How a cleaning company can find new contracts: pass the check first, then name the price

You open the email, read the figure in the proposal again, and think: this time it is genuinely competitive. The scope of work is clear, the crew route can be planned, and the price was not pulled from thin air. Then the reply arrives: your application was not considered any further.

The most unpleasant part is not the rejection. It is the feeling that you lost a price battle even though the price was never reached at all. The process broke earlier, like a printer that gets stuck on page one and already starts pretending to be the legal department.

A search such as “where to find building cleaning contracts” can easily turn into an endless hunt: more searching, more tabs, more applications. But a new contract is not always lost because you did not see it. Sometimes it passes you by because your company is not ready for the way the client chooses a contractor. The main idea is simple: looking for contracts is not only about looking for listings, it is also about preparing for a check. This is especially true where the procedure has formal rules, the client first looks at whether you can properly perform a specific contract, and only then compares other conditions.

A private client and a public procedure may be looking for the same service - for example, regular building cleaning. But their path to a decision is not the same.

In the private world, you agree terms with a specific person or team. An office owner, site manager, or manager may ask about your approach, ask you to explain your proposal, and compare you with another contractor in their own way. Here it helps to understand the request quickly, not hide the limits of the service, and show that you understood the real task rather than simply sending a universal price list.

Your strength in this conversation lies in attention to detail: the site, pain points, frequency, and the specific result. A clear clarification is often more useful than a rushed calculation.

When a procedure makes the decision

A public procedure follows different logic. GWB § 97 establishes that public contracts are awarded under conditions of competition and through transparent procedures. The provision also requires equal treatment of participants unless EU law or federal law allows otherwise. This does not mean “fewer chances for a newcomer”. It means a different discipline: it matters that all participants work with the same procedural conditions.

Do not transfer this rule to every private client. A private client does not become public simply because their request looks official. And conversely, do not enter a public procedure expecting that a good presentation or a call after submission will settle everything.

Imagine two situations. In the first, a small office is looking for cleaning after a move. You can ask precise questions about the premises, explain what your option includes, and offer an understandable start sequence. In the second situation, you see a public cleaning contract. Here you first need to read the conditions of this specific procedure and check whether your company meets the stated criteria. In both cases, you are looking for a client, but you are preparing for different conversations.

This distinction is reassuring. You do not need to invent one “perfect channel” that will suddenly fill your calendar. You need to see where you build trust through direct contact and where you pass through a defined procedure. Then it becomes clear which materials are missing, not in general, but for a specific type of submission.

In public contracting, it helps not to treat the word “suitability” as an assessment of your reputation. Under GWB § 122, public contracts are awarded to qualified and capable businesses that have not been excluded under §§ 123 or 124. The client itself defines the suitability criteria for the specific contract.

This is why the phrase “we clean well” may be true but still insufficient for a submission. It answers a general question about quality, while the procedure may require an answer about suitability for this exact scope and delivery. Neither your confidence nor someone else’s assumptions define the criteria - you need to find them in the conditions of the specific contract.

This also changes how you read a listing. Do not start with the price. First write down: what exactly the client wants to receive, which suitability criteria are named, what on your side can confirm them, and what is not yet available. Such a list does not guarantee admission or victory. But it removes the worst working mode: preparing a proposal in the hope that nobody will ask the important question.

Respond to conditions, not to an impression

A hypothetical example: your company handles its current sites well, but a new procedure describes a different work format. Instead of quickly reworking an old proposal and adding a new cover to the PDF, you compare the stated criteria with what you can actually show. If you have the answer, you build the submission around it. If you do not, you do not disguise the gap with a beautiful general phrase. This protects your time and reputation without spending energy on decoration around a mismatch.

There are two honest conclusions: either the request fits because you can show compliance with its conditions, or it is interesting but there is not yet a basis to pretend you are ready.

For a young company, there is another important detail. GWB § 97 paragraph 4 says that the interests of small and medium sized businesses must be taken into account primarily when public contracts are awarded. This is not an automatic advantage, not a promise of a contract, and not a replacement for suitability. But it is a reason not to cross public procedures off your list simply because of the size of your company.

There are things that neither crew experience nor a convincing price can fix. GWB § 123 provides that the client excludes a business from participation at any stage of the procedure if it knows of a final conviction or imposed fine for one of the offences listed in that provision.

It is important not to turn preparation into a game of self diagnosis. You do not have to interpret a specific procedure yourself or look for workaround wording. The practical value lies elsewhere: understand that the formal check exists and that the quality of future cleaning does not cancel it.

Likewise, GWB § 122 links receiving a public contract not only to qualification and capability, but also to the absence of exclusion under §§ 123 or 124. Preparation for such submissions therefore has two separate parts. The first is showing compliance with the criteria of the specific contract. The second is not missing the formal part on which participation itself depends.

These parts should not be mixed into one chaotic file “for every possible case”. If you only have a well written presentation, it does not become a suitability check. If you only have a set of materials without clear compliance with the conditions, it does not explain why you are right for this task.

A hypothetical example: you see an opportunity that closely resembles your usual work and already want to ask a colleague to “just submit it”. But first you split the check: one person reads what exactly is required for participation, while another checks whether the company has a current and truthful answer to those requirements. Only then does it make sense to discuss price, proposal text, and internal allocation of work. This is how “submit quickly” stops meaning “send something first”.

The rush does not begin when an interesting contract appears. It begins earlier - when the necessary information lives in your head, old emails, and different file versions. At that point, you are not preparing a submission, you are conducting excavations in your own business.

Create a working setup that can be updated, not one “perfect folder”. It should contain clear answers to five questions:

• which types of work and sites you actually take on;
• what from your experience and capability can be used as confirmation;
• which materials must be checked against the conditions of each specific procedure;
• who on your team assembles, checks, and sends the submission;
• where you record the result: the request, channel, status, and the reason why progress continued or stopped.

This is not bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. It is a way not to confuse two different problems: “we did not find a contract” and “we found it but were not ready to submit”. When they sit in the same basket, you start treating everything with more searches.

After every submission, add a brief explanation: what worked, where you had to search for information, and what to prepare better next time.

You can gradually move the repeatable part of preparation into process automation and AI systems: for example, collecting current information for an internal checklist or preparing a draft package. But automation does not decide whether you meet the criteria of a specific contract. That decision still requires a careful comparison of the conditions with the company’s real capabilities.

Keep a simple picture of your channels separately. Not to immediately declare one channel the best, but to avoid being guided by the most vivid recent case. If you can see where there were direct private conversations, where there were public procedures, at which stage submissions stopped, and why, you gain a basis for acquisition channel analytics. It helps distinguish a channel with no result from a channel where your preparation does not yet match the selection method.

New contracts rarely appear as a ready made answer to a search query. Some come through direct contact with a private client. Some come through public procedures, where competition, transparency, and equal treatment of participants apply. The mistake is not using several channels. The mistake is entering every channel in the same way and wondering why the result differs.

If you work with private enquiries, prepare to explain exactly what you offer and how you understood the task. If you look at public contracts, read the requirements as a check: whether suitability criteria are set, whether you have something that meets them, and whether the formal part has been overlooked. Company size does not exempt you from this discipline, but it is also not a reason not to try.

Do not measure search quality only by the number of opportunities found. For a healthy process, it matters to see how many of them you can genuinely consider without rushing, at which stages a stop signal appears, and what should change in preparation. Otherwise, your calendar fills not with work but with a list of tabs sadly looking at one another. Take a recent submission or an enquiry you did not submit, and break it into three columns - channel, what was checked, and what was missing for a calm answer. Record the conclusion in your working setup so the experience does not settle in one correspondence thread. Do not search for the next listing until you see this gap: this is often where the way to stop losing opportunities you have already found lies.