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