Great reply Lionheart,
Going the route you have described is exactly why window cleaning is mostly a sole trader occupation!!!
You are quite correct in all you say.
Therefore you have to have the kind of work whereby your employees can indeed do around £200 per day per man.
But surely you have to have a basic minimum built into your wage structure??
I didn't think you could pay purely on piece work for an employee??
That was always the way I did it when I took on lads on a self employeed basis, I gave up in the end though, it was becoming increasingly risky to take lads on in this way
And you go through so many guys! Then you find one that can stick at it, a year or 2 goes by and they leave and set up by themselves!!
Over the years I have had 6 do this (Squeaks being the last one, I gave up on employing people after Squeaks and sold him just about all of my remaining domestic round) and 5 of them are still going strong now.
To employ legally and on the books means you have to have the kind of work where they can produce a high enough turn over, on domestic work that takes some doing.
Paul C Smith over on the other forum did a good post on this, he used Doorknockers to generate work, he hasn't been going very long as a window cleaner and is already VAT reg.
If you've got what it takes then it is the road to go down.
If your minimum price for a semi is only £8.00 or less then move along please, forget about employing people. You won't stand a snowballs of making it work.
Er...I fall into that category myself
£8.00 is my minimum.
You probably need to be up around £15.00 for the same size job.
If you have what it takes then the sky's the limit, but how many of us have it?
