Three proposals land on your desk and every one of them sounds excellent. That is normal, and it is also useless, because they were written to sound excellent. Comparing the best theater cleaners Lawrenceville venues can hire means rewriting all three onto the same rows before you read a single number. A house on the Square has different bones than a college auditorium or a civic meeting hall, so let the rows reflect your room. Do this once and the differences you could not see in prose become impossible to miss.

Build the worksheet before you open the bids

Rows first: post-show reset tasks, periodic tasks with intervals, crew size, supervision frequency, staffing across consecutive shows, supplies, and access hours.

Now transcribe each proposal into those rows. Anything that will not transcribe is missing, and missing is the thing you were trying to find.

Where bids for the best theater cleaners Lawrenceville hires diverge

One bid includes upholstery on a cycle. Another says seats are spot-treated as needed. Those are not close, but in paragraph form they read almost the same.

The other common gap is dark nights. A bid that only staffs show nights has quietly moved your periodic work into a future change order.

What to do on the walkthrough so the bids match

Give every contractor the same tour, the same hours and the same information. Count your seats out loud, name your restroom fixtures and show the riser stairs.

Then ask each of them one open question and listen for the follow-up. A contractor who asks about your food and drink policy is thinking about seats. OSHA guidance on walking and working surfaces is a fair yardstick for how any crew should handle stairs, aisles and wet floors during a busy night on the Square.

Around the county offices, the courthouse and Northside Hospital Gwinnett, public traffic swings hard, so tell each bidder the truth about your busiest week. Bids built on a quiet week are not really bids.

Most commercial cleaning gets sold on price per square foot, then quietly handed to whoever was cheapest and free that night. That’s why quality slides after month two — the scope was never real to begin with. We build yours from an actual walkthrough of your actual building, on your actual hours. Then we send the same crew who learned it. Boring? Completely. It’s also the only thing that makes month five look like month one.

DBS Cleaning Services Group

Red flags to circle on the worksheet

Circle any line that says as needed, as required or periodically without a number. Those three phrases carry most of the future disagreements in this trade.

Also circle anything priced before a visit. A run at Aurora Theatre and a weekday event near Georgia Gwinnett College put different loads through a room, and no spreadsheet knows that from a distance.

Frequently asked questions