Ian_Giles

  • Posts: 2986
Re: How did you get your commercial work?
« Reply #20 on: March 27, 2006, 01:16:18 pm »
If you are going for commercial stuff, whatever you do, don't go in cheap!
Don't price it as if it was a domestic house!!!

Potentially the small to medium sized commercial stuff offer you possibly the best paying accounts of all.
Shops are ok, but the prices are the tightest of all on those and of course most of them are quite tiny.

But when you move on to the accounts that would take you about 3 to 6 hours done trad you can make really top money, even with trad they can pay really well, but with WFP they are the cream.

The bigger commercial stuff begins to get tightly priced, much like the small shops, when companies are paying out several hundred quid they start to look closely at the price once more.
But a small office, the equivalent of the upstairs on a pair of semi's and about 10 minutes work will bring you in £10 to £15, maybe more than that.

A 3 storey office block that you can knock out in 3-5 hours trad should get you close to £100, and when you do it WFP and still charge the same amount and only take an hour to do it, then you really can make money.

Remember, if you are going up over 30ft then charge for it, even with a pole that is still hard work and is going to be putting a fair old strain on your body. :o

WFP may mean you are doing the work quicker, but if you drop your prices because you are quicker then what on earth is the point in investing all that money in the first place??
You have to cover your investment and your increased overheads and the last thing you want is to be stuck earning no more than you were before!!

My next fav accounts after the medium sized office are the well priced domestic, as a result of WFP these are really top paying accounts for me now.

I have had the balls to crank up my minimum price, even for a tiny semi I am charging £8.00, ditto bungalows and I'm hardly having any refusals either.

Drive around your area, visit trading estates or look at the various offices and small factories around you, are their windows clean or dirty?

As Rich has said, call in on them and say someone rang and  asked you to give a quote for the window cleaning, it may at least get you past the receptionist!

Ian
Ian. ISM CLEANING SERVICES