Winning new business in the cleaning and facility services industry isn’t just about having the best proposal. It’s about giving clients confidence that everything will run smoothly after the contract is signed. For many contractors, that’s where deals are won, and that’s where deals are lost.
Randy Burke, CEO of DCS Global, has spent more than two decades consulting in the industry after years as a contractor himself. Jason Little, director of operations at DCS Global, brings 23 years of high-level janitorial experience as a subject matter expert. Together, they’re helping contractors and property managers close the gap between signing a contract and successfully running an account.
The push into supporting contractors came through natural demand from DCS Global’s property and facility management clients, Burke said. After about a year of focused work in this area, the team identified three core ways they can help contractors close more business and improve margins.
The objection nobody says out loud
Post-COVID, property and facility managers are stretched thin. When evaluating a new contractor, a quiet but powerful objection often shapes the decision.
“What would be a natural occurrence to the client was, wow, do I have time to manage this? And do I have the skill set?” Burke said. “It’s a natural objection. And sometimes it’s not even voiced. But it’s real.”
That unspoken concern is one of the biggest reasons facility managers hesitate to make a change, even when they want to. Little has seen the same pattern.
“A lot of facility managers, they do get a little bit nervous. They want to make the change, but they don’t want to follow through because they don’t want to go through the headache,” Little said. “Having a third-party provider like DCS help manage your transition and all the nuances and aspects as a mediator helps make it flow more smoothly, and everybody seems to feel more comfortable and at ease.”
Why third-party oversight changes the dynamic
DCS Global’s third-party transition oversight is built around protecting two sets of interests at once—or the contractor and the property manager.
“Third-party is really important because we really are watching out for the interests of both the service provider and the property manager,” Burke said. “And they’re different.”
For contractors, the value is in having subject matter experts who can spot challenges and opportunities they might otherwise miss. For property managers, the value is having someone who can surface concerns they might not feel comfortable raising directly.
“If they’ve got concerns, sometimes it’s hard to talk to your service provider,” Burke said. “Whereas a third party, they’ll tell us exactly what’s going on, and we can communicate it and provide solutions to the service provider.”
Little sees the relationship-building benefit play out from pre-startup through post-startup. And importantly, DCS Global doesn’t overstay.
“We tend to exit the relationship,” Burke said. “We want to set things up, but we don’t want to get in the way. Once the startup has happened, great. Typically, at last 30 to 60 days after startup, we’re out of there. We may come back and do audits from time to time, but we want to set this relationship up to win and not get in the way.”
Closing the deal as a sales advantage
Burke walked through several real-world examples that show how third-party transition support has helped contractors win and retain business.
In one case, a large retail owner with four centers and 1.5 million square feet had worked with the same contractor for eight or nine years. After an RFP that included contract upgrades and new language, ownership wanted to keep the incumbent—but worried about whether on-site staff would change. The solution was to engage DCS Global to oversee the transition. The annual contract value was $5.7 million; DCS Global’s one-time fee ranged from $70,000 to $90,000.
A second project involved a large office and retail complex with five office towers around a retail center. The annual contract value was $7.6 million, with a DCS Global fee in the $40,000 to $60,000 range. A third—a Class A office portfolio with six buildings and just over a million cleanable square feet—carried a $6.4 million annual contract value, with transition support costing $30,000 to $40,000.
“I would trade $40,000 for six or seven million myself,” Burke said. “But I understand this is business. We try and balance what we cost, making sure that the contract value itself more than carries it.”
Little added that the team also serves as a mediator when contractors are reluctant to push back during early-stage negotiations.
“Sometimes the clients are the contractors,” Little said. “When you win a contract, you’re nervous, you don’t want to speak up, and then you’ll just deal with it until it bottles up sometimes. We help iron all that out. We’ll be the mediators, the bad guy, the good cop in between, and we help get that everlasting contract right from the start.”
Operational excellence from A to Z
The second pillar of DCS Global’s contractor support is operational excellence, an area Little leads.
“Say you have an account coming up for rebid, or you want a fresh-eyes look, or you have some kind of specific problem—that’s where we can come in,” Little said. “We offer a variety of services from A to Z.”
Those services include product testing, white papers, innovation testing, and reorganizing org charts around best practices. They also include hands-on technology evaluation, an area where Little sees a lot of confusion in the bidding process.
“You’ll see a lot of times that we’ll have RFPs and a lot of bidders will propose different types of technologies, and a lot of the times they haven’t implemented any of these technologies,” Little said. “We’ll do the pilot testing, suggest the best-in-class robotic sensors and other programs, come to your site, and we’ll set it up for a two-, three-week proof of concept. We’ll get you the real intimate data on site within that environment.”
DCS Global also works with contractors on hybrid and outcome-based models, integrating robotics and sensors for on-demand cleaning in restrooms and key areas. The team has added a training component, tailored to each environment based on audits and identified opportunities.
“After I spend a week or two on site with all your folks, or my team is spent on site, we do a training program tailored to your environment based on what we’ve seen—the audits, the misses, and areas of opportunities,” Little said.
Tight margins and the race to zero
Burke didn’t sugarcoat the financial reality contractors face.
“The race to zero is on,” Burke said. “Especially post-COVID, occupancy is down here and there. People are tougher renegotiating leases, working from home. It is a new day.”
To help offset that pressure, DCS Global has restructured its RFP service to move items like technology and training above the line, so those costs don’t come out of contractor overhead or profit.
“We’re ex-contractors. We’ve lived it,” Burke said. “We’re working with everybody to try and make this a high-value industry.”
Renegotiating contracts without going to bid
One of the most valuable services DCS Global offers, Burke said, is contract renegotiation that satisfies due diligence requirements without forcing a property manager to go to RFP.
“A third-party contract renegotiation satisfies a lot of the due diligence requirements so that they don’t go to RFP,” Burke said. “If a service provider has, in fact, a good relationship—which many, many do—contract renegotiation essentially is a friendly process where we work with both parties.”
The process typically starts with the service provider softly introducing the idea to the property manager. From there, DCS Global handles the proposal, the spec rewrite, the new budget, and the back-and-forth needed to land on terms that work for everyone.
“We go back and forth until we get something that really does work in terms of a new contract,” Burke said. “Present that to the property facility manager, get the green light, give them everything they need to actually sign a new contract, and bingo, it happens.”
DCS Global backs the process with a guarantee. If a property or facility manager later goes out to RFP within a year, DCS Global will not handle that RFP.
The renegotiation track record includes an office portfolio of nearly 5 million square feet across 30 buildings, with an $8 million-plus contract value and a renegotiation fee of $50,000 to $70,000. Smaller projects, like two buildings totaling 350,000 square feet with a just-under-$1 million annual contract value, carried fees of $7,000 to $9,000. A retail shopping center complex with a renegotiated $3.4 million contract value came in at $27,000 to $33,000.
“Who doesn’t want to renew a contract?” Burke said.
Little summed up the appeal. “It’s all about the relationships and keeping the current provider in the current contract and doing it in a unique way, not having to go out to bid.”
Bridging the disconnect
For Burke, the disconnect between contractors, facility managers, and property owners comes back to time and expertise.
“Property managers and contractors are busy,” Burke said. “Having a subject matter expert in whatever we do in the market is very much focused on a win-win relationship. That’s why we get repeat business.”
Little pointed to a more candid reality.
“Sometimes what the clients and the providers don’t have is the resources,” Little said. “That’s where we give our leading industry knowledge, and we help everyone feel comfortable. We provide and fill that gap with giving you the information you need. Because sometimes, to be fair, you don’t know what you don’t know.”
Getting started
DCS Global is making it easy for new contractors to try the service. First-time clients receive 40% off their initial project. The offer expires June 30, 2026.
“It’s a bit of a steep bite for us, but we want to meet service providers and help them grow their business,” Burke said.
Contractors and property managers interested in learning more can reach Burke or Little directly. As Burke put it, “It always starts with a conversation.”
Learn more at the DCS Global website.
