Tim Thorlby is CTC’s Development Director. He leads our work on enterprise and is also a Director of Clean for Good. Here he blogs about the latest step on the journey to launching Clean for Good…

We’re nearly there.

For the last two and half years I have been involved in helping to shape, support and bring to fruition a brand new business for London. We are now on the home straight to launch.

Clean for Good is a cleaning company, but one which is different. It is a business with a social purpose. Our aim is to reinvent cleaning and the way that cleaners are perceived – and we want to challenge the rest of the cleaning sector to do the same.

Clean for Good will provide an excellent cleaning service – because cleaning matters. But we will also pay the London Living Wage to all of our staff, all of the time, provide decent working terms and conditions, guarantee minimum working hours and invest in our people. Because cleaners matter too. We want to provide a fully ethical contract cleaning service for London, which customers can trust.

After a lot of hard work over the last two years, we’ve just appointed our first Business Manager. She is starting work in February 2017 and we are aiming to formally launch soon after this – we will be introducing our team and announce the launch in due course, so do watch this space!

We are also now issuing shares to our founder investors as we bring in the capital required to get this business off the ground. These funds are enabling us to make Clean for Good a reality. We are being backed by CMS, the PCC of St Andrew by the Wardrobe, CTC itself and a couple of private Christian investors. We’ve also had a small grant from the PCC of St Sepulchres in the City of London to encourage us and help us get started.

We are nearly there.

All of this has been made possible by a team of people – the entrepreneurial team at St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe who kicked this off, the investors who are prepared to back this with their money, our legal advisers, the business experts who’ve advised us along the way, as well as our own business planning and project management expertise at CTC. It has been a real team effort.

The real test is still to come though. When we recruit our first cleaners and advertise our cleaning services, will we finally be able to reconnect cleaners with customers in a new and fair way? That will be down to you. We will be looking for customers who are prepared to pay for a good and ethically provided cleaning service.

Join us in changing how cleaning gets done. Let’s make London a fairer city.

You can follow Clean for Good on Twitter and you can keep in touch by signing up for our newsletter at cleanforgood.co.uk. If you want us to clean your office, church, charity, shop, school or other commercial premises etc. then get in touch through the website and we’ll get back to you.