Research brief 04.03Make vs buy

Cleaning: Own Crew or Contract? A Make-vs-Buy Worksheet

Cleaning is the venue's most frequent, most repeated purchase: bought again after every single event. Decisions you make that often deserve arithmetic at least once.

Published 2026-09-281,216 words~5 min readVenue Economics

Every event ends the same way: the room must return to zero. Who returns it, your own crew or a contractor, is the classic make-vs-buy of venue operations, decided at most venues by inertia rather than arithmetic. The worksheet below runs the comparison properly: true per-turn costs on both sides, then the three factors the invoice doesn't show (quality control, surge capacity, and management attention), which usually decide the answer more than price does.

1. Define the unit: the turn, not the month

Compare per turn (one complete post-event reset to event-ready, as specified in the turnover article) not per month, because monthly contracts hide the volume assumption inside the price. Write the turn's scope once, explicitly (floors, restrooms, kitchen or bar zones, trash-out, table wipe-down, what "event-ready" inspection means), because make-vs-buy comparisons quietly cheat when the two sides are pricing different jobs. The same written scope later becomes the contractor's spec or the crew's checklist, so the hour is not wasted either way.

2. The "make" column, at loaded rates

The in-house side costs more than its wages, always:

• Labor at the loaded rate: the full multiplier, including the minimum-call blocks cleaning shifts are bought in (a 2.5-hour clean on a 4-hour minimum costs 4 hours).
• Supplies and consumables (chemicals, liners, pads, restocked paper) plus the equipment line: machines bought, maintained, and replaced (a floor scrubber is a capital asset with a lifecycle, not a free perk of "doing it ourselves").
• Scheduling and supervision: someone recruits, schedules, checks, and re-does. Price that someone's hours; if it's you, price yours.
• The reliability burden: the no-show on Sunday morning before a Monday corporate setup is now your no-show, with the pool-management obligations of the crew article attached.

3. The "buy" column, past the quote

The contractor's per-turn quote is the visible number; complete it with the invisible ones. Scope drift: what the quote excludes (event trash-out? exterior? the kitchen?) gets done by somebody, and that somebody has a rate. Schedule fit: a venue's turns happen at anti-social hours on irregular dates. Contractors priced for weekly office cleans often quote low and perform late, and a turn done at noon instead of 7 a.m. can cost you a booking window. Verification: someone still inspects every turn against the spec (buying the labor never outsources the standard). And the certificates: a vendor working your building carries insurance you've verified, per the vendor-certificate rule. An uninsured cheap quote is a liability transfer to you, priced as a saving.

4. The worksheet, worked

Under these assumptions the models land within about 5% of each other, which is the worksheet's most common and most useful verdict, because it means price isn't the decision. When the columns nearly tie, the decision moves to the factors below; when one column wins by a wide margin, check the losing column for a cheat (an unloaded wage, an unpriced supervisor, a scope mismatch) before believing it.

5. The tie-breakers

• Quality variance. Whose bad day hurts less? An own crew converges on your standard over time and takes your feedback directly; a contractor's roster rotates, and your spec is one client's preference among many. Venues whose product photographs sell it, wedding rooms, tend to weight this heavily toward make, or toward a contractor relationship senior enough to hold the standard.
• Surge and stack. The Saturday-Sunday double, the three-event weekend, the compressed flip: who can field two crews at once? Contractors with depth win surges; a small own-crew loses them exactly when the calendar earns most. Grade against your densest realistic weekend, not your average one.
• Volume trajectory. Low turn counts favor buying (the make column's fixed overheads, equipment, supervision, pool management, amortize badly over 30 turns); rising volume favors making, and the crossover point falls straight out of the worksheet by rerunning it at next year's projected count.
• Management attention. The make column consumes a scarce resource the table prices imperfectly: your operational bandwidth. A venue whose owner is the bottleneck should weight "buy" a notch beyond the arithmetic, and spend the freed attention where only the owner can: an argument that recurs across every make-vs-buy in the building.

6. Writing the contract so the comparison stays true

If "buy" wins, the contract's job is to keep the worksheet's assumptions enforceable. Price per turn, not per month, with the turn's written scope attached as a schedule. Monthly pricing re-hides the volume assumption you just worked to expose, and it bills you for the valley months when turns are few. Define the service window in hours ("complete by 9 a.m. following the event") with a remedy, because a late turn's cost to you is a booking window, not an inconvenience. Build in the surge terms now, the rate and notice period for a second same-weekend turn, while you're a prospect rather than a hostage. Require the certificate of insurance annually, not once. And keep the term short or the exit easy: cleaning is a competitive trade, requotes are cheap, and the renewal conversation goes better when both sides know you can hold it with someone else. None of this is adversarial; it's the same written-scope discipline the in-house checklist would need, pointed outward.

7. The hybrid most venues land on

In practice the stable answer is usually split by job, because "cleaning" was never one job: an in-house event-day reset (the fast, standard-critical flip your own pool does as part of the turnover choreography) layered over a contracted deep-clean cycle (the periodic floors-to-vents work that wants specialized equipment and no glamour), with surge cover pre-negotiated with the contractor for the stacked weekends. The hybrid buys each job from whichever side does it best, keeps the standard where it must live, inside, and leaves both relationships small enough to replace, which is its own kind of leverage. Rerun the worksheet annually and at every volume step; the answer is a function of turn count, quotes, and wages, all three of which drift.

Last, connect the answer back to the per-event books: whichever model wins, the true per-turn cost belongs as the cleaning line in the per-event P&L and the cost floor, at the worksheet's number, not the wage or the quote alone. Venues that run this worksheet usually discover their events were carrying a cleaning cost 30–50% above what the pricing assumed, in either model. Finding that gap, more than picking the winner, is what the afternoon of arithmetic actually pays.