So your company is running on a tight budget and cash flow issues are keeping you from contracting out your cleaning needs the way you’d like to. Welcome to the modern economy; guess what? That describes about 80% of all businesses in America right now. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to keep the place clean. It just means it’s difficult to keep the place clean. But this is, after all, America: getting by long enough to hit the big time is pretty much the name of the game!

So how do you ‘get by’ when you’re trusting a bunch of desk jockeys and middle management suck-ups to keep your building clean? By putting a decent maintenance plan in place, with People In Charge and a schedule and all that for the everyday stuff — and then spending the most efficient way you can by hiring a professional just barely often enough to get by. About every four months, a deep commercial cleaning for the Studio City business you own and operate should keep you doing well enough.

Ideally, of course, you want a weekly cleaning with a seasonal deep cleaning — every three months — but if you can get some buy-in from your workforce and get them to do the basics well and consistently, you can get by only hiring a professional three times a year. The best times are around the beginnings of December, April, and August — that way, you get the beginning of the fall season, mid-winter, and honestly there’s probably a month or so of give in the Spring but it should be done at some point in there.

The only caution we would give businesses who intend to take advantage of this ‘alternative’ to a genuine professional clean is this: talk to the workforce repeatedly. When your job is writing code and you wipe down the break room as a mandatory side activity, it’s easy to forget how important those basic efforts at cleanliness are! When they go for a few weeks without being properly cleaned, all of those everyday-use spots that everyone touches over and over (light switches, common telephones, the coffee pot in the break room) become breeding grounds for bacteria and sources of constant cross-contamination.

This is why we say that getting a regularly-scheduled commercial cleaner is important — but if the budgetary realities of doing business force you to sacrifice your cleaning contract, at the minimum, keep up with the regular deep cleaning. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a very disgusting surprise someday, in a place no one ever thought to look…or clean.