From Essex Roots to a £10m London Operation: The Rise of Prime Clean
With growth that has taken it from an £800,000 regional business to a £10 million specialist serving London’s most demanding financial institutions, Prime Clean has built its reputation the hard way — one contract at a time.
London’s cleaning and facilities management market is a crowded one. Procurement processes routinely attract a long list of contractors offering similar services at similar prices. What separates businesses that endure from those that fade is rarely visible at the tender stage. It shows up later — in renewal rates, in the consistency of site management, and in the working relationships that outlast the initial contract term.
By those measures, Prime Clean is worth noting.
A Strategic Move into the Capital
Ray Lancaster and the Lancaster family acquired Prime Clean in 2010, when the business was operating from Essex with a client base concentrated in education and government. The plan from the outset was deliberate: establish a presence in London and build a brand defined by service quality and long-term relationships, not volume.
Sixteen years on, the company has transformed in culture, structure and has extended its reach across the capital from Canary Wharf to Hammersmith. Every pound of that growth has come organically — no acquisitions, no shortcuts. It is a trajectory that reflects sustained client confidence rather than financial engineering.
Finance, Insurance and the Demands They Place on Service Providers
Prime Clean has carved out a strong position in the finance and insurance sectors, a market segment that makes few concessions to underperformance. Client-facing environments, security-conscious premises and high standards of presentation are the baseline expectation, not the aspiration. Contractors who cannot consistently meet them do not last in this market.
The company’s first major London professional services contract was a Swiss private bank which was won by Julie Clark and a contract she proudly leads today; This set the tone early and provided market confidence required in central London. Winning and holding that mandate signalled to the wider market that Prime Clean could operate at a level of client sophistication well beyond its size at the time. Further contracts across the sector followed.
The business also maintains a broad SME portfolio alongside its institutional work, a mix that sharpens operational flexibility and reduces the concentration risk that can make larger, narrowly focused contractors vulnerable when a major contract moves.
Senior Leadership with Sector Depth
The leadership team Prime Clean has assembled draws on decades of experience at the senior end of FM soft services. Jeanette Van Roy, previously Managing Director of Ambius, leads with a strategic perspective shaped by running large-scale operations alongside Matt Croney who heads Finance and Andy Deeker, a former Managing Director at Lancaster Office Cleaning, brings executive-level experience across the group. The Senior Leadership team work closely with the Lancaster family; Ray and Warren to form a highly experienced board.
It is a management structure that punches above the company’s weight class. The operational discipline and commercial judgement typically associated with much larger contractors are present here in a business that has retained the responsiveness and client focus of a specialist. For clients, that balance is a practical advantage.
The Retention Record Speaks for Itself
In cleaning and support services, retention data is the most candid measure of how a contractor is actually performing. Clients who are satisfied renew. Those who are not, move their business elsewhere, and in a competitive market, there is never a shortage of alternatives.
Prime Clean’s retention figures are, by its own description, exceptional, and the pattern of consistent, year-on-year growth backs that up. A business that has scaled continuously without acquisition has, by definition, held onto its clients while continuing to win new ones. That is not a marketing claim — it is arithmetic.
For facilities Managers and Procurement Leads weighing their options, Prime Clean offers a proposition grounded in evidence: sector expertise, experienced leadership, and sixteen years of measurable performance in one of the UK’s most competitive cleaning markets.

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