The commercial cleaning industry has always been a relationship business. Contracts flow through people who know people. An FM director calls a cleaning business owner they used at their last company. A facilities manager recommends a local contractor to a colleague at a networking event. A referral from a satisfied client opens a door that twelve months of cold calling could not.
This is not a broken system — it is a human one. But it has a significant structural problem: it systematically excludes businesses that are newer, smaller, or simply not embedded in the right networks. The quality of the cleaning work is often not the deciding factor. The deciding factor is who you know, and whether you happened to be in the right place at the right time.
The marketplace model is changing that dynamic. By creating a verified, structured layer between cleaning businesses and the organisations looking to hire them, it makes capability and compliance the primary matching criteria — not relationships and luck. This article explains how it works, what makes it different from existing options, and what the soft launch of Cadi Connect means for cleaning businesses in the UK.
How commercial cleaning work has been won — until now
The routes to commercial cleaning work have been largely unchanged for thirty years. Cold outreach: calls to business parks, emails to facilities managers, knocking on doors in industrial estates. Word of mouth: referrals from satisfied clients, introductions from trade associations, recommendations between FM contacts. Tender portals: public sector procurement processes that favour incumbents and require months of preparation for uncertain outcomes.
Each of these routes has a fundamental friction problem. Cold outreach produces low response rates and requires sustained effort for modest returns. Word of mouth is unpredictable and cannot be scaled. Tender portals are slow, compliance-heavy, and structurally biased toward businesses with existing public sector track records.
For smaller cleaning businesses — particularly those that are well-run, compliant, and have real capacity to take on new commercial work — none of these routes reflects their actual capability. A cleaning business with excellent references, full compliance documentation, and spare capacity in a specific region should be able to find commercial work faster than six to twelve weeks. The problem is not the cleaning business. It is the discovery mechanism.
| Route | Speed | Transparency | Favours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold outreach | Slow (weeks) | Low | Persistent businesses with large contact lists |
| Word of mouth | Unpredictable | Very low | Established businesses in existing networks |
| Tender portals | Very slow (months) | Medium | Incumbent suppliers with public sector track record |
| Verified marketplace | Fast (days) | High | Compliant businesses with spare capacity |
What a verified cleaning marketplace is
A verified cleaning marketplace is not a job board. A job board lists vacancies and lets anyone apply — there is no verification of compliance, no matching against capability, and no infrastructure for evidence or invoicing. The result is that FM companies using job boards still have to manually vet applicants, which is slow, and cleaning businesses using job boards compete against everyone regardless of whether they are qualified for the work.
A verified cleaning marketplace operates differently at every stage.
Verification before matching. Before a cleaning business can receive job notifications, their compliance profile is verified: insurance certificates, DBS policy, trade types, geographic coverage. This is not a self-declaration — it is checked against the documents. Only verified businesses are visible to FM companies posting work.
Matching on capability and location. When an FM company posts available work, the platform matches it to cleaning businesses based on trade type (interior, exterior, specialist), regional coverage, and current availability. The FM company sees a shortlist of businesses that actually fit the requirement — not an open list of every business that happened to apply.
Evidence and invoicing in the same system. Work is tracked through the platform from acceptance to completion. Photo evidence is submitted on completion. Invoicing is linked to evidenced, completed jobs — which means FM companies can pay with confidence, and cleaning businesses have a record of every job they have delivered.
How it works for cleaning businesses
The experience for a cleaning business on a verified marketplace is straightforward — and significantly faster than any traditional route to new commercial work.
How it works for FM companies
For FM companies and commercial clients, the marketplace solves a different but equally real problem: finding reliable, compliant cleaning subcontractors without manual vetting.
The current process for most FM operations teams when they need a subcontractor in a new region or for a specialist trade is: ask around internally, check the existing PSL for anyone relevant, post on LinkedIn or a job board, receive a wave of approaches of varying quality, manually check insurance certificates and references, and eventually shortlist someone — a process that can take weeks even when urgency is high.
On a verified marketplace, the FM company posts work and the platform returns a shortlist of cleaning businesses who are already verified, already matched to the trade and region requirement, and already have a completion history visible on their profile. The FM company selects the right business, dispatches the job, and receives evidence of completion automatically. Invoices are linked to completed jobs — no separate invoicing system, no WhatsApp groups chasing for photos, no manual matching of invoices to job records.
What makes Cadi Connect different from a job board
The distinction matters because it changes the value on both sides of the transaction.
Verification is pre-done, not post-done. On a job board, FM companies have to verify every applicant themselves. On Cadi Connect, verification happens before the business is visible to any FM company. By the time an FM company sees your profile, they already know your insurance is current and your DBS policy is documented. The vetting step has been removed from their workflow.
Evidence is built into the job. On Cadi Connect, photo evidence is not an optional extra — it is part of the job completion flow. Every completed job adds to your evidence portfolio, which FM companies can see when they are evaluating whether to select you for new work. This creates a compounding advantage for cleaning businesses that consistently deliver quality: their track record becomes visible and searchable, rather than existing only in their own head and in offline reference calls.
Two-sided reputation. Cleaning businesses build a score based on completion rate, evidence quality, and FM company ratings. FM companies can see this score before they select a business for a job. This gives newer businesses a genuine pathway to build reputation that is visible — and gives FM companies a meaningful signal that goes beyond a reference from someone who owes a favour.
The soft launch — what's happening
Cadi Connect is opening waitlist access now, ahead of soft launch. This is not a pre-registration form that results in an email in six months — it is the actual access queue for early users who will be the first to receive job notifications when the platform goes live.
Early access has a practical advantage beyond being first: cleaning businesses who are verified and profiled at launch get first pick of available contracts in their region, before the platform opens to the wider market. The first weeks of a new marketplace are when the early movers establish their presence — and that presence compounds as their job completion history builds.
Early access closes when capacity is reached in each region.
Join the waitlist →