Clean It Up
UK Window Cleaning Forum => Window Cleaning Forum => Topic started by: johnny_h on October 04, 2007, 05:46:36 pm
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quoted £25.00 an hour to clean gutter and facias which are black and green with muck tested a bit and it does come off all done with pure water shes happy he thinks im taking the urine , am i charging too much? west london area ...
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no, thats a normal rate, Luke
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dont charge per hour charge per job
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woman whos house I now do got a firm in and they charged her £300.00 for both sides, apparently they took them down and cleaned by hand in the cu-de sac
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Don't quote an hourly rate!
Just work out how long it will take you and then charge a price for the job!
Andy
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I'm SW London.
I charge £25ish ph and many on this site think I'm too cheap!
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I'm SW London.
I charge £25ish ph and many on this site think I'm too cheap!
Simon,
You are too cheap for London!
Take a look: http://www.cleanitup.co.uk/smf/index.php?topic=43823.0
Andy
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quoted £25.00 an hour to clean gutter and facias which are black and green with muck tested a bit and it does come off all done with pure water shes happy he thinks im taking the urine , am i charging too much? west london area ...
I would say she is m8 £25 an hour is cheap if you didnt take 14 hours to do it, if you did its expensive.
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No matter what you charge some customers will always think you are too dear. The problem is with the customer not with your prices.
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cheers lads
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You tell your customers what your hourly rate is? BIG MISTAKE. It's none of their business. They want a job done, you agree a price for it.
You do it properly, and to a good standard, as agreed. It only takes you 10 minutes? So what?
You've done what was asked and agreed, they owe you.
If they don't like your price, they're perfectly entitled to get other quotes, but if they accept yours and the job's done to their satisfaction, they've got nothing to complain about.
Don't let the customer dictate to you or you'll finish up working for nothing.
Cheers,
Ian
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I'm SW London.
I charge £25ish ph and many on this site think I'm too cheap!
Simon,
You are too cheap for London!
Take a look: http://www.cleanitup.co.uk/smf/index.php?topic=43823.0
Andy
You're probably right Andy. As new customers come along I'm slowly tweaking the price northwards. But there's a fair amount of competition around here so I have to tread carefully.
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I would say she is m8 £25 an hour is cheap if you didnt take 14 hours to do it, if you did its expensive.
i argee with windowwashers if you think thats its going to take 2 hrs
charge £50
3 hrs £75
dont do it by the hr (price wise)
;)
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If I quote for gutters and facias. I tell the customer that they are paying me for the effort I have to put in. Facia boards take far more effort and energy then normall w/cleaning.
If a job will take me two hours I will charge them for 4 hours at my w/cleaning rate.
I class the job as an extra. So I want to be paid very well. I had a lot of trouble with trapped nerves in my arms when I first went wfp. So any job that puts a lot of extra pressure on them will be reflected in how much I charge. More pressure = more money.
Nel
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on the other side of things, i said to someone an hourly rate last month and this site ripped me for doing it. so i rang her and gave her a one off charge...i thought it would take around 4 hours so charged her accordingly. it took me ALL day so i lost out money cause i listened to people on here. most of the advice is superb on here and has helped me lots. but that one was not good advice. from that job i just learned that i wont b charging by the hour, but charging a dammed lot more!
i dont care its gone now and im not having a dig at anyone. charging by the hour isnt all that bad mate
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oh yeh, they dont realise how much yu can earn working self employed. they're used to £5.50 in shops. not seeing the expense we have.
i think salmon is too expensive in sainsburys. but i dont go to the counter and tell them i think its too expensive. i buy it because i want it. as said they dont HAVE to accept your quote
does my nuts in this does. people taking the mick
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on the other side of things, i said to someone an hourly rate last month and this site ripped me for doing it. so i rang her and gave her a one off charge...i thought it would take around 4 hours so charged her accordingly. it took me ALL day so i lost out money cause i listened to people on here. most of the advice is superb on here and has helped me lots. but that one was not good advice. from that job i just learned that i wont b charging by the hour, but charging a dammed lot more!
i dont care its gone now and im not having a dig at anyone. charging by the hour isnt all that bad mate
You can't blame anyones advice if you got the price wrong on a job! There is plenty of other advice on here that helps when quoting for jobs that would have helped you price it right.
Andy
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Never price up a job on an hourly rate, and never tell the customer what your hourly rate is.
It's fair enough to charge a 'DAY RATE', ie, you charge £150 per day (or whatever it is you think represents the turnover you want to make)
An hourly rate almost never equates to a day rate, most of us are lucky if we work 5 or 6 solid hours a day, take out tea breaks, dinner breaks, ttravelling between accounts, talking to customers, writing out invoices and so on, and that's just for starters.
If possible, always price per job, if you think it's 4 hours and it takes you all day, well..tough, you screwed up, live and learn.
As you gain experience you will make fewer and fewer mistakes, there will also be times when you might reckon on 4 hours work and get it done in 2 hours, but thats what pricing is all about.
Ian
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on the other side of things, i said to someone an hourly rate last month and this site ripped me for doing it. so i rang her and gave her a one off charge...i thought it would take around 4 hours so charged her accordingly. it took me ALL day so i lost out money cause i listened to people on here. most of the advice is superb on here and has helped me lots. but that one was not good advice. from that job i just learned that i wont b charging by the hour, but charging a dammed lot more!
i dont care its gone now and im not having a dig at anyone. charging by the hour isnt all that bad mate
alot say on here they dont charge by the hour, when in fact all work is priced that way but in rough terms,
I will prove my point: wc sees house 8 windows will take say 30 mins he looks for £15 an hour so quotes £8. thats 50p over what he wants an hour to allow to extra time that could be needed just incase.
every window cleaner that i know and have read about on here all have an hourly rate they just dont state it to customers, I on the other hand do sometimes if I am unsure I put in a quote and an hourly rate so they have a choice (that does not happen often) working for less money to get a job is not in my nature.
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I quoted for a job and told the person I thought it would take 4 hours and gave a prices accordingly....in the end I worked 10 hours on this house with only a 15 minute break ....at the end of the day, theu guy came out and said 'where's the bill' I gave it to him with the price as agreed.....he said that's not right, you worked 10 hours and you said it would take around 4....
Yes I told the guy but thats is my mistake and as such I will honor our agreement....he wanted to give me more money I declined...and said if it was such a problem how about he gave some money to a charity of his choice...he said this he would do....
The next day I checked my bank account and the guy had put 400 in the bank instead of the 160 I was going to charge him.
But this job did make me think about how I will charge in future...and hourly rate is not it.....it is what I think the effort expended is worth....
Ok this guy lives in a really posh house but in the end he showed that he knew the value of money and could see very early on in the day that I had made a big mistake....and so did I !!!
The fact that he paid me more that I quoted was really nice...and put my faith back in some customers as I have recently been 'done' by a couple of customers.
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On Gutter cleaning I charge by the meter
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on the other side of things, i said to someone an hourly rate last month and this site ripped me for doing it. so i rang her and gave her a one off charge...i thought it would take around 4 hours so charged her accordingly. it took me ALL day so i lost out money cause i listened to people on here. most of the advice is superb on here and has helped me lots. but that one was not good advice. from that job i just learned that i wont b charging by the hour, but charging a dammed lot more!
i dont care its gone now and im not having a dig at anyone. charging by the hour isnt all that bad mate
You can't blame anyones advice if you got the price wrong on a job! There is plenty of other advice on here that helps when quoting for jobs that would have helped you price it right.
Andy
and i quote "im not having a dig at anyone"
just purely stating that i listened and it didnt work. and YES i quoted the job wrong
no harm intended. just saying my personal experience :)
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I think that unless you are stepping outside of your comfort zone, where the pricing of windows is concerned, never guesstimate, always estimate!
When you give an hourly rate, no matter how quickly or slowly you work, your earnings stay exactly the same.
Once you have a solid system for pricing, and you are also experienced enough to pick up on variables correctly (access, degree of difficulty and so on) you are always going to be on safe ground.
For me, I break work down into units, i.e., into what I consider to be a standard sized window, I know how much I charge per unit, and then it is a simple case of counting your units and pricing accordingly, making any allowances for any variables that will make the job more difficult.
your hourly rate simply does not equate to what you will earn over 12 months, its too small a sample.
When you truly look at the hours you are actually working per day, even if you are going out to work from 9 till 5, you will not be working for 8 hours.
Your time working is the minutes it takes you to clean a house.
Take ten minutes to clean a standard semi?
Well you won't average 6 an hour between 9am and 5pm that’s for sure.
Take out holidays, sick days, late starts and early finishes, days lost due to bad weather, days that simply don't go as planned, plus all the other things I mentioned in my previous reply.
Look back at your last years accounts, what did you submit to the tax man? That is your turn over, and that is the bottom line, and don't forget, you have to take your overheads out of that too, so that is going to be at least 5k (oh yes it is, don't kid yourself that it isn't)
Take that 5k off your turnover (minimum) and then you are getting close to what your actual income is.
If you charge £25 per hour as your hourly rate, your potential customer is going to think you are on something like 50k a year, this is going to be incredibly unlikely in reality. …..for all the reasons I’ve stated above!
If you are a newbie starting out, then in a way, charging an hourly rate appears a good way of ensuring you earn what you want, but of course you will be painfully slow at the job to begin with. It takes many months to develop real speed, years usually, but again, if you start out charging an hourly rate, you will simply end out doing more and more work for the same amount of money.
The problem with window cleaning is that it is a simple and practical job, the job itself doesn’t require a lot of brain power, and many of us window cleaners don’t truly understand business, we just turn up with a ladder and bucket; “£8.00 please missus.” Money in your pocket and move on to the next job and at the end of the day you count up what you’ve earned…£100? Cool! 500 smackers a week!
And that’s where we let ourselves down. It is a business, the job itself is easy (relative) But running and truly understanding a business isn’t….
All this waffle is only to try and explain why I don’t think you should charge by the hour because the customer won’t understand the difference…minimum wage is just under £6.00 an hour and maybe she works in an office for a similar rate, pulling in £180 a week or so and then sees a guy with a bucket earning more than that in a single day!
Ian