$1,000 to $3,000 a month: a commercial cleaning company's real marketing proposal

The client owns a commercial cleaning company serving the Twin Cities, Minnesota area, offering janitorial cleaning for corporate buildings, warehouses, laboratory buildings, healthcare facilities, and offices, along with one-time deep cleans and construction cleanup. The client's own message was explicit that residential house cleaning is not the focus: the goal is recurring janitorial contracts sold to property managers, facility managers, and property management companies, a business-to-business sale rather than a consumer one.

That distinction matters because a property manager buys differently than a homeowner does. They compare vendors on reliability, insurance, and a written scope of work, and the sales cycle runs through a walkthrough and a quote rather than an instant online booking.

The inquiry that led to this proposal was unusually detailed: ten specific questions about strategy, the right channel mix between search ads, outbound outreach, SEO, and email, how to target property and facility managers specifically, whether the agency had experience with janitorial companies, how results would be tracked from lead through to signed contract and revenue, a recommended local ad budget, setup and management fees, the minimum commitment term, and what a realistic 90 days would look like.

The proposal answered each of those ten questions directly, in the same order they were asked, rather than folding them into a generic pitch. Two honesty notes were flagged internally alongside the proposal: the wording used to answer the experience and case-study questions pointed to a general commercial-cleaning marketing playbook and the built sample itself, since no completed cleaning-industry client case study existed to cite honestly.

The offer bundled Google Ads, a three-step booking form built specifically for scheduling a walkthrough rather than an instant purchase, general lead capture, a new website, ongoing SEO, AI search optimization, Google Business Profile management, and an outreach sequence: written emails and outreach messages sent from the client's own accounts to property management companies, with every message approved by the client before it goes out.

A new 16-page sample website was built around two lead magnets tailored to the business-to-business sale: the 60-second walkthrough booking form, and a janitorial scope-of-work checklist aimed specifically at property and facility managers, built to capture a work email address. Six dedicated pages covered specific building types the client wanted to win, apartment and multifamily buildings, property management companies, offices, medical offices, warehouses, and post-construction cleanup.

The number sent was USD $1,000 a month to start, with no setup fee, stepping to $2,000 and then $3,000 at targets agreed together, measured either by signed recurring contracts or by monthly contract value generated across the website, ads, search, and outreach. Recommended ad spend of $1,500 to $3,000 a month was kept separate from that management fee, following the standard model of pricing ad management as a percentage of spend rather than folding paid media into a flat number.

To answer the client's own question about a realistic ad budget, the proposal cited a specific, dated industry source: a named 2026 search-advertising benchmark report giving typical cost per click and cost per lead figures for business services and industrial and commercial categories, then worked through one example on the page showing roughly how many walkthrough requests a stated monthly budget might produce at those published rates.

No insurance or bonding claim was added to the sample site's trust section, because the client's own website did not state either one, and adding a claim the client had not confirmed would have been an invented fact rather than a described one. The proposal flagged this explicitly as something to confirm with the client rather than guessing.

The sample also did not invent a completed case study or a named past cleaning-industry client. Instead, the wording used to answer the client's own question about experience pointed honestly to a general playbook and the sample itself, with a note that this wording should be edited if a real past client example exists that the client would rather have used.

The proposal was built and sent the same day the client's inquiry came in, ahead of a strategy call the client had already booked for later that same day. Three open items, the ladder targets, the insurance and bonding claim, and the outreach offer's exact framing, were sent as built rather than confirmed first, with a note to raise them on the follow-up if the client asks.

None of that follow-up activity is recorded as leading to a decision either way, so this write-up stops at the send itself.