Clean It Up
UK Floor Cleaning Forum => Carpet Cleaning Forum => Topic started by: M.Acorn on December 10, 2008, 09:06:24 am
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Got to go and quote for a huge garden and lesiure centre this morning ! at a guess it will be around 10 thou sq ft,been there before shopping etc ! there are lot`s of displays and stuff to be worked around,so was going to go in at the normal .28p per ft.
It will be an out of hours job,starting from 6 pm ish,and prob over a couple of nights ,at least.
If i get it it`s my tax bill paid ;D i will be using a porty.
1) will it be too much to take on ?
2) Does .28p sound too much ?
3) It`s that blue cord style carpet,which i would ,vac,multi pro,sebo,then acid rinse,any prob with this on such a large area ,carpet is fairly new as it`s not been open for more than a couple of years ;D.
Cheers
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Good luck Mark, sounds like a nice little earner
regards
Dave
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Well not far off in my estimation,it`s 21850
sq ft ! got a map with all measurements on ,and areas of carpet.Been done before a year or so ago,didn`t ask what they paid ,should i have done ?
Place is really busy and carpets pretty dirty.
estimat that it will take me 3 sessions 5 hours per session 6pm till 11pm.
Was thinking to do one price for al carpet,some not as dirty as others,then the displays that can`t be moved will compensate for the dirtier areas.
On my normal pricing it would be around £6118.00 but was thinking along the lines of £3000,as they may well be a reg customer ?
Input anyone ;D
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Well not far off in my estimation,it`s 21850
sq ft ! got a map with all measurements on ,and areas of carpet.Been done before a year or so ago,didn`t ask what they paid ,should i have done ?
Place is really busy and carpets pretty dirty.
estimat that it will take me 3 sessions 5 hours per session 6pm till 11pm.
Was thinking to do one price for al carpet,some not as dirty as others,then the displays that can`t be moved will compensate for the dirtier areas.
On my normal pricing it would be around £6118.00 but was thinking along the lines of £3000,as they may well be a reg customer ?
Input anyone ;D
Why are they not going back to the previous company that cleaned it. If It's a quality issue then you can play on that and get a good price. If it's a price issue then you may need some negotiation skills to get the best price possible. Striking a rapore with the descision maker could be a help. If it's a price issue you could say to them what do I need to beat to secure it. May save a lot of time. Only works if you can deal with the man with the cheque book. Any one else and the message gets lost in translation.
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I am flexible in my working hours, and will fit in the cleaning around the hours you want me there. Cut off point would be 6 am so carpet would be dry for opening at 8am.( I use high powered drying fans ,to speed up drying time)
With the dimensions supplied by yourselves 21850 square feet ,using my normal pricing structure of .28p per square foot the job comes out at a massive £6118.00 !
Some of the carpeted areas are extremely dirty, which would increase the price to .32p per square foot, but you mentioned that some of the displays are immovable so that would compensate. Meaning a flat rate.
I would also like to have you on my list of yearly commercial jobs ,so would be prepared to halve the above price to £3059.00 For a contract in writing saying that you are tied to using my services on a yearly basis. Until 2010
You mentioned that you had had the carpets cleaned before ,was it an increase in price ,or the quality of the other companies work that has made you look elsewhere ?
The job will involve a through vacuum, followed by a high alkali pre spray, which is then worked into the carpet using a contra rotating machine, this will then be followed by steam extraction. Then dried using large fans.
I estimate the job will take roughly 20 hours to complete ,so I could do 2 sessions starting at 6pm end at 4am.or 4 sessions ,start at 6pm end at 11pm.But as I said before I am happy to work around you and your staff.
Currently working on this !
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You might be as wise to get some one in on the job with you to get it done faster , I believe most companies want the work done quickly and at a good price but this is only what I think and DO NOT take this as Gospel .
You could even hire a bigger machine for the day/evening if you get the work
Just a thought
Good luck I hope you get the work fella
Ricky
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Cheers mate ,was thinking the very same thing even at 20 hours thats 1000+sq ft per hour,which takes me 2 to 3 hours usually.
Not sure how it would work though,if i book the job and get some help i would be reponsible for them if the did something wrong !
Mulling that one over at the mo,and yes 2 portys would make a big difference,couldn`t get access with a t,m unless you had very very long hoses
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21850 sq ft is approx 2006 sq m @ £3 sq m is cock on.
Last one I did was 1250 sq m and I charged them £3 a sq m, did it through Initial/Rentokil and they bit my hand off.
This was also a heavily used public area, lots of chewing gum etc.
Think your time estimation is out though especially as your using a porty.
Took me 40 hours over 4 nights 10pm - 8am for just over half that.
Having to fill up every hour or so so need to allow 15 mins every hour to mess about filling and mixing chemicals.
You'll be suprised how long it takes to go back and forth filling a 50 gall tank and also getting rid of the waste.
2 or 3 passes on really dirty areas and chewing gum spotting took me down to 30 sq m an hour including coffee breaks.
BUT IT'S WORTH IT WHEN ABOUT 6 WEEKS LATER THE GOLDEN EAGLE SH*TS THROUGH YOUR LETTERBOX.
Just allow yourself plenty of time, you'll find they're very flexible with so give them a very broad time span.
I told them 3 nights maybe 4 at most depending on how it went and they were happy with that.
Only just did it in 4.
John
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A job that size you will spend half your time filling and emptying your porty also most of the commercial jobs ive done they would laugh at you if you came in at £3sq metre.
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£150 an hour?
good luck with that,
derek
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Might just get the wife involved or find myself a bucket and vac monkey to help with this ;D
Updated copy
1/ I am flexible in my working hours, and will fit in the cleaning to suit your opening hours.
2/ Cut off point would be 6 am so carpet would be dry for opening at 8am. (I use high-powered drying fans, to speed up drying time)
3/ 21850 square feet, dimensions supplied by you, at 0.28p per square foot. Total comes in at £6118.00. There is no vat on top of that.
4/Some of the carpeted areas are extremely dirty, which would normally increase the price to .32p per square foot, but you mentioned that some of the displays are immovable so that would compensate. Meaning no extra charge.
5/ I would highly recommend that you have an annual contract and would therefore suggest adding you to my list of yearly commercial jobs. If this is acceptable I would be prepared to halve the above price to £3059.00, for a written contract for my services on an annual basis yearly basis until 2011. There would be no increase on these prices during the contract period.
6/ The job will involve a through vacuum, followed by a high alkali pre spray, which is then worked into the carpet using a contra rotating machine, this will then be followed by steam extraction. Drying using large fans.
7/ I estimate the job will take 2 of us 30 hours to complete, so I could do 3 sessions starting at 6pm end at 4am, or 6 sessions, start at 6pm end at 11pm. But as previously stated, I am happy to work around you and your staff.
You mentioned that you have had the carpets cleaned before, was it an increase in price, or the quality of the other companies work that has made you look elsewhere?
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DARREN O How do you know they would laugh at you if you've never tried it.
Probably laugh at your low price and think yes.
Have done 7 this year but that was the biggest, all at £3 sq m and 2 of those were with Initial/Rentokil.
Both companies have my rates and they come back to me.
John
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6/ The job will involve a through vacuum, followed by a high alkali pre spray, which is then worked into the carpet using a contra rotating machine, this will then be followed by steam extraction. Drying using large fans.
think you want thorough.
But im no carpet cleaner so dont know the terminology you guys use, so what you already had could be correct.
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£150 an hour?
good luck with that,
derek
Well spotted Derek. £150 per hour ???. No way.
I quoted 10 months ago for 2000 sq yd office carpet at £1.60 per sq yd and never heared anything.
I was rubbing my hands at the thought of it too.
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Got to disagree,
£150 per hr is not out of the way on some commercial , wether it is acheivable using a porty I have my doubts, but certainly other methods shouldnt be a problem.
geoff
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will work out less than that for 2 of us ;D
he has also left it a bit late,as he wants it doing over xmas,so i have that on my side too.
Will get my wife to go througgh it when she gets home,she has the english a level ,wheras i got kicked out of the lessons for being uncontrolable (adhd before it was recognised,just got put down to being a problem child)
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This will break your heart with a portable for the size and type of carpet.
Firstly offer a demo so you can guage how easily it will clean and they can see your work. This will make working out your price and getting it easier.
If I where you Id get an experienced TM user in and do a deal with him. It will be cleaner, dryer and quicker than any portable. Tms where born for this sort of work.
Mark
PS. If its the type of carpet i think it is then its cheap so beaware of this as £3sqm is way off.
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Mark
Sorry guys but have to discount most of what has been said
£150 per hour? no problem
Need a TM? No. But get a helper to fill bucket/empty etc and pre-spray in front of you (in smallish areas, say 25m2 per time) and I'm assuming you have a porty that produces a, heat and b, 300-400 psi?
Charge £1.40-£1.50 to get job but if I were you I would ring up contact and make up some questions (that appear relevant) to get a conversation going and it it feels right ask if £1.70 per sq mtetre will get you job (or however much that works out)
Most important thing is to get the job because at whatever rate you go in at over £1.40 per square metre, you get your £150 per hour if it takes 2 x 8 hour shifts which is what I think it will take you.
Happy days or what?
Check with custy first that it was'nt cleaned with a rotary system before as this will make your quote look like one of Pilgrim Payne's (and this is where most CC's lose out on commercial jobs) compared to someone who goes in with a victor wolf and a bag full of charly pads
Pete
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I quoted 10 months ago for 2000 sq yd office carpet at £1.60 per sq yd and never heared anything.
I was rubbing my hands at the thought of it too.
Same here.
Had a quote in for £2,000 plus on about 1,300 sq/m
Put a similar quote via the office cleaning company for the same place.
Looks like we lost out to a TM outfit who have gone in at £800
Even with 2 rotaries I reckon on at least 16 hours work and that would be the easy way of doing it. 16 hours of using a wand :o
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p.s
or you could just ask who did it before
ring them up, tell them your ring a n other managment agency and ask what they would charge to clean 2000m2 or whatever it is.
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Pete , thats a foxy way of doing things ;)
Mark , test area sounds good , if you do a good job u should get the work if the bill payer is viewing
Good luck Fella , hope it s yours after all the thought your putting in
Ricky
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Pete ;)
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Some organisations ask for 3 quotes, you and 2 others, confuse the buyer by putting yours and a fake one in at a higher price then they'll have 4, they usually don't go for the bottom one but you have a 50-50 chance, just make sure that you know which quote they have picked.
Shaun
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My price works out at £90 per hour??
John
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chances are your dealing with the monkey, not the organ grinder. i did a big quote, gave her all the speel, even showed her the truckmount. she was well impressed, gave her the quote and she said, i'll run it by the management and see what they say. like she's gonna give them all my speel. all they see is the price. didn't get it @ £1.75 m2.
gutted.
derek
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Mark
What system are you going to use mate ???
Good luck anyway :)
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Ask them outright!
Who's done it before?
What did they charge?
Why are you looking for Someone else?
And what is your problem are the previous cleaner not coming upto standard or are you looking to save money?
When i go into a situation like this i want to know the answers as i'm not there to sell my services... i'm there to solve a problem that the customer has.
1/
I'm not a salesman selling my sevices i am a consultant and as a consultant my sales pitch is to turn their request into a problem for which i alone can solve for them.
2/
Never fall into the trap of pricing for cleaning every so many months, Price the first clean at what ever you like, followed by 2, 4, or 6 cleanes over the next so many months (depending on what they want) at a much lower price, you'll find that they will buy the first clean to get the reduced price maintenence package,
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Don't tell them that you'll clean for them the carpets every say 6 months or 12 months at such and such a price as you hav'nt built in any price rises.
4/
Email them when their next clean is due, allowing 4 weeks for them to respond,Don't phone them with the reminder to be told it doesn't need cleaning yet, 'put a sell-by' date in the email informing them that after the 4 week period the price will return to the original higher price. Phone them on the 4th week if nec
To Some all this may seem like poppycock but it works for me. Take from it what you will using your own judgment and i hope you will secure many large commercial contracts in the years to come.
Wishing you a very happy Christmas
Dave
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H/W/E ;D And a sebo duo ! Have given him a list of options,one includes having it all done in one pop ! so would be getting 2 other c/cers involved,from a company i buy my chems from .There is going to be a huge amount of stock to be moved so best for all parties if it`s done over a few nights.Unless he is going to have a team f peeps there moving stuff !
It`s in the post so see what happens ;D
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Sounds ike you have it organised mark.
Just remmember as you work on through the night you will start slowing down due to fatigued.
Just saying that as before i used my l m systems i used to do a car dealers in stockport with h w e and it was a hard job and used to start slowind down after midnight ::)
Good luck
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Mark, your idea of productivity is way off mate. Get real, you're tackling a mahooooosive job with a portable machine.
OK I'll say something that others will be afraid to......If you turn out the productivity you project, you will not be extracting the carpets anywhere near thoroughly enough! You'll just be getting them wet.
I had a trained-up helper with me to extract 900m² of the same type of carpet in a school recently. It took us 3 days, 8 hours a day. You could fall on your arse big time here if you don't get realistic.
The money you could earn from this job could go a long way to buying a small truckmount off the back of it. To seriously consider doing this amount of area with HWE in a restricted time, I'd reckon you'd be mad to attempt it with a portable. Believe me, after that school job I wanted to die.
Is HWE really the best way to go? What do they want? An unseen benefit of "soil removal from deep down in the base of the pile" or do they want it to just "look better" ?
Think square peg, round hole.
My gut feeling is that unless they've been stung by a low-price bodger they won't really have any gauge for what is a proper carpet clean and what is a cosmetic quick-fix.
Your best way may be to bonnet it, with 2 or 3 machines going. As mentioned already, always be thinking of future work, get a regular maintenance schedule proposal as well as your quote for the one-off job.
Sorry to be a bore but seriously don't under-estimate the time and effort that's going to be involved extracting this huge area with a portable!!
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Well said Jim.
You will certainly need a water boy to vac the carpet in front of you and keep filling the machine etc. Dont forget when YOU are filling or empting it that is lost productivity time.
Its a big site you will have to allow 5 or 10 minutes to go there and back each time and if its done in the evening it gets very very boring.
Doing loads of schools and I got fed up of there and back all the time with buckets of water so I took a mate with me in the end, then bought a TM. Ha.
Murky
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Good point jim
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Spot on Jim there.
The times work out the same as mine,you did 37.5 sq m an hour with a labourer
I grafted hard to do 30 sq m an hour on my own.
£3 a sq m is not out for that type of soiling.
Mark's price for the job is the same when converted from sq ft to sq m.
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Ditch the porty for this job it will kill you and the results will be dissapointing.
You need to clean as Jim has correctly stated using a low moisture pad system, on a low profile carpet such as this you will see good results with no wick back, essential if do not want any call backs and win any future work.
On a job of this size you need something like Charly pads which will clean a large area between rinses or DF.
You will need help with the vacuuming and spraying ahead of the clean, I would spray approx 10 sq mts at a time (no more) to avoid drying out and misses.
Good Luck ;)
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Cheers for all the input guy`s ! got a couple of options going around at the mo,l/m system,hire machine from local machine place or possibly getting hold of a t/m ,but deffo will be having a helper and a hosepipe for filling up ,if i do go the h/w/e route.
Some of the carpet that is down is really clean ,there are lot`s of areas that are tucked away that don`t get much use,so hoping that will compensate.On the plan he gave me with the measurements,it was split into 3 sections,so assumed that last person did it in 3 visits,which would be my best option.Waiting for the call,if i do get it i will be going back in to talk to him and see which of the options he wants,i know i quoted about right,is there any set rule about going over original quote ? £ increase wise.
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you could use me and my machine max 470 tm £50 per hour 500 ft of hoses
how far away from exit is it
Bri
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Agree with jim mark and i would go with the l m system :)