By Danny Gonzales, Owner • Updated September 11, 2026
Owner, Plan B Facility Services · Commercial cleaning, janitorial and facility services across the Phoenix metro since 2010.Plan B Facility Services provides custodial and janitorial services to colleges and universities across the Phoenix metro, including multi-campus community college systems. We currently serve Rio Salado College across its seven campus locations and Mesa Community College.
Campus custodial work is not office cleaning at a larger scale. A campus runs on an academic calendar rather than a business week, its spaces range from lecture halls to labs to athletics to student unions, and the contract almost always comes through a formal procurement process rather than a phone quote. This page covers how we handle all three.
"Plan B Janitorial Services … provides cleaning services for Rio Salado College, which includes seven campus locations. Their team has consistently done an excellent job keeping our facilities clean and presentable … responsive, reliable, and proactive when any issues come up."
— Jack Gallegos, Jr., Director, College Facilities Planning & Development, Rio Salado CollegeInstitutions often go out to bid with a scope written for a different building type, then discover the mismatch in month two. The differences that actually matter:
| College & university | K-12 district | Commercial office | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating hours | Early morning to late evening, often weekends | Fixed bell schedule | Standard business hours |
| Occupancy pattern | Continuous but uneven — by class block | Predictable, uniform | Predictable, uniform |
| Space variety | Very high — labs, studios, athletics, libraries, unions | Moderate — classrooms, gym, cafeteria | Low — offices, restrooms, break rooms |
| Heavy floor work | Summer and inter-session windows | Summer break | Any weekend |
| How it is bought | Formal RFP, scored evaluation | District RFP or purchasing co-op | Quote after walkthrough |
| Reporting | Documented inspections, single point of contact across sites | Per-campus | Informal |
If you manage a K-12 district rather than a campus, our school cleaning services in Phoenix page covers that scope.
| Space type | Typical frequency | What drives the scope |
|---|---|---|
| Classrooms & lecture halls | Daily during term | Desk and seat surfaces, floors, whiteboards, waste — turned between class blocks where possible |
| Restrooms | Multiple times daily | Highest-traffic space on any campus; supply restocking is constant |
| Labs & technical spaces | Daily, restricted scope | Defined boundaries — crews clean floors and common surfaces, not benches or equipment, unless the SOW says otherwise |
| Libraries & study areas | Daily, extended hours | Long opening hours push work early or late; carpet traffic lanes and study-carrel surfaces |
| Athletics & gyms | Daily plus event-driven | Wood floor care, locker rooms and showers, bleacher and spectator areas |
| Student unions & dining | Daily, often multiple passes | Food-adjacent sanitation, high-touch seating, hard-floor degreasing |
| Administrative offices | Daily or nightly | Standard janitorial scope |
| Hard floor restoration | Summer and inter-session | Strip and wax, scrub and recoat, burnishing — see floor cleaning & waxing |
Campuses with heavy daytime foot traffic through unions, libraries and main corridors typically add day porter coverage on top of the nightly scope, so restrooms and common areas get reset during class hours rather than only overnight.
Most campus custodial contracts in Arizona are awarded through a formal RFP rather than a quote. Plan B responds to RFPs and invitations to bid, and has served local city municipalities alongside our higher-education accounts.
What tends to matter in how these are scored, based on the responses we write:
Timing: Arizona's July 1 fiscal year means custodial and janitorial RFPs typically post in late winter, get evaluated through spring, and start over the summer. If you are scoping a solicitation for next fiscal year, the useful conversation happens well before the posting.
Every campus has a fixed window where floors can actually be stripped, recoated and burnished, carpets extracted, and spaces deep-cleaned without working around students. On most Phoenix-area campuses that is the summer session gap plus winter break, and it is not negotiable — the work either fits or it waits a year.
That window also collides with Phoenix conditions. Monsoon season runs mid-June through September, which loads entry matting and glass exactly when summer floor work is underway, and extreme heat pushes exterior work — window cleaning and power washing of walkways, plazas and building exteriors — into early-morning hours. Campus summer schedules need to be built around both.
We serve higher-education facilities throughout the Valley from our Peoria office, including campuses in Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale, Glendale, Chandler and Peoria.
Organisations such as APPA, the association for educational facilities professionals, and ISSA publish the benchmarking and workloading frameworks most institutional custodial specifications are written against — useful reading if you are drafting a scope of work from scratch.
Yes. We currently provide cleaning services for Rio Salado College across its seven campus locations, coordinated through a single account manager rather than separate arrangements per site. We also serve Mesa Community College.
For a district with several campuses, consistency between sites and one point of contact are usually what the facilities office is actually buying — a vendor who performs well at one location and unevenly at the others creates more work, not less.
Yes. Plan B responds to RFPs, invitations to bid and formal solicitations for higher-education and municipal custodial contracts, and we have served local city municipalities. If you have a submission deadline, tell us the date when you first make contact so we can work backwards from it.
Institutional custodial pricing is built from cleanable square footage by space type, service frequency, and total labour hours across the contract — not a single rate applied to the whole campus. A lecture hall, a restroom block and a chemistry lab carry very different workloading factors.
For a formal solicitation we price against your published scope of work. Outside of one, we walk the campus first. Our commercial cleaning cost guide explains the pricing models in more detail.
Yes, and it has to. We build service around the academic timetable — classrooms turned between blocks or after the last session, restrooms and common areas maintained through the day, administrative and back-of-house work overnight. Libraries and student unions with extended hours get scheduled separately from the main academic buildings.
Summer is when the heavy work happens — hard floor stripping and recoating, carpet extraction, deep cleaning of spaces that cannot be taken offline during term, and any restoration deferred through the year. Reduced daily coverage continues for whatever summer sessions and administrative operations remain.
The window is fixed and short, so summer scopes are best agreed in spring rather than in May.
We clean floors, common surfaces and waste in laboratory and technical spaces within whatever boundaries the scope of work defines. Bench surfaces, fume hoods, specialised equipment and any regulated materials stay with your own technical staff unless the SOW specifically assigns them otherwise.
Getting those boundaries written down explicitly is worth doing at contract stage — it is the most common source of disagreement in campus custodial work.
With a written transition plan agreed before the start date — walkthroughs of every building, confirmed access and key or badge procedures, staffing in place before day one, and a defined check-in schedule through the first weeks. Mid-year custodial transitions are where institutions most often lose service quality, and almost always because the handover was never written down.
Multi-campus custodial across the Phoenix metro. RFP and formal bid responses welcome. Free campus walkthrough.
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