About Clean Best in Alexandria

An About page for a cleaning company usually contains four things: a founding year, a number of happy clients, a star rating, and a photograph of a smiling person holding a spray bottle. Three of those four are unverifiable, and on this site none of them appear.

That is not modesty. It is the recognition that every unverifiable claim on a page like this is a liability — under Australian Consumer Law, in a search engine that checks entities against the public record, and with any customer who decides to look you up. A business that will invent a statistic to win a quote will invent other things later, and everybody reading knows it.

So here is the honest version.

We are not near you

Clean Best runs from 54 Columbia Rd, Seven Hills NSW 2147. Seven Hills is in western Sydney. Alexandria is in the inner south, on the other side of the city. These are not adjacent suburbs, they are not in the same council area, and no amount of careful phrasing changes that.

Every other suburb site in our network can and does say that its depot is close to the area it serves, because it is. This one cannot, and the temptation to fudge it is exactly why it is stated this bluntly.

We have also never measured the drive from Columbia Road to Botany Road at six in the morning, so we do not publish a travel time. A great many cleaning websites do publish one, and a meaningful proportion of those numbers were invented by a copywriter. It is a trivially checkable claim to get wrong, and there is no version of getting caught on it that ends well.

What we offer instead of being close

Distance is a real disadvantage and pretending otherwise would be insulting. The correct response to a real disadvantage is to compensate for it with something concrete, in writing.

So Alexandria runs as a scheduled route. Your site has a named day and a named arrival window, and both are in the service agreement rather than in a phone call that everybody later remembers differently. If we are going to be late, you hear it from us before you notice it. If the run has to move, you are told, in advance, by a person.

A cleaner who lives ten minutes away and arrives whenever the day permits is genuinely worth less to you than one who is further out and arrives when they said they would. That is not a rationalisation. It is the entire reason scheduled contract cleaning exists as an industry, and it is what we are selling.

The year we are not going to give you

There is no founding year on this website. Not in the copy, not in a statistic, not in the schema markup where a search engine would read it.

The reason is dull and it is the right one: the founding year the rest of our network publishes has not been reconciled against the date our ABN was actually registered, and until that is resolved we are not going to assert a date on a page. A missing fact costs us a little credibility. A wrong one, on a page that also carries an ABN anyone can check against the register, costs considerably more.

No stars, no testimonials, no numbers we made up

There is no rating on this site, no review count, no client total, no square metres cleaned and no “trusted by hundreds of Sydney businesses”.

We have no Alexandria clients yet whose testimonials we could publish with their consent, and inventing them is fraud. Self-declaring a star rating in your own schema markup is not only ineligible for Google’s star rich result — Google does not show ratings that a business has awarded itself — it is a documented trigger for a spammy-structured-markup manual action. It is the rare case where the dishonest option is also the strategically stupid one.

When real reviews exist, they will live on our Google Business Profile, where Google reads them directly and where nobody has to trust our own website about our own quality.

What we will actually put in writing

An ABN you can check on the Australian Business Register. A certificate of currency for $20m public liability, and workers compensation for everyone on the roster. Police check details for the cleaner attending your site, and a Working with Children Check number where children are on the premises — supplied, so you can verify them rather than believe us.

A written scope, split into every-visit, weekly and periodic work, so you can see precisely what you are buying and precisely what you are not. A fixed price, given in writing before anybody starts. A named cleaner who attends every visit and is inducted on your site before they attend it alone. A named supervisor who audits the site monthly against that scope and writes down what was missed. And thirty days notice, because nobody should be trapped with a cleaner they have stopped trusting.

And the things we will say no to

We will not wash your exposed brick, however much you want us to, because it can bloom salt across the face and that is a repair rather than a clean. We will not wet-clean a wool rug on a cold concrete slab. We will not guarantee your bond, because a cleaner does not control damage, wear or an agent’s judgement. We will not quote high-level work into a nightly rate that we then have no safe way of performing. And we will tell you when the thing you are describing is a builder’s job rather than a cleaner’s.

Every one of those refusals costs us money. All of them are the reason the next quote is not the last one you will ever need.