal background doesn’t mean your employee is a bad person. People make mistakes, and they sometimes need the opportunity to turn their life around. A steady job goes a long way in this effort. However, the employee with that background may not be the person you want to have on your after-hours cleaning team. As always, it’s the details that make the difference, but this is something to consider. 

4. Provide uniforms. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy. A tee-shirt or polo shirt with your logo may be sufficient. This helps facility managers and business owners know that the people walking into their building are, in fact, part of the commercial cleaning team and not just some random person who decided to walk through an unlocked door. Bear in mind, however, that you will likely need to pay for these uniforms and give them to your employees. The laws around this are complicated, and state laws are all over the place, but it’s a fairly minimal cost for your business, which you can probably write off as a business expense. 

5. Wear name tags. Like uniforms, name tags can help clients feel like they know who is coming into their facility. 

6. Share regular inspections reports with your client. This gets into that client concern of wondering how much you’re doing if they don’t see you working. Janitorial inspection software makes it easy to share your inspections with clients. You can send before and after pictures and any notes or comments from the inspection. This is true not just for after-hours cleaning, but also any work you do during regular business hours. 

7. Keep your schedule consistent. One problem clients have with cleaning teams, regardless of when they work, is that there can seem to be a rotating cast of people coming in. If you can keep your schedule consistent and send the same people to a facility for every shift, you can do a lot to ease the concern of new people continually in and out of a client’s space. 

8. Make it easy to contact you. The chances that a client is going to send you messages late at night are slim. Still, they will feel a lot better if it’s easy to get in touch with you. And if you use the JM Connect app, your clients can easily reach you or your team without you having to give up your personal phone number. 

9. Offer references. We get references and reviews when we look up hotels, buy something online, or look for a mechanic. So why not include references when you submit a bid? Especially in the case of after-hours cleaning, it helps to have that social proof that your team is trustworthy and will do an excellent job. 

10. Get certified. Whether you and your team get certified for carpet cleaning, handling bloodborne pathogens, or you have a green-building certification, be sure to share that information. Every professional certification adds to your credibility and expands your potential client base. There’s no real downside here!

Easing any concerns your clients may have regarding after-hours cleaning may take some time, but these efforts will help. Better yet, they can help boost your business image for clients no matter when your team is working.


Clean up your cleaning business with Janitorial Manager! Sign up to learn more about managing work orders, inspections, employee performance, and so much more—all in a single app!


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