shubamsji

@bsutton wrote:

Charging per sqft does take some practice. The more you do it the easier it becomes. You will eventually be able to have sqft averages in your head for certain rooms. For example: Ave. bedroom traffic is 75 sqft., hall is 45 sqft, dining is 120, LR is 300, Family room is 350 and rec room up to 600 sqft.
When getting into the larger rooms with less soil and staining, I discount. My base price to clean and stain protect is 50 cents/sqft. With this in mind, if I clean a quality house with 2400 sqft but it only takes me 4 hrs, I may only charge $400. It’s my way of rewarding the good housekeepers. I try not to charge more that $100 per hour. On the other hand, if I go in to clean a 200 sqft room and spend 2 hours, I will figure out a way to get close to $200 from them without pissing them off. I’ve begun to individualize my pricing. It seems to be working and seems to put more money in my pocket. I think it will come back to bite me some day as customers start to talk to one another but at that point, I will have to tell them that pigs cost more to clean up after. 😉

It’s like you took a page right out of my book! That is exactly how I Price. If I feel like I’m losing money then I start charging extra for spot removal. If I feel like things are moving along then they start getting discount’s. I try to keep my pricing between $90.00 and $120.00 an hour on average, but shootfor the $100.00 mark. I like the Idea of requiring the beds took moved if we are to be cleaning under them. I HATE MOVING BED’s!

we had similar results when we ran a radio campain at a smaller local station over the course of three to four months time i was only able specificaly track 2 calls to the ad. the hard part with radio to me is its hard to track the calls absolutly to the radio. What i mean is average joe is driving home from work, hears our ad, laughs, and forgets it, then a month later he comes home and his wife yells at him for traking in mud, so he grabs the phone book, sees our ad, remebers hearing about us from… somewhere, calls and reports that he found us in the yellow pages. Were going to be trying another campaign in a few months and hopefully will get more direct results.

Just ran accross this old thread, and had fun reading about everybody so I thought I would tell my saga. My history has been primarily in construction. My dad was a general contractor and i was raised swinging a hammer, and thats what i always wanted to be. Then by the time I was 21ish, and i was starting to have back issues, and i watched my Dad at 55 still beating his brains out every day trying to make an honest buck i decided maybe I might have been miss directed. from there i kinda floundered around for a while. I sold cell phones, joined the army guard (oops) became an excavator, moved from Utah to Alaska and got into trucking. Then i went to Iraq on deployment and had alot of time to think, and what I decided is all that time i thought construction was the way to go, what I really wanted was to be the boss. So with some money in my pocket i started looking for opertunities. At first I thought I was going to buy into a sandwich franchise, but then i couldn’t come up with the 300,000 they wanted just to get me rolling (glad I couldn’t get funding now). Then it came to my attention that my brother in law Bayden Neilson was getting ready to sell his HB franchise and move south to montana, and I had an ah ha moment. We worked out a deal, and my wife and I became the new proud owners of the only Alaska Heaven’s Best.

i have run a buffer over surfaces like that with a thin pad and just enough 101 to loosen the over spray, and splatter, but like anything ya got to be carefull to test first so you don’t end up with bigger problems. the easiset is just to catch it while its fresh. if its an employee thats causing the problem, i would make them go back and scrub it out by hand, might cost a little extra in time, but they probably will be a little more carefull next time.

I do my pricing at around a dollar per tile for cleaning, and .25 for sealing. beings that the hardest part is the grout lines and the smaller tiles means more grout, and more time and work. its also easy for the client to count their tiles and know about how much the job will be. when it gets to really small tiles 2″ or smaller i will on sight bid these as the price could get out of control. actual pricing is still taken by sqft and then tile size modifies the final price. that being said when i can justify the new machine i will probably go to a straight sqft price as there seems to be far less scrubbing involved.

We had the same scam for almost a month over and over again. It was almost daily for awhile 3 times a day as they went through the phone book, and hit each of our numbers. we just told them we didn’t clean rugs and didn’t take cards. adventually they quit trying

There is another company called guardian, very similar to guardsmen. There is a little more paper work to get involved. We haven’t dont anything with them yet mostly because we don’t get much work with guardsmen. I don’t think they activly sell it up here in AK so the only people who have it are implants from the military, and by the time I go through the rigamoroll to get on base there isn’t much profit margin left. It’s good slow season work, but I hate doing their jobs when I’m busy with real work.

Our Meile seems to be working great. It seems to wash 7-10 pads well. it has a heavy soil and extended wash option which allow you to use more soap in a second cycle, so when the pads are supper dirty i will us those to extend the wash time and get a little extra dirt out. It is extremly heavy so don’t plan on moving it often, and it has a small crack on some surface trim (no idea how that happened) but overall it has been a dream