We deep clean before regular service starts

Why we clean a building before we start cleaning it

When CLS starts with a new building, the first thing we do is not the regular nightly routine. It is an Intensive Initial Cleaning, a deep pass through the whole facility that brings it up to our Everyday Cleaner Standard before the standard schedule begins. New business partners are often surprised at what this turns up, because it shows exactly what the previous cleaning company had actually been doing, as opposed to what their invoice said they were doing. The Intensive Initial Cleaning is included at no additional cost when a new building starts with CLS, as the first step of our Extreme Clean Program. We treat it as the foundation the rest of the contract stands on, not an optional extra a building can skip to save time.

A regular nightly clean is built to maintain a building that is already at standard. It is not built to fix years of buildup in one visit. If a new crew just runs the normal routine on a building that has not been properly cleaned in a while, the buildup stays exactly where it was, underneath a surface wipe. The Intensive Initial Cleaning is a different kind of visit. It is scoped to find and remove the buildup first, restroom tile and grout included, so the nightly crew that follows is maintaining a clean building instead of quietly covering up a dirty one week after week. That difference tends to show up fastest in the corners nobody thinks to check, the tops of file cabinets, behind doors, under furniture that rarely gets moved.

We have seen this play out with real buildings. Some owners have tried a less expensive cleaning company and switched back to CLS later. In one case, a building owner came back to us after two years with other companies. When we returned, we found dust and dirt embedded in the restroom tile and grout, to the point where it looked like the floors had not been scrubbed in those two years. We ran the Intensive Initial Cleaning again and brought the floor back to a near new appearance, the same result a new building gets on day one. The building owner had been paying for regular service that whole time, and the difference in the finished floor was obvious to their own staff within the first week.

One hundred pounds of dirt under a floor mat

Floor mats and Pedimats are supposed to stop dirt and debris before they ever reach the rest of the building. They work well for that, right up until they get so saturated with dust that they stop working the way they are supposed to. Most cleaning companies wipe around a mat or vacuum its surface and move on. The Intensive Initial Cleaning lifts the mat and deals with what is actually underneath it, which is often the dirtiest square footage in the entire lobby, hidden in plain sight under something everyone assumed was doing its job. A mat that looks fine on top can be hiding months of tracked-in grit underneath, pressed flat by every pair of shoes that has walked across it.

At one new building, we lifted the Pedimat during an Intensive Initial Cleaning and found an amount of dirt underneath that surprised even our own crew. A photo taken partway through, when the crew was a little more than halfway done cleaning underneath that single mat, showed just one section of it. By the time the whole Pedimat area was finished, we estimated we had removed about 100 pounds of dirt from underneath it, all of it collected over time by a mat nobody had lifted to check. That is not a small amount of debris to have sitting in a building's main entrance, tracked in by every visitor and employee who walked through that door.

That is not an unusual result for a mat that has never been lifted and cleaned properly underneath. It is what happens when a mat does its job for months or years without anyone checking what it has been catching. The same pattern shows up in other spots that get wiped on the surface but never cleaned underneath or behind, chairs, desks, doors, drains. An Intensive Initial Cleaning checks those spots specifically instead of assuming a surface wipe is enough, which is exactly where most regular cleaning routines stop looking. Once those spots are addressed the first time, keeping them clean on an ongoing schedule is a far smaller task.

• Floor mats and Pedimats lifted and cleaned underneath, not just around
• Chairs, desks, doors and drains checked, not just wiped on top
• Restroom tile and grout scrubbed, not just surface mopped
• Included at no additional cost when a new building starts with CLS

What a first cleaning tells us about the building

An Intensive Initial Cleaning is also how CLS learns a building before we start maintaining it. Every facility has its own trouble spots, a stairwell corner that collects dust, a break room floor that stains easily, an entry mat that saturates faster than it should. A crew that starts on a normal nightly schedule without ever seeing the building at its worst has to learn those spots slowly, over weeks of regular visits. A crew that runs the Intensive Initial Cleaning first sees the whole picture on day one, before the nightly schedule ever begins, and can plan around what the building actually needs rather than guessing at it over the first few months of a new contract.

That first look also tells us what equipment and products a building actually needs going forward. A warehouse with polished cement floors needs different handling than an office suite with carpet in every room. A medical office needs different disinfection than a corporate headquarters lobby. The Intensive Initial Cleaning is where we work that out, building by building, instead of assuming every facility runs on the same routine regardless of what it actually contains or how it gets used day to day, floor by floor, department by department, so the ongoing schedule fits the building instead of the other way around.

Once the Intensive Initial Cleaning is done, the building moves into Surface Cleaning Testing, where we verify the results with ATP and UV equipment, and then into the Everyday Cleaner Standard for ongoing service. The three steps work together as one program. Skipping the first one means the other two are just monitoring whatever condition the building already happened to be in when the contract started, instead of a genuine clean baseline the rest of the program can actually build on, month after month, for as long as CLS is on the contract.

Start with a clean building, not a clean promise

When a cleaning company has been maintaining a building without ever really cleaning it first, an Intensive Initial Cleaning is usually the fastest way to find out. Building owners who have tried a cheaper company and come back to CLS almost always start here, because it shows them exactly what condition the building is actually in, not what a monthly report from the old company claimed about it. It is often the moment a building's own staff first notices the difference in how a floor or a restroom actually looks, sometimes within the first week of the new schedule.

There is no extra charge for this step when you start service with CLS. It is built into how we begin every new relationship, not sold as an upgrade after the contract is already signed. We would rather find out what a building actually needs on day one than discover it three months into a contract, after a property manager has already started asking questions about why things look off around the building, or why complaints keep coming in from the same floor month after month with no clear explanation.

This has been our process since 1985, done with our own trained staff, not subcontractors. Call (630) 816-0300 for a free, no obligation building cleaning audit, and we can walk through what an Intensive Initial Cleaning would look like for your building before you commit to anything, including what it is likely to turn up and how long it should take from start to finish, before any regular schedule ever begins. There is no obligation attached to the audit itself, and no pressure to sign anything before you have seen what we found.