We often see references in various threads about how much money you can turn over in a day or a week, or some like Squeaks (not a dig Rog, merely using you as an example cos I know you) who will say that some are ripping customers off with their high prices.
But just what is a decent income for a sole trader window cleaner to earn?
What do you consider to be a decent income for the job you do?
I'm not talking about your turnover here, I'm talking about your wage, your real income....NOT YOUR BUSINESS TURNOVER!!
I've mentioned in other threads how I know guys doing very ordinary picking work in warehouses and earning about £25,000 per year, continental shifts, 4 days on, 4 days off, lots of holidays all included and so on....
I would personally like my income to at least equal that, or to be honest, to exceed that, after all, it isn't just the fact that I clean windows, I also run a business, unlike our factory worker who clocks in and then clocks out at the end of the day; job done.
Now once you have decided what you want your income to be, lets say 20k, you then have to work out how you are going to go about developing your business to the point where you can actually draw a wage of 20k per year.
You need to allow for the three weeks holiday per year (2 weeks summer hols and a week at Christmas) and the bank holidays too. and there are another 6 of those (we've allowed for the 2 at Christmas above) to take into consideration.
You need to also be realistic in allowing for down time due to various reasons, bad weather, car in for a service/mot/repair, sickness and so on, that'll take up at least another 8 days or so.
So I would guess that you would have to allow 6 weeks in total.
You have also to take into account that the vast majority of sole trader window cleaners probably work a maximum of 6 hours per day, and by that I don't mean when you clock off early, I mean the actual time you are cleaning windows and not moving between accounts, writing out invoices or talking to customers, having tea breaks and so on.
You also have to be realistic in your business costs too, your vehicle is usually the biggest overhead, it doesn't matter that you will have had a car anyway, you could not do the job without a vehicle.
Yet again, if you are going to be a proper businessman you have to build in investment and profit for your small business.
I think it is more than reasonable to allow for about 5k per year for all of your business costs, depreciation on vehicles, purchasing new equipment, ladders and so on.
So you have to make enough in 46 weeks productively working roughly 30-32 hours per week.
So your daily turnover needs to be in the region of £100 per day, and you have to average that across all of the 46 weeks you can reasonably hope to work in any given year.
In your 6 hours at work (and I think that's generous) you have to do about £17.00 an hour.
Doesn't sound to difficult does it?
We all know it is perfectly reasonable to expect to do around £100 per day quite comfortably, when you look at those figures Squeaks accusations of rip off pricing by some of us sound pretty fair...don't you think?
But you still need to knock out about £25,000 per year to make your 20k wage, and the £100 per day turn over needs to be more like £150 at least on any given day if you want a realistic chance of turning over 25k at the end of the year....
How many of you (sole traders) submitted a turnover to the tax man above 25k?
But as I said at the start of this post, I want an income of at least 25k, I think that is a perfectly reasonable aim, and my own business overheads are more than 5k per year too, so to get my 25k per year income I need to turnover somewhat more than £30,000 per year in order to do so, I need to do over £700 per week, I actually need to get close to £200 on any given day I work. I need to average £30 plus per hour....
suddenly those rip off prices are not quite such a rip off at all, if I want to equal my mates picking in a warehouse and get an income worth £500 per week I really do need to keep my prices high....
And at £500 per week that really isn't a very big income at all....is it.
Ian