The WHYs of Listing Supplies in Your Contracts

Before I dive into the What's and Why's, I'll start off with some stories, initiated in question form.

If a small office client tells you that they expected you to provide trash liners to their 10 or so trash cans, at a low cost of $40/year, would you?

When the school client calls to tell you they ran out of toilet paper and they thought you were to provide that, at a cost of maybe $800/year, would you do it?

If you had a $18,000/mo client, and they felt they needed air fresheners and refills for their 35 or so restrooms in a 14-floor building, at an estimated cost of $1800, and they insisted you provide and pay for that, would you?

If another client disliked the paper towel dispensers they had in their property after you signed a new contract, and said that you need to give them new stainless steel dispensers at an estimated cost of $10,000 for their restrooms, would you do it?

These were all true scenarios we faced. In the order of these, the 3rd one happened first. A client had a Class A office building that had a design flaw in the drains the snaked between floors. It trapped bad odors. We tried it all, including flushing them with hot water, bioenzyme cleaners, and even germicides and disinfectants. Nothing we did worked, unless the client hired a plumber to snake the lines between floors. So, this client demanded we pay for through a bandaid solution of air fresheners. These were the motorized ones that ran every so often. 

But herein lies the challenge: we didn't have a clear contract. Our Scope of Work for that agreement, modeled from their RFP, said we will keep the restrooms odor-free. They demanded we pay for it. 

And we did. 

Why? This client had paid $18K/mo at the peak in early 2000s dollars and we held that client for about 20 years. Not only that, but the same property manager had us clean up to 5 other buildings. At the peak we invoiced over $150K/mo for all properties.. So what's $1800? Nothing in the scheme of things. 

We knew that a great contract would fix this so we made some edits. We added in what we WILL include. And we added in what we WON'T include. We became VERY clear and enclosed is a sample of our Supplies section of our contracts:

SUPPLIES  .....Unless a written agreement is made beforehand, [Our Company] does not provide dispensers (for soap, paper, etc), air fresheners, floor mats, drinking water supplies, toilet paper dispensers, trash cans, sanitary dispensers, walk-off mats, air fresheners, recycling bins, hand sanitizers and refills, facial tissues, ash trays, or other items not ordinary in the cleaning process. At the request of [Client], [Our Company] shall not provide feminine hygiene products, paper products, hand soap, or trash liners for Owner’s use....

Have VERY clear terms means you're removing any doubt as to what you'll provide and what you won't provide. If you eliminate friction points within your agreements, you'll set yourself up for success down the road. 

As we've all experienced at one point, you might have a client try to usurp (or assert) the relationship and make it one-sided. The $10K in paper towel dispenser client mentioned in the scenario above is a great example. We changed our terms thanks to the air fresheners. So when the dispenser request came in from another client, all we had to do is point to the signed contract and remove that as a potentially negative topic. Most clients are reasonable. But this one wasn't but in the end there was no leg for them to stand on. 

Putting supplies in the contract also helps you firm up your pricing early on. When we bid, we know exactly how much we'll spend on glass cleaner, a vacuum, or the X-number of cases of toilet paper we'll likely order for a location. With a solid price, we're not guessing on our budgets after we start. We got it right the first time.

And finally, I've omitted it in my quote above, but we put a couple of sentences around what we expect to happen to our supplies while it's stored at their location (we expect it to be safe), and we set expectations that it's our equipment and when the contract ends, everything is ours because we provided it. There's no need to guess as to who owns what. We clean out our closets when the contract ends. 

I hope this helps. A great agreement will eliminate friction points and can keep a long client relationship.

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Next On Deck: Are You Looking Kinda Green? (Coming 9-11-2024)