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).
