Government Cleaning Contracts: What Happens When Two Bids Tie
Gifted Hands Cleaning Services won a state cleaning contract on a coin flip. Mimi Kromah explains how government janitorial bidding actually works, and why showing up consistently beats low-balling.
Government cleaning contracts go to the lowest compliant bid, right up until two companies submit identical numbers. Then the agency reaches for a tiebreaker: past performance, staffing plans, or in rare cases, a literal coin flip. You can’t plan for the coin flip. You can build a track record that makes it unnecessary.
Mimi Kromah of Gifted Hands Cleaning Services has lived the coin-flip version. In Bidding Strategies That Win + Growing Smart on Tech & Tidy, she and Bill walk through how to get government cleaning contracts: the real process, from bidding mechanics to cash flow blind spots to the slow game of showing up until agencies call you.
The coin flip story
Gifted Hands bid on a state cleaning contract. Another company submitted the exact same price. Nobody knows how it happened (no notes were compared), but both companies landed on the same number. The agency brought them both into a state office. “We’ve never had to do this before,” the procurement officer said, “but we’ve heard of it.” Bill called it by its name: the tiebreaker rule.
They flipped a coin. Mimi called heads. Gifted Hands won the contract.
It makes a great story. It’s a terrible strategy for building a business. The lesson isn’t that you should get good at calling coins. It’s that public-sector bidding can come down to that, and the only real answer is to not be in a tie in the first place.
Government contracts are a different game
The biggest practical difference between commercial and government work, according to Bill: you don’t have much negotiating power.
On a commercial bid, you can sit down with the client, make your case, and adjust the number based on the relationship. Government solicitations don’t work that way. Agencies publish a scope, set insurance and bonding minimums, and go to the lowest responsive bid. Set-aside quotas for minority-owned and small businesses shape who gets considered. The price is usually the decision.
Bill and Mimi have been vocal about something they think is broken in that process: agencies often don’t ask for experience. No references, no questions about how long you’ve been in business, just the number. Gifted Hands has been advocating for agencies to change this: check references and ask why a price is what it is, high or low. Right now, a lot of contracts go to whoever types in the lowest number, experience optional. That’s the environment that creates coin-flip situations.
The cash flow part nobody warns you about
State contracts pay net 30. That’s manageable. The harder part is what happens around January and June.
Twice a year, government accounts go into a kind of limbo: budget transitions, contract rollovers, fiscal year shifts. Bill and Mimi learned this the hard way: some months they’d run payroll three times and the incoming cash felt short, and it took a while to figure out why. Once they connected the dots, they started planning around those two windows.
If you hold state or local government contracts, know those two periods are coming every year. Operators who treat it as a surprise every time end up thinking something is wrong with their business when it’s really just a calendar problem.
The real edge: show up before the bid
A lot of Gifted Hands’ state work didn’t come from winning a competitive bid in the traditional sense. It came from word of mouth, one state agency referring them to another. That doesn’t happen if you only show up when a solicitation drops.
Their approach is consistent: collect certifications, get on agency mailing lists, and attend the events. Webinars, networking events, business week conferences, women’s conferences. They go, and they send their team when they can’t make it themselves. They keep seeing the same agency contacts. They keep being professional.
Over time, that consistency pays off. Some agencies have discretion even in a lowest-bid system. Buyers who’ve been burned by the cheapest option enough times start exercising it. They handpick contractors they’ve seen, talked to, and vetted. Bill put it plainly: “When they see you and they consistently keep seeing you, it gives them a thing now when they say, ‘Hey, give me your card because our last guy isn’t working out.’”
SBA and SBDC resources help here too. They run events, provide mentorship, and help operators navigate the certifications and solicitation processes that actually get you in front of the right buyers.
Skip the million-dollar contract hype
If you’ve spent time on YouTube looking for government contract advice, you’ve seen the gurus promising seven-figure federal deals. Mimi is direct about where Gifted Hands actually operates: state contracts, local government accounts, county offices, EDD buildings. Real work that pays real bills.
That tier is large enough for most janitorial operators. It doesn’t require chasing federal contracts you’re not ready for. It requires showing up, holding the work you win, and building the operational record that lets you prove past performance when an agency asks: inspection reports, GPS-verified time logs, and consistent service history that commercial cleaning software captures automatically.
Start local. Keep showing up. The coin flip is the last resort, not the plan.
Watch Bidding Strategies That Win + Growing Smart on the Clean Smarts YouTube channel, then book a demo to see what operational records look like on your own accounts.
About the author
Co-Founder
Brent thinks about product the same way he thinks about the people using it — methodically, with an eye on what comes next. He was the only engineer behind Clean Smarts for its first two years, building the multilingual and offline capabilities no competitor had. Integrity and long-term thinking are how he works.
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