Clean It Up
UK Window Cleaning Forum => Window Cleaning Forum => Topic started by: stuartb on January 14, 2007, 03:38:59 pm
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Hello everyone,
I have been window cleaning for about 15 months now and and it is going well. I have had to canvas lots and have managed to attract 126 domestic customers so far. I seem to get at least three more new customers per month now without the soul destroying canvasing.
The thing is I would like to earn more money, as we all would and wondered how to get new work in the commercial sector and how much should I be charging?
I appreciate this is quite a braod question but I really hav'nt got a clue and I dont want to undersell myself.
Any help appreciated,
Stu
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What you also have to remember is commercial work is few and far between unless you can clean their windows differently...cheaper.....or can other something thats going to let you do the work you are never going to get it.
Firstly you need to contact the facilities manager and ask him if you can send some info.Then you could wait months until they contact you with a yes or no.Then if you do get it and you do the clean you could wait months again until your paid.
You can look at local council websites and authorities for tenders but most will ask you for 5million liabilty at least.
i do cleans for building contractors,race teams,schools,pubs and lots of managed flats most of these have taken years to get but if your in it for the haul youll be ok.
Ive quoted lots and lots private schools,factorys,nursing homes and never even had a call back...what you didnt have you wont miss move on to the next one.
Sometimes youll need luck youll be in the right place at the right time and someone will use you for their offices.And alot of work will only come by word of mouth you clean his windows and his mate has ashowroom that needs cleaning simple as.
These jobs take time to get and like i said you need something they dont allready have.
Certificates not really but you will definately need the following
Risk assesment
Method statement
Insurance certificate
some ask for your safety policy,manual handling record,equipment records,ppe the list goes on.
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Im trying to do less commercial, just keeping the ones that I have at the moment , they can be good earners but some want you to wait 60 days for payment . If you just do domestic you get your money most of the time when you have finished the clean
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Exactlly if you do residential say £10 minimum 15 a day you get paid most of them or they send you payment and you can still earn a good living.
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Commercial is fairly difficult to get into but the rewards do tend to be greater. As for the payment situation it's surprising how many companies will treat you different from a larger organisation.
About a half of my work is commercial & the longest I have to wait on a regular basis is 2-3 weeks. They do this because they know I am a small one man band & have different payment terms to other companies. You just have to stress what your payment terms are & most will accomodate you.
For eg, I took my Renault Espace into our local dealership for a service & noticed the windows were hanging. Found out who I needed to speak to, gave him a written quote & a day later I was cleaning them. In return for a quick clean I asked them what their normal payment terms were. "Oh we get the invoice, wait 28 days for a reminder then take another couple of weeks to pay."
No good for me was my reply, so we came to an arrangement where I do the windows & hand in an invoice there & then & then in 7 days time I ring the girl in accounts & she raises a cheque in a few days time. Everyones a winner.
So don't let late payments put you off, 90% of companies are only poor payers if you let them get away with it.
As for hourly rates try & aim for around the £40 an hour mark. My attitude is if I have to do it for any less I could do domestic work for the same rate. Not saying I always get it, but that's what I aim for.
How to get more commercial work. It's true, quite a lot of the time you just need to be in the right place @ the right time, but a free line advert in the Thomson Local has got me a fair bit of work over the years.
Just paid for a small box in the Yellow Pages but it doesn't come out till next month so not sure how it will go. Only pay £10 a month so won't exactly break the bank.
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Don't kid yourself that commercial work is the 'Holy Grail' of window cleaning, it isn't and it is in equal measures.
I do a lot of shops in my local town, when you have a lot of them they are great money, but it is a right sod to get them in the first place, and their prices are really low if you have to make a special journey into town to do a single shop, often the price for a shop front can only be about £2.50, hardly worth getting out of your vehicle to do :-\
But if you have a dozen or so to do then they start to become decent money...and then you have the headache of collecting them...why a headache?
Well, by and large shops are done early in the morning, often before they have opened (this allows you free rein with parking and so on) So when you collect them you are often stuck in queues of shoppers >:(
But of course the biggest bonus of all with them is that they are usually weekly and therefore done regardless of weather conditions.
Pubs can be good earners, but you usually have to do the insides too, and smoke is a real pain to deal with and you mostly have to do them before the are open to the public.
Going on to offices; This is where you can really make good money (just my own opinion here mind) The ideal size is the sort of office that would take you maybe 3 to 5 hours to clean (trad), you can charge darn good money for it, way more than you can generally make doing residential, and if you are WFP, and are still charging as you would for Trad then you can REALLY make good money as instead of taking 5 hours you'll be doing the same job in 1 & a half hours.
The bigger commercial ones can be much, much tighter on price, and as has already been said, you can end out waiting a long time for payment.
Where you can earn as much as a couple of quid a minute on an office priced at anything between £50 and £100.
On the kind of job that will take you a few days to clean your earning power will be way down by comparison.
When a company has to pay out several hundred quid (and more) for the window cleaning it usually goes for the cheapest price.
I'm currently in the process of pricing up what I consider to be a big job, probably about 3 full days work if it is all done in one go, I'm going in at my normal kind of pricing structure, but they are also going to be getting other quotes in...cheapest will probably win the job, and that means it probably won't be mine.
But it also entails risk assessment and method statements and so on, and having to go on a health & safety induction course if I get the job.
Another problem with large commercial work is that it also ties up a lot of your time...eggs in one basket and so on, lose it and it hurts!!
Some of my best accounts are my well priced domestic, but these are ones that are mostly outside of housing estates, though having said that I have a days worth of estate stuff and it'll be worth £200, plus £50 worth of shops and so on.
To get the work you do the same as you would with any other kind of work...you knock on doors :-\
Pricing it rather depends on the competition in your area ;)
Ian
Mmm, Just read Paul's post,
Generally I agree with him, except for the £40 per hour bit!
If at the end of the day you can have made £40 an hour then fantastic!
But to make £40 per hour on a full days work, on individual jobs you have to actually earn more than that.
The problem with estimating by how much work you can do in an hour is that the faster you get the cheaper you also get!!
If you break work down into units, count those units and charge per unit, then you are going to price in a far more uniform manner.
Once you know how long your 'unit' is going to take it makes pricing much safer on large jobs.
Ian
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Mmm, Just read Paul's post,
Generally I agree with him, except for the £40 per hour bit!
If at the end of the day you can have made £40 an hour then fantastic!
But to make £40 per hour on a full days work, on individual jobs you have to actually earn more than that.
The problem with estimating by how much work you can do in an hour is that the faster you get the cheaper you also get!!
If you break work down into units, count those units and charge per unit, then you are going to price in a far more uniform manner.
Once you know how long your 'unit' is going to take it makes pricing much safer on large jobs.
Ian
Yes you are right, if you look at the whole day you will earn less. I was looking purely on the time taken & price charged for one job. For eg I clean a hotel that takes me 2 & a half hours & I charge £125. To me that job is a £50 an hour job, but then I will drive to another little job, have 15mins break(if lucky) for lunch & drive to my final job, so at the end of the working day over all I don't earn anywhere near 50 an hour. Just depends how you look at it
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The only "commercial work" i do now is managed blocks of flats i have 20 for one company and have had a good relationship with them and have for 3 years. But i got that because the chap who owns it saw me cleaning a bowling alley high up luck luck luck. Ive tried all sorts even under cutting by £££££££ it stil dosent work.If they have someone they like they wont use you no matter what you try and do.
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IMO it's virtually impossible to canvass up Commercial work. All you can do is make sure your companies name is out there when the time comes for an organisation to look for a WC.
You just said,
Ive tried all sorts even under cutting by £££££££ it stil dosent work.If they have someone they like they wont use you no matter what you try and do.
To me that's a good thing because at least when you do get a decent contract companies are less inclined to go looking for cheaper deals. Be very careful trying to undercut other WCers. Personally I think that sort of behaviour can end up biting you on the backside, it's never a good idea to do.