Priced medical janitorial like regular office and lost $27k in ten months

Multi-tenant medical outpatient building, 44,000 sf, twelve suites. I'd been cleaning conventional suburban office for years at $1.60 to $1.90 per sf per year and won this one at $1.85, about $81k annually. The RFP described it as office with medical tenants, and I priced it off the rentable square footage and a walk of the lobby and two corridors.

What I priced wrong, in order of size. Access hours. Six of the twelve practices ran patients until 7pm and two started at 6:30am, so my crews worked a compressed window with more bodies instead of a spread-out shift, and my labor went up about 22% against my model. Room count. A 3,000 sf family practice has fourteen exam rooms, each with a sink, a hard surface protocol and a separate wipe-down standard. My per sf math assumed open plan. Procedure rooms. Two suites had rooms that needed terminal-level cleaning after last case, which is a different scope and a different training requirement, and I ate it for four months before I asked for a change order. Regulated medical waste was handled by another vendor, but my staff still had to be trained on what not to touch, and I paid for that training twice because of turnover.

Actual cost came in near $2.55/sf. Ten months, roughly $27k out of pocket, then I gave notice and finished the term at a renegotiated $2.35 with the procedure rooms as a separate line.

What I'd do differently. Walk every suite with each practice manager before bidding, price per exam room and per procedure room rather than per square foot, and get the tenants' actual patient hours in writing from the property manager, not the leasing summary.