When it comes to pricing a residential or commercial cleaning job it is important to hit the mark accurately with a fair price. In this article we will look at a method for accurately estimating prices for cleaning jobs and offer some tips for quoting prices to customers.
Quoting a price too low means leaving money on the table and wasting an opportunity to profit. By offering to clean at a price level that is barely profitable you will be damaging the cleaning industry overall in your area and you will find it difficult to raise prices to a profitable level in the future. Trying to win customers by pricing low is clearly a bad strategy for getting started in the cleaning business.
Quoting too high means that you will often be declined by customers and may miss out on jobs unless your customers perceive that they will be getting above average quality services from you. Having an established brand that your prospects are familiar with is one way to be able to price higher than the market average. The other way is by offering truly unique services or having a highly effective sales strategy.
The best way to estimate a price is to firstly come up with an approximation of how long it will take to complete the job. Make a thorough inspection of the building in question, break the job down into the various tasks and then calculate the total time that it will take you or one of your workers to complete.
The next step is to take your time estimation and multiply it by a fair hourly rate to calculate the total labor cost for the job. Don’t forget to include traveling time.
A small allowance can then be added on for job related expenses such as cleaning products, transport costs and equipment expenses.
You should then add on another small allowance that can be put towards your monthly fixed costs such as rent, insurance and marketing costs. You can come up with a suitable figure by taking your total monthly overheads and dividing this by the average number of cleaning jobs that you do and month.
You will then have arrived at a figure that represents your total costs for the job. Finally, you can add on a suitable amount of profit and then you will have the total quote amount that you can put forward to the client.
When you are starting out you can compare your quotes to what your competitors would charge for a similar job to make sure that you are reasonably close to fair value for your services.
Don’t forget that the first time you do a cleaning job you will probably spend a lot longer then you will on subsequent visits. After you have cleaned the property once you will then have it in reasonable condition and you will be familiar with it. Many cleaning business operators charge an additional fee for the first visit and you can consider doing so on a case-by-case basis, depending on the state of the property in question.
If you are pricing by the hour you should never let your customer know this. If you have quoted them for a three-hour job and they catch you leaving after two hours, then they may feel cheated. Quote a price for completing the job rather than an hourly rate if you can get away with it.
Price estimation in the cleaning business, or any service business for that matter takes time and skill to get right. Successful cleaning business operators start off with a good pricing system and then try to constantly perfect this system over time.
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