I've been in the commercial cleaning business for the last 18 years. Approx. 5 years ago I, with a biz partner, acquired our employer and are looking at 25% growth for 2014. We're in the the DC area and as long as we don't compete in the same market, I'll give you a winning estimate for your 1.5 million square feet.
When I prepare our estimates, along with our proposals, I'll use a simple Excel spreadsheet. Every company has their own methodology, but we breakdown our pricing to separate the things we can control and the items we cannot control. In the case of our industry, we can only control two things: labor and supplies. All other items like taxes, fixed biz costs, etc. are fixed. We can't do anything about those, but we can control labor and supplies. So our pricing centers around those two items and we developed a formula to account for these.
What you'll receive would be that spreadsheet, with a breakdown of the pricing including labor, taxes, supplies with those supplies listed out, hours, staffing, etc. Our business bids on 5-6 major projects per year and we find that our pricing is very competitive for our market.
In order to be effective, there are some questions that need to be answered, and certainly couldn't fit in the space remaining. Things that need to be considered include provided supplies like paper, soap, liners, any wage requirements (e.g. union), carpet to tile floor ratios, special cleaning needs, cleaning frequency, and many, many more....
-Mark