[Cloverleaf]

Today,
Lounge, hall, study, £ 100, 1.5 hours
large bedroom, large hall, £125, 1.5 hours
Clean limestone floors x 2, 2.5 hours + waited 1/2 hour for custy to come back and pay £225

Set off at 8.45.....finished at 4.30 got home at 5.30

Travel time approx one hours 40 mins to jobs, plus cups of coffee and chattin about life in general, refueling, telephone calls, dinner etc.

Great Scott! how anyone can do a suite which can take 2 to 4 hours for 29 quid is beond me!

John

[Jason_B]

I hear what you are all saying about the fact that I should charge higher rates and believe me I wish I could. However my overheads are probably lower than most carpet cleaners, I don't advertise in the Yellow Pages and I don't advertise in the Press anymore (apart from the Urdu Magazine.) I pay £47 for 5000 leaflets and then get schoolgirls to deliver them for peanuts and ten Benson & Hedges. So yes I may charge less than most but I don't have to pay much out at all to get the work.

This will all change of course when I 'upgrade' and start chasing more commercial work.

[Susan Dean (1stclean)]

Hi Jason,
£29.00 for a 3 pc suite, how many a week do you manage to book at that?
Wouldnt you be better charging a little more and cleaning a few less for the money at the end of the working week. Do you have any other advertising running or do you find that leaflets work alone.
Do you use Double clean on all carpets you clean?
sorry if i seem nosey im just interested to see how other carpet cleaners work!
Kind regards Mark.

I won't beat about the bush - the majority of my customers (over 90%) are muslims and we all know how "careful" they are with their money. It wouldn't be a case of me putting my prices up and getting less work it would be a case of me putting my prices up and getting no work at all. I think they'd rather I slaughtered their first born child than charge them an extra tenner. And also as a community they're like the Borg off Star Trek - if they think I've done a bad job/ overcharged or undercharged one of them the rest of them know within hours! I learned this early on and now use it to my advantage, I get a lot of recommendations. I wasn't the best carpet cleaner around when I first started (having been trained by a cowboy from Doncaster,) and I used to get a few recalls but now I can't remember the last time I had someone complain about anything.

With regards to advertising I ran an ad in the local paper for about 12 weeks and it got me about two jobs so I sacked that. I place ads in the local Urdu magazine which has a circulation of around 7,000 which is a lot less than the local paper but I get a much better response. I think that within 12 months I will be totally without advertising, I have worked hard at getting contracts doing mosques and they are the best referals you can get.

As for Double Clean, yes I use it on the majority of carpets I clean. I do have some other chemicals, one from Chemspec and another from somewhere else I can't recall, but Double Clean seems to do ok for me.

My main problem is going to come when I get my new equipment as I simply will not be able to clean a carpet for £15 using £3K of machine and I can pretty much bet any amount of money that my customers will rather pay £15 for the clean with the old £600 machine than pay £20 for a clean with a £3K machine..... 

ive just been thought this myself my companys been on the go for over 25 years and until 8  months ago i was chargeing the same as you !

i got loads of stick off people on here saying i was too cheap , i wasnt doing agood job , and many more nasty comments 

how ever there were a few like carpetguy , glynn watersworth , dave ingram , and the t.m. lads and a few more on here  that didnt mock but just tried the best to show me the way forward and upping the priceses

i was nt going to do it as i thought i knew better but one week i started buy adding 3 -5 pounds per job then 8 weeks later 5 - 10 pounds and when the truck mount came it went up anthor 7 - 30 pounds per job

i have only losted 11 jobs in that 8 months ! IM NOW GETTING MORE WORK  due to me upping the priceses , ok im still not getting what some are and were now doing suites for 45 - 55  pounds the custys  are paying it with out even saying anything at all so in a months time there going up buy anthor 3 - 15 pounds each  job

i work in middlebougth the cheapwest place to buy smack in the country so as you can imagen most of the places we go are not very nice but they are still paying !

as for the muslms  i now get more work from these graet people because they dont want cowboys they want the job done right , and will pay for that !

hope this helps if you need any help im more then happy to give you my number to help you out any time good luck   susan

[matt jones]

I hear what you are all saying about the fact that I should charge higher rates and believe me I wish I could. However my overheads are probably lower than most carpet cleaners, I don't advertise in the Yellow Pages and I don't advertise in the Press anymore (apart from the Urdu Magazine.) I pay £47 for 5000 leaflets and then get schoolgirls to deliver them for peanuts and ten Benson & Hedges. So yes I may charge less than most but I don't have to pay much out at all to get the work.

This will all change of course when I 'upgrade' and start chasing more commercial work.

Alot of people go on about how there overheads are lower then other peoples so it doesn't matter if they only charge £10 to clean 5, 3 bedroom houses, the point is if you are lucky enough to be in a position where your overheads are on the low side then think how much money you could make be charging reasonable prices, use it to your advantage not for the customers advantage they don't know your overheads are low so what give away your service?
matt

[Doug Holloway]

Hi Guys

This is a good thread , a sensible discussion and all credit to Jason for his honesty.

The thing which strikes me most about working for very low prices is that you are not building a business so your life will never become easier/better, in fact as you get older it will be harder to keep up the volume.

I would suggest a two pronged approach, keep your cheap side while you build a better priced business and in a few years you will look back and think how did I ever work for those prices.

Cheers

Doug

[Kinver_Clean]

For the last three years I have put my prices up by 30 per year. I have still got comments @is that all?' so I put my prices up 50%. ( I have one or three olD customers still on the old rates.) RESULT---3 days work for 5 days pay. Thursday off in the caravan with the other half and the dogs for a weekend walking on the coast or moors!!!!

Trevor

[Cloverleaf]

Well said Doug and Trevor.

Another thing to take into consideration is the quality of work you do.

If you impress your customers, recomendations will always come in and price is rarely an issue.

John

[Mike Halliday]

the best option if you are stuck in a low price situation is to give the customer the opportunity to spend more money if they want,

OK tell them the price for a suite is £35 but always tell them you can protect it for an extra £20 you won't lose the job because you've mentioned the protector but you have given yourself the opportunity to earn an extra £15.

same goes for carpets stick to your low price but  mention the extras, you've nothing to lose.

Mike

[Shaun_Ashmore]

Extras for turbo drying, protector, an extra room while you are there, disinfectant, pile lifting with your rotary. Spot removal should be standard.

Shaun

[Shaun_Ashmore]

I just remebered that a cleaning company used to have a menu of cleaning

something like basic HWE £25 a room
                        add   £10 for scotchguard
                        add   £5 for disinfect
                        add   £10 for speed drying
                        add   etc etc etc

The original phone call was for a carpet £25 thenon arrival a menu was presented to the customer while he was getting the machine from the van, then if the customer thought I'll add this that and the other well the price went up.
(but not always if they were tight)

Shaun

[Mike Roper]

The company my sister inlaw uses in Fife do her suite and carpet for £40 using Prochem powermax. But you have to have all parts of the equation to get the picture- 2 man team in & out in an hour. So their hourly rate could be the same as what higher priced cleaners are getting . There is a market for this but do you want to work that way.
As for Asians , I was recommended to a family who lived 20 miles away in Redcar , I tried to pass them to my aunties business in Redcar but no iit was me who had been recommended so I had to do it. They were the nicest people you could wish to meet & price was not a problem- but they were fussy , which I dont mind.
Mike

[Doug Holloway]

Hi Guys

Customer I went to this morning rang an advert in the local paper (Basildon) for a quote and was told 7 pounds a room

He decided he wasn't going to get much for that and went on the internet and found me, I quoted 250 lounge,dining room , hall , leather suite which he was more than happy with.

Cheers

Doug

[Jaybee]

Just an update to this topic - my previous username Jason_B was banned as was my previous to previous username JasonB, so here I am in my latest guise (does nobody have a sense of humour around here?) 

Anyway I would just like to say that today I charged £80 for two lounges (basically it was a house with two downstairs rooms the same size) along with a small hall area and a tiny rug. This basically means that I charged about £35 per lounge which is £20 more than my previous rate which was £15.

I am at the moment over the moon about this but I have a feeling that this will lead to less liquidity in my business. Because where as before I was guaranteed a consistant income because my prices were so low, I am now venturing into the realms of gambling i.e. banking on the fact that a certain percentage of higher quoted jobs convert to orders.

I'll let you know how I go on.....