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