Keeping it local by the numbers
Everyone says they want to keep it local. But when you actually look at where the money goes, the difference is massive.
Let's run the numbers.
Take a $2,000/month commercial cleaning contract. Pretty standard for a mid-sized Northern Rivers office or club. That's $24,000 a year.
Here's where it actually ends up.
Option A — a large national franchise
Most of the money goes to wages. But not necessarily local wages.
National cleaning franchises run on subcontracting. So your wages get handed down through labour-hire agencies that often rotate workers in from outside the region. Then you've got:
• Head-office overhead (10–15%)
• Interstate insurance and admin (5–8%)
• Franchisor margin (another 10–15%)
By the time everything's paid out, somewhere between 25% and 40% of the cleaning spend is sitting in local households.[1]
Real local retention: roughly $6,000 to $10,000 a year.
Option B — a Northern Rivers social enterprise
Every dollar of wages goes to a Northern Rivers resident. Suppliers are local where possible. Insurance is placed through a regional broker. Any surplus flows back through Sistability into community services across the region.
Real local retention: roughly $20,000 to $22,000 a year.[1]
Same $24,000. Two to three times the local impact.
What that extra $12,000 actually buys
It's tempting to see these numbers as abstract. They're not.
$12,000 extra going into a local household can cover:
• A full year of school fees at most regional private primaries.
• Six months of rent in a median Ballina or Lismore rental.
• An out-of-pocket specialist appointment someone would otherwise put off.
Now multiply it across the region. There are an estimated 200 medium commercial cleaning contracts across the Northern Rivers.[2] If all of them chose local, that's $2 to 4 million a year shifting back into local households.
That's not a slogan. That's a calculator.
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CIC will run them with you. Walkthroughs take 30 minutes, no pressure.
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SOURCES
[1] Clean Impact Co. internal modelling, derived from BSCAA labour-cost ratios and franchise overhead structures.
[2] Clean Impact Co. order-of-magnitude estimate, based on Australian Business Register data for cleaning-services entities in postcodes 2477–2484 and 2480 (May 2026).
