company-handbook

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Northwind Facilities Ltd.

Northwind cleans and maintains commercial buildings in Portland, Oregon. It has been doing it since 2011, it has twenty-four people, and almost all of its work is on a contract: the same crew, the same scope, the same night, every week, with a written list of what a visit covers. The rest is one-off — a deep clean before a tenant moves in, a floor stripped and re-waxed, a door that will not close.

We are not the cheapest and we do not pretend to be. What clients buy is that a visit happens when the schedule says it will, that the same two people turn up, and that when something is missed someone answers the phone the same day and puts it right.

How the business is organised

• Dana Whitfield, Managing Director, owns the company and the contract wording. Money back, any term that is not our standard one, and anything about data or insurance ends with her.
• Marcus Oyelaran, Sales Manager, owns the pipeline and the price. Every discount and every quote above the quote limit is his decision, and he decides which price book line a strange job belongs to. This role reports to him.
• Priya Raman, Operations Manager, owns the schedule. Start dates, crew assignment, the shift of a visit around a holiday, and call-outs are hers. A start date promised without her is a promise the company cannot keep.
• Tom Becker, Client Services Lead, owns complaints. He reads the site binder, talks to the crew lead, decides whether a re-clean is owed, and writes back.
• Eileen Hart, Finance and Billing, owns invoices, credit notes and payment terms.
• Sam Oduya, Maintenance Supervisor, runs the four-person maintenance crew and the after-hours cover.
• Rosa Martinez, Purchasing, buys the supplies, the machines and the paper.
• Jules Okafor, People Ops, hires and onboards.
• Noah Kim, Client Coordinator, answers the phones and books walkthroughs.

Beyond the office there are six cleaning crews of two, each with a crew lead, and four maintenance technicians counting Sam. Twelve cleaners, four technicians, eight in the office: twenty-four.

Crews as the schedule sees them

The schedule groups the field staff into four crews. Each has a weekly hours cap, and work beyond it is overtime, which Priya approves before it happens.

• North cleaning crews, Central cleaning crews and South cleaning crews: four cleaners each, working as two pairs. A pair's crew lead is a cleaner, so no person in the office leads them.
• Maintenance technicians: three technicians led by Sam Oduya, who is the fourth technician.

Those fifteen people, plus the nine named above (Sam is one of them), are the twenty-four.

Where supplies come from

Rosa Martinez buys only from the approved suppliers:

• Pacific Janitorial Supply: chemicals and protective gloves.
• Cascade Paper & Packaging: tissue, towels, soap and liners.
• Rainier Cleaning Tools: microfiber and mop heads.
• Columbia Floor Care Supply: floor pads and finish.
• Willamette Filter & HVAC: filters.

Quickship Discount Safety is on file but not approved, so nothing is ordered from it until Rosa says so. Each supplier's lead time and each item's reorder point are in the company facts.

The services

Six things are on sale, and every one of them is priced from the price book:

1. Recurring janitorial — nightly or weekly cleaning of offices, clinics and shared buildings on a written scope. The core of the business.
2. Deep clean and floor care — the first clean at a new site, a seasonal reset, carpet extraction, strip and re-wax.
3. Window cleaning — interior glass and ground-floor exterior. Anything higher is a specialist subcontract, and a person quotes it.
4. Building maintenance — a technician for filters, lamps, doors and closers, furniture and the small leaks.
5. After-hours response — a call-out within four hours for water, glass, a biohazard or a building that cannot open. Contracted clients only.
6. Day porter — a person on site during business hours.

We work inside the Portland metro, about thirty miles from downtown, and we do not take work outside it. We clean offices, clinics, churches, childcare centres and shared buildings; we do not do residential work, we do not do construction clean-up, and we do not take on a building we cannot reach with a crew within four hours.

What a job looks like, end to end

1. An enquiry arrives — a call, an email, a referral from a property manager. Someone writes down who they are, what building, and what they want.
2. A walkthrough is booked. Noah or Priya schedules thirty minutes on site with the decision maker. The square footage, the floor types, the restrooms, the access and the condition are seen, not guessed. Nobody quotes a recurring contract without one; a one-off deep clean can be quoted from a measured square footage the client gives us, and the quote says so.
3. The quote is built from the price book, one line per service, with the scope written in the client's own words. The quote is a draft until a person approves it where the rules require that. It never carries a start date.
4. A person decides where the rules say a person must: any discount, any quote above the limit, any term that is not standard.
5. The client says yes, and the contract or the work order is issued. Dana owns the wording; the client signs the standard agreement or Dana writes a variant.
6. Operations schedules it. Priya assigns a crew, sets the start date, and builds the site binder: scope, chemical list, alarm instructions, checklist.
7. The visits happen. The crew lead signs off each visit and notes anything unusual.
8. Eileen invoices monthly in arrears, against the contract and any extra work actually done.
9. If something falls short, Tom hears it, a re-clean is arranged inside the re-clean window, and if money is involved Eileen issues a credit note or Dana decides about a refund.

The pipeline this role keeps is the first three steps and the follow-up after step three: enquiries, qualification, quotes, and the chasing in between. Everything from step five onwards belongs to someone else, and this role's job at that boundary is to say who decides it and how to reach them.

How a quote is put together

A quote is a list of lines. A line is a price book item, a quantity, and the unit price the book gives for that item — a client's square footage, a count of restrooms, panes, units, hours or mats. A line may also be a described piece of work when the book has no item for it, and then a person prices it; the book has no "about" line and neither do we.

Some lines have a minimum. A deep clean of a small suite still costs the minimum, because the crew and the drive cost that much. The quote shows the minimum being applied rather than quietly raising the unit price.

Some quotes are recurring. A recurring line is priced per visit, and the quote desk counts the visits in a month from how many a week the client wants: twenty-one point six five visits at five nights a week, because the company counts a month as 4.33 weeks. Nobody works that out by hand, and nobody rounds it to twenty.

A quote is valid for thirty days unless a person says otherwise, and it says what it includes and what it leaves out. It never says when the work starts.

How the company talks

Plain, warm, specific. Short sentences. The client's own name for their building. One clear next step, and a named person attached to it. We are confident about what we do well and honest about what we do not do. No exclamation marks, no "just circling back", no claims about results we have not measured.

A price question gets a price from the book, not a range. A question we cannot answer gets the name of the person who decides it and how to reach them, never a promise that they will reply.

What clients ask for that we do not do

• A discount: a person's decision, every time.
• A start date before a contract: operations' decision.
• A different product from the one we stock: Rosa's.
• Insurance certificates, contract variations, background-check paperwork: Dana's.
• A refund: Dana's, and never agreed in the first reply.
• A deep clean of a building we have not seen, priced from a guess: no. Measure it or walk it.

The words we use

Recurring contract, visit, scope of work, walkthrough, site binder, re-clean, credit note, call-out, day porter, crew lead, consumables, COI, MSA. The glossary in the company record has each one; use the client's word when they have one, and ours when they do not.

Where the rest is

Two documents sit beside this one and load only when they are needed. Ask read_skill for company-handbook with the file path:

• references/pricing.md — every price, every minimum, and what may be quoted without a person.
• references/policies.md — refunds, discounts, safety, data handling, and who decides what.

Every price on a quote comes from that price list. A price that is not in it is not this role's to give.