Went on a large commercial job today with another window cleaner who'd kindly agreed to help....only agreed to do the job verbally last week on a description from a cleaning contractor (they'd taken the job on at one days notice) as i'd turned up to site to have a look around and got told to push off by the site manager.
Get on site today...absolute chaos....wasn't a building clean more a building site....must've been 200 guys still working on the site and smashing the crap out of the place....dust and hazards everywhere, half the carpets down and getting ruined, no keys for rooms or windows.....sposed to be scaffolded but half scaffolding had dissapeared....needless to say we walked off.
Didnt like letting the commercial cleaner down but couldnt work like that....my view from experience in a previous career/ life is the contractor is going bust hence accelerating the work regardless of schedule to get paid then sink the company.....couldnt see us getting paid ~ we got told clean them now then come back again and do them again at a later date.....just didnt add up...all other trades were up in arms so guess the contracts in dissary...
Any thoughts/ similar experiences? comments welcome...
this sounds like a company i did some work for a few years back. It was a build clean company but basically they used to sub all window cleaning and had there own team of cleaners all doley types.
Anyway she rings me up one day to do some quotes, so i drive there and only the skeleton of the building is up! been sent to jobs much the same as above, but the icing on the cake...
One day she rings me up desperate to go do a build clean on a new classroom at a school in a town about 40 miles away. So I told her if you want me to drop what im doing it will be £300 so she says fine.
I get to the job and the builder asks who i am, i explain who sent me and says "i dont think so!" he then tells me he had just sent her cleaners home (i saw them in the car park) as they had turned up with hardly any cleaning gear, it was all domestic stuff brought from home and they didnt have a clue what they were doing!
so i phone my woman and tell her whats happened and i will still be charging her £200 for my wasted day (kind of me to discount my rate i know) so i had a nice little drive up the coast and back for £200
prob my most enjoyable work day ever
After that episode I thought it best to leave our dealings at that. She was basically a hustler getting work and subbing it out etc, but as she never had a pro cleaning team there was always some disaster but she always had plenty of work