Holding consistent cleaning rates across several Liverpool sites

The mistake in multi-site buying is trying to make the buildings the same. They are not. A civic building, a clinic and a suburban office have genuinely different cleaning requirements and pretending otherwise produces a schedule that suits none of them. What can be made consistent is everything around the schedule: how work is priced, who supplies consumables, what reporting is provided, how variations are approved and when reviews happen.

Write that as a head document, then attach a site schedule for each premises. The head document is negotiated once and rarely changes. The site schedules are living documents that can be adjusted as individual buildings change, without reopening the commercial arrangement. This structure also makes adding a seventh site straightforward, since only the schedule is new. Reviewing the head document every couple of years is enough, provided the site schedules are kept current between times.

The first benefit is comparability. When every site is priced on the same basis, you can see which buildings are expensive relative to their size and use, and investigate why. Often the answer is legitimate, such as public access or extended hours. Sometimes it reveals a schedule that was written generously years ago and never reviewed. Neither is visible when each site was negotiated separately by a different person.

The second is administrative. One set of terms, one reporting format, one review rhythm and one escalation route across the portfolio saves a considerable amount of time, particularly where sites are managed by different people locally. It also means a local manager can adjust their own schedule within agreed limits without needing a commercial negotiation for every change. Local managers also spend less time explaining an arrangement that already reads the same at every site they visit.

A common structure should not remove local judgement. The person who runs a building knows when it is busy, which areas cause complaints and when access is difficult. Give each site manager the ability to adjust frequencies within their schedule and to request additional work, with a stated approval threshold above which it comes back to the centre. That balance keeps the arrangement responsive without losing control of the total.

Set a portfolio review as well as site reviews. The site review checks whether the schedule matches the building. The portfolio review looks across all of them for patterns: sites drifting upward, areas nobody uses still being serviced, periodic programmes not being taken up. Half a day once a year across several sites usually finds more than any single site review will. Bring the site schedules to that review rather than only the invoices, since the schedule is where the drift usually started.