It’s Clean Achieves ISO 9001 Certification

Mike Woodcock • 28 January 2022
It's Clean team with ISO 9001 certificate

We are pleased to announce that on 16 December 2021 our commercial cleaning services business achieved ISO 9001 Certification.


Having attained SafeContractor accreditation for 12 years in a row, and in 2021 also achieving SafePQQ accreditation which includes as one of its key pillars a focus on quality, we wanted to go further. Our senior management team identified a need to focus more directly on quality management to drive both consistency in the quality of the services we offer and to foster a culture of continuous improvement throughout our business. Being a globally recognised quality standard, we felt that ISO 9001 offered the best framework to achieve our goal.


Our journey towards Certification began back in December 2020 when we undertook desk research to identify the right consultancy to help us deliver an effective Quality Management System (QMS). We shortlisted three consultancies and appointed Alpha Swanson in York due to their local representation and past success in helping service-based companies like ours achieve ISO 9001 Certification.


The next stage was to form an internal working group to partner with Alpha Swanson, and Jade Harper our office manager was our project lead, as she had successfully developed and implemented a QMS in previous businesses she had worked in.


Alpha Swanson undertook a detailed examination of our processes, documentation, communications, and evidence of continuous improvement. We were pleased to discover that we were already undertaking around 70% of what was required for us to achieve certification which ultimately saved us a lot of time.


After a few months work by Alpha Swanson and our in-house team, we had a QMS to be proud of.


Our next step was the selection of a certification body. Alpha Swanson provided us with a list and Approachable Certification were selected due their high benchmark for success. They commenced their work with a detailed review of our QMS, and then along with Alpha Swanson they randomly selected 10 of our customer sites to audit against our QMS. These sites included commercial offices, schools, warehouses, GP practices, and dental surgeries.


With the review of our QMS and audits complete, we received our certificate of certification at the end of last year.


We will now be able to bid for public sector and larger private sector contracts where being ISO 9001 certified is a basic requirement. Of course most of the national commercial cleaning service providers have ISO 9001 certification, but we have now joined the 10% of regional commercial companies to have achieved ISO 9001.


This project has been a significant investment for It’s Clean costing around £15,000 which includes a significant investment of our own time in developing and implementing our QMS.


Everyone in our team, from the managing director to our valued cleaning operatives has had to change and improve the way we work to enhance the quality and consistency of the services we provide. 


Since the implementation of our QMS we have also benefited from an increase in the overall productivity of our business.


David Whan, our managing director concludes “the road to ISO 9001 certification has not been without its challenges, but I can honestly say that it has been one of the most beneficial projects we have ever undertaken at It’s Clean, and our customers are already giving us some very positive feedback on the improvements to the services we provide.”

David looks back on his 60th birthday volunteering week in Ghana

by david • 1 March 2026
When I hit 60, I didn't want a party. I wanted to do something that would actually matter. So instead of celebrating at home, I flew to Ghana and spent a week volunteering with a charity called Village by Village getting my hands dirty, sitting in open-air classrooms, and meeting some of the warmest, most resilient people I have ever encountered anywhere in the world. This is what I found there, and why I think you should know about it. The Charity Village by Village was founded by an old school friend of mine and has, over the years, evolved into something beautifully self-sustaining: it is now predominantly run by Ghanaians in Ghana. That is not an accident, it is central to the charity's entire philosophy. The approach is simple and powerful. Before a single brick is laid, the charity asks the village what they need, and what they can contribute. There is no imposition, no outside organisation deciding what is best for communities they don't understand. The result is genuine local ownership, stronger outcomes, and projects that endure long after the volunteers have gone home. The work focuses on two areas: education and healthcare. In the remote villages of Ghana that the government's budget cannot reach, Village by Village builds schools and medical centres from the ground up and then keeps them supported. What a Volunteer Week Actually Looks Like I'll be honest: I wasn't sure what to expect. What I got was a genuinely physical, genuinely meaningful week that I will never forget. Most mornings began on a building site, mixing cement alongside professional local builders, plastering walls, shifting materials. I wore a bright pink polo shirt bearing the logo of my company, It's Clean, which helped fund the trip, and I got absolutely filthy in it. There is something grounding about hard physical labour in service of something real. There were also two young men — just finished their A-levels — who were wrapping up three months of volunteering. In that time they had helped build playgrounds and medical facilities with their own hands. Their energy, their commitment, and what they had achieved at their age was genuinely extraordinary.

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