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Amos

Well-known member
Messages
124
Location
Surrey
Hi guys I am about to start canvassing for old peoples homes offices etc , offices and I was wondering when I send the letter to the company who would I send it to would it be the manager head of HR or just person in charge of cleaning etc ! Now that I am getting a WFP system I can promote my work more thank you for your time I look forward to hearing from you soon cheers guys !

 
Our experience:

It much depends on the company your are targeting who you correspond with.

As we used to say in the motor trade, you want to speak organ-grinder and not the monkey. Its the organ grinder who makes the decision. Most monkeys act like the organ grinder so you can waste valuable time talking to the wrong person.

With regard to care homes our council had a list of care-homes listing the owner and manager's names as well as their address and the number of resident beds. It is under "Adult Residential Services". We got a copy from the library.

We were never very successful canvassing care homes as they wanted them doing for nothing.

In most small/smaller business cases you need to contact the manager by telephone and he will put you in the right direction. We deal directly with the managers/owners in the majority of the commercial customers we have. Just sending a general non targeted/non addressed letter will usually just get 'filed' with all the rest of the junk mail.

We did have some Sainsbury's local outlets a number of years ago, but they all went in house. There were discussions on the forums several years ago where most cleaners lost store cleans to the big cleaning companies who were charging prices we would choke on.

We clean a local primary and high school and the contacts are the maintenance and facilities managers. The council pays the bill. We got those jobs through recommendation.

Our council do have their own wfp cleaners with equipment. They also put cleaning requirements out to tender. They then want to examine the last 12 to 18 months of your trading records to ensure you are a suitable contractor. We found that contracts never seem to be awarded on merit. We found that there was always something that wasn't kosher. We weren't the only ones to notice that contracts always seemed to go the same companies even although the window cleaning results was appalling.

Some specific schools and child care are cleaned during holidays and over weekends when there are no children around. Again you need to speak to each manager respectively.

Commercial customers aren't usually quick payers, so you have to be prepared for outstanding debt and you have to keep chasing it. Its the squeeky wheel that gets the oil.

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