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I don’t like the idea of a service or trip charge to a normal in city limit job. Just raise your price and don’t have one. I have read that you can raise your price 10% and 20% of your customers and still make the same amount of money. I have raised my prices twice this year already.
I have been frustrated cleaning tile and grout because of the amount of effort it takes compared to carpet. I have been using lately the dirt napper with no pad. I have found out that this seem to get the little tiny holes better when you have some fine dirt in there. I don’t really use the dirt napper that much on carpet. Best thing is to keep scrubbing.
Wow maybe my minimum is to low I was $65 dollars and raised it to $75 a week ago. I have two van crews and hated sending them to the small jobs. So I try to do those ones by myself. Most of my jobs are about 15 minutes from each other. However I also try to schedule jobs close together. It seems to be a little slower this time of year than it was last year. I am thought I was doing something wrong or different. Looks like I’m not the only one. The good thing about this is that maybe it will ween out some of the bad carpet cleaners and the market won’t be so saturated with carpet cleaners.
What about google does anybody advertise on that. I have gotten a number companies that say they will get on the first page of google and I don’t pay until I am on there. It is $345 a month for my three cities. I don’t pay for clicks I just pay for a monthly fee I would neeed 3-4 jobs to pay for itself each month. Is there anyone else that uses google, msn, or yahoo and that likes the results? I believe more and more people are going to the internet. I would like to get on there but don’t know really what to do.
The mission and vision statements are our own I feel it personalizes them. I forgot to mention one other thing that I put in there it was the ad the says why do property management companies like us.
To those who charge by the room what is the sq.ft. limit? I understand if you increase you price by 10% you can decrease your sales by 20% and still make the same amount of money. I little thought about raising your prices.
I will ask them. I’m sure it will be every 6 months but maybe not the whole unit and maybe traffic areas. The packet had the hb folders from corporate along with the hb brochure. It had our vision and mission statements with a few testimonials. 4 different before and after pics of my own that i had printed at king soopers for 10 cents each. Then we also had our checklist in there that has our written guarantees on it. Then of course we had our card in there in the slot. I thought they looked really sharp. I had it all printed up professionally and in color on glossy paper. Thanks for feed back. Is there anything that you think I should put in there?
So to give a little feed back on the day that I went knocking on doors. I had a list of businesses on this list it had everything: name phone # address e-mail, position whether is was the owner or manager, and even income. I map out he day and did two was able to do three demos and pass out about 15 sales packet. Since that day I have cleaned for one of them. One time was $1400 and it took two of my techs about 8.5 hours including drive time. Today they are up there again doing more for the same company. The amount will be probably around the same amount. I believe I will still need to go up there a third time. I don’t know if they want me to do once a year or twice a year. I am protecting all of the areas which help considerably. The place manages condos on a daily bases and people rent them out days at a time. This is what I want. I know this is good money and this the the type of business that I want. Knowing this it still doesn’t motivate me to do this even once a week for a day. Bottom line I know I need to do this and if I am to retire at a young age,which is my goal, I need to do this one way or another.
I had another one today that should of been pulled up and replace carpet and kilz. The carpet was three years old and still in great condition. They didn’t what to pay for that so I black-lighted and used fresh scent. I told them the odor would still be there but the carpet would be clean. They were happy when I was done. I won’t be worried about this one because they weren’t doing what I was recommending. Looked better and smelt better but the fresh scent was still fresh. I do like the guarantee 95% still have the pets and the other 3% don’t want to pay to the expense. I like it because I think that I make people feel good even the guarantee doesn’t apply to them, but you need to be ready for the 2%.
I have not cleaned an oriental rug with a massive odor on it a while. Sorry can’t help you on that one. Since the big one that I have done I have done some other and so far all is well, but all the other ones still has the pets so of course I don’t guarantee it.
A few things here that I would like to add. One is a newer franchise carpet cleaning company call Zero Res or something like that lasted only a year in my area. They have a patten process and supposedly can heat the water to some ridiculous temp. way above boiling. Anyway there big advertising pitch was that they don’t leave residue on the carpet. I recently cleaned for a customer of theirs that helped them with some advertising. He said that the owner of zero res said the market was too competitive. Another CC that isn’t a franchise charges $.35 per sq.ft. but he only does one house a day. I did talk to him and he said that it cost him $.15-$.16 per sq. ft. to clean OUCH. He also pulled up in a ford explore with a trailer attached. He was dressed in a company t-shirt that had a hole in it about the size of a dime and you could see his hairy stomach. He also would take a smoke break every 30 minutes it seemed like. He cleaned my neighbors house and I went to talk to him as well. The carpet was clean, but it better be if you spend all day on it. The house was only 1300 sq. ft. I am not worried about this guy take any business away from me. There have been some other small guys that went out of business or got to old to clean carper or whatever. There are a lot of things that make us different other than great service and great prices everybody says they have that. We to have raised our prices we started out at 22 cent raised it to 24 cents and now we are 25 cents because of gas maybe 26 if it continues to increase.
I would love to do this but I don’t really have anything to send I think this would be a good inexspensive way to keep in touch with customers.
Sounds like the carpet was wet for too long. I have never been able to get out the smell of carpet from a flood job that I have done. The ones that I do are really small and didn’t have standing water. I work with a water restoration company and refer them out 99% of the time. If there is mold there is health risks to. STAY AWAY were not trained to remove or deal with mold.
There is another article is the clean fax magazine in this months edition and it said the softener the water the better it cleans. Don’t remember more that just that is does do better I would like to know if the rumor about quick boost being a water softener is true. does anyone know for sure?
Yes fresh scent works better on dry carpet as do most of our products that mix with water. The red dye has better success with dry carpet as well. Here is a more detailed explanation of what I did. The urines was from female dogs I am assuming. My assumption is because the spots were in the middle of the room. I am told that males generally go in corners and on corners of things. Day 1: Is what I did first it drenched the carpet with pet enzyme letting it sit for about twenty minutes and rinsed about three or four times to get the soap out. Having two upholstery mates helps and a lot of defoamer. I put two fans on the carpet and it still took a little over 24 hours to dry. 2nd visit: Painted kilz on the sub floor. 3rd visit: There was a little bit of an odor still so I spayed fresh scent on the backing at left it didn’t do anything. 4th visit: Was at night to black light the house and spray fresh scent on the top of the carpet. The plan was to let it sit all night. 5th visit: The odor was amazingly better by this time but you could still smell an odor. Re-stretch and lay all carpet back down. I also applied fresh scent again on the backing. Clean all carpet with 4 ounces of orange deodorizer in 2.5 gallons of solution. That was from a Monday to a Friday. I came back the following Monday to see if there was still a smell. I did not smell anything. I did have some orange deodorize left so I went ahead and lightly sprayed it again. I have called the realtor and told her to let me know if anyone complains about the smell and so far it has been a week and no phone call. During this week process I did have and $800 ionizer set on high. I hope this helps.
