How much weight should price carry in a Hornsby cleaning decision

Price is precise, comparable and available immediately, while everything else is qualitative and requires judgement. That asymmetry is why price wins by default even among buyers who genuinely intended otherwise. The mind naturally anchors on the number it can rank, and the softer factors then become reasons for or against a conclusion that has already formed rather than genuine inputs into it rather than shaping the conclusion you eventually reach.

The remedy is not to ignore price, which would be foolish, but to give the other factors enough structure to compete. Writing down four or five headings and a rough weight for each takes fifteen minutes. It converts vague preferences into something you can apply consistently across three proposals, and it makes the final decision explicable to somebody who asks why the cheapest was not chosen.

For a straightforward commercial premises, giving price around half the decision is defensible, with the remainder divided between whether the proposal actually covers your brief, who attends and who supervises, what evidence of insurance and screening exists, and how the provider has behaved during the comparison. Those four cover almost everything that determines what the building will look like in a year and most of what will frustrate you if the arrangement goes wrong.

Adjust the balance to your circumstances rather than treating it as fixed. A site with compliance requirements should weight evidence more heavily. A site where disruption would be costly should weight staffing and supervision. A very small, simple tenancy can reasonably weight price higher, because there is less operational complexity for the other factors to influence in the first place and fewer moving parts for a provider to get wrong.

Use a coarse scale. Three points for a strong answer, two for adequate, one for weak, and a note explaining why. Finer scales imply a precision that does not exist and invite arguments about whether something was a six or a seven. The purpose is to force a considered judgement on each heading, not to produce a mathematically defensible result from inherently qualitative material which no scoring scheme can produce however carefully it is built.

Then look at the outcome and ask whether it feels right. If the scoring produces a result that surprises you, work out why before overriding it. Sometimes the model was wrong and the weighting needs adjusting. Sometimes the model has caught something your instinct missed, which is exactly why you built it. Either way, record the reasoning alongside the scores so a successor can see how the ranking was reached.