[Wayne Thomas]

Matt's nickname is the 'Elvive window cleaner' (£500p.h) .....why? ...because he's worth it!!!!!   lol.

[matt]

Matt's nickname is the 'Elvive window cleaner' (£500p.h) .....why? ...because he's worth it!!!!!   lol.

  thats on a bad hair day aswell

[geefree]

Please can we stop... did someone say that customers also read these posts.?

[matt]

Please can we stop... did someone say that customers also read these posts.?

alot of my customers love my hair 

[alanwilson]

I tell you what

total what your round is worth per month - then divide it by 160

that'll give you an idea of what you make per hour

I doubt very much that many on here have rounds worth more than £4000 per month, which by the way is equivalent to £25/hour based on a 40hr week.
Come on guys, be realistic, I get local wc'ers telling me they make about £40 an hr - rubbish - are they telling me they make £6400 a month?? 

I know some of you are part-time but even then you have a certain amount of collecting, bookwork etc.

[Spursboy1972]

I hate these earnings threads.

What I will say is this. People should be honest with a true figure.

So w/c says he earns £40 per hour. Is that for every hour he is out or just the hours he is working?

What is it when he has taken out overheads, fuel, depreciation, servicing, insurance, road tax?

What about time collecting, going to bank, admin and personal tax and NI?

Costs of water production, equipment and consumables?

Holidays, sickness, and extereme weather conditions?

I dont believe that £40 per hour every hour is possible as for a 40 hour week it would be £1600 plus! smells a bit to me.

[Ian_Giles]

Williamx is correct, I think many of you are not quite understanding what he is getting at.
A £10 minimum charge is more than reasonable for one thing, that isn't over the top at all.

And I too have jobs that pay me unbelievable hourly rates!!! over £200 an hour is not rare!!
A shop I charge £3.50 for takes me no more than a minute to clean, thats a pro rata rate of £210 per hour!!!!!

Of course my annual business turnover is absolutely nothing like that.

There is a very big difference between what your hourly rate is and what your rate per minute worked is.

Like Williamx I too have a general minimum rate of a tenner (shops are an exception of course as are a few domestic accounts).
A bog standard 2 bed semi will cost that and the time taken to clean such a property would be no more than ten minutes maximum, probably less than that for a smallish one.
But that is actually being there with the brush on the glass and cleaning windows.
My rate per minute worked is at least a £1.00 a minute.
And just like Williamx, if I had 6 of these houses all next door to one another and with easy access I could easily knock out 6 of them an hour.

I have other accounts - one at £80 and one at £90 - and the pair are done in an hour and a half, do them off a ladder and you'll be over 5 hours (minimum) and be totally shattered on completion.

I don't charge per hour, I charge per account, and each one is different, for instance, if I decide I want to earn a minimum of £25 and hour those two accounts would realise me only £37.50 if I charged by the hour.
 If you saw the size of these accounts you'd think I was 'aving a laff' charging such a ridiculously low price.
I happen to be very, very good on these accounts.

We all have some top accounts, but they are just snapshots of the rounds we work.

On run of the mill work I look to be able to actually work at a rate of £1.00 per minute worked but at the end of the week I have absolutely nothing like £60 an hour or £480 a day, in fact it is considerable less than half of that figure.

You need to price at so much per unit, therefore when you price up work your pricing is consistent, you are in fact giving an estimate and not a guesstimate.

My base rate per unit, like many others on here is £1.00 per unit (window) and over many years I know exactly how to break down large windows into those individual units and charge accordingly.
Priced in this manner, at the speed I work (which isn't ultra fast, merely very efficient) gives me a rate per minute worked of £1.00.
On a reasonable busy day on just residential work I would expect to turn over above £150 (not £450) and I have days where I exceed that comfortably...but my rate per minute worked is around £1.00 per minute.

Saying what you earn per hour is very different, you can only truly work that out by looking at your annual tax return and divide by 52 to give your weekly turnover, and then by 5 to give your average daily turnover...I wouldn't go further than that as most don't really realise just how many hours they actually work a day.
Most will be on their first job by about 9am and back home by 3.30pm.

And most will have an annual turnover - as submitted to the tax man - somewhere around 17k.

Ian

Ian

[Kentish Poleman]

Ahh, the great 'how much do you earn, I earn more than that' debate.

Aside from the good men at the ILR who will be reading these posts with interest, especially when comparing such boasts against one's submitted tax return, it would seem to me that everyone is an instant millionaire once joing the ranks of the humble window cleaners.

Get real Guys, you can make a lot of money, or very little money, depending how hard you choose to work, and of course, where you live. Fancy £50.00 an hour, then clean two largish homes at £25.00 a pop, in say 20 minutes per property, and leaving yourself say another 20 minutes to drive between the sites. Simple eh? But of course, you need to take into account the price of: Fuel, RFL, Van cost, Water rates, Insurances, Uniform, Plant cost, Depreciation, Tax, N.I. Your impressive £50.00 an hour is no longer £50.00, its significantly less.

Oh how I wish my fellow WFP cleaners in sunny Kent would also take this somewhat simple equation into account when they go in and try to poach a job of mine. They obviously are happy to work for a nett gain of a fiver an hour....

[Mike 108]

Ian

I have read many, many, of your posts and they are always well written with, seemingly, a lot of thought before ‘pen is put to paper’.

Obviously, you have been ‘in the game’ a lot longer than most – but to many of us newer cleaners on this site £1 a minute cleans seem unattainable.

For example, many of the bungalows I do have 10 windows (only average size windows) but each window has 3 panes of glass in it.

Working at £1 per minute means it would take me 10 minutes.
Charging at £1 per window would give me £10

There’s no way I can clean 30 panes of glass in 10 minutes (including ‘detailing’and wiping the frames) and make a good job of it.

Even if I could, I’d probably feel guilty charging a domestic customer £10 for 10 minutes work (plumbers and joiners are only charging £30 per hour around here.

I’LL JUST HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT I’M TOO OLD, TOO SLOW AND TOO CHEAP.

Having said that, I’ve worked my way up over the last 2 years from £5 per hour, through £7.50, and £10 to £12.50 and the occasional £15 per hour – so perhaps I’ll get there one day.

Regards

Mike

[Bobs Window Cleaning]

DJW

          Which company did you work for?

£15 per hour for a printer. I also worked for a printing company as a no 3 and i earnt £14 per hour. The number 1s  earned nearly double that.

Bob

[williamx]

The figures I have given are correct.

My minimum earning rate is £30.00 per hour, which I have based on cleaning 3 houses per hour, which is working at a reasonable but not too fast speed.

On quite a few the working rate goes up, it never goes down below this figure, because this is what I consider I need to earn a living.

If I worked 8 hours a day 40 hours a week, then I would have a gross wage of £1200, but I don't want to work that amount of hours anymore.

My working week is as follows

Mondays day off unless it a commercial client, then its only them I clean.

Tuesday to Friday 10.30 to 14.00hrs

Saturday Only worked for those customers who are not at home and won't can't leave the back gates open.

I never every collect money, I telephone all my customers the night before and they leave it out for me, if they forget, then I get it the next clean.  With this method I get paid by 90% of my customers every week and the other 10% comes the next month.

When I first started out I use to charge £6.00 per house.

One day I broke this figure down and found that to earn a decent living I would have to work like a Trojan, which I did not consider acceptable, if I want to earn a pittance and be stressed about it why work for myself, which should be more enjoyable than working for someone else.

So 3 years ago I upped my minimum charge to £10.00 for a monthly clean, first cleans are double the price, the rate also goes up if they want 6 weekly or bi-monthly cleans, anything over this is classed as a new clean and charged accordingly.

I have dropped over £30k worth of business in the last 3 years and I now have a round that's suits me, I don't have any customer that I don't like, any that are moaners or I don't get on with are dropped,. (why should I be unhappy going to work when its my own business)

All of my customers can get a cheaper cleaner if they want. They don't, because they think that I give them value for money.

I am not bragging or living in another world, if a cleaner wants to charge £2-£3-£4 or £5 per house then thats great for them, if they want to target my customers on price, then they can.

I charge what I consider is my correct price and because I have customers who know they can get a cheaper deal and are still willing to pay me my rate makes my prices acceptable

[Mike 108]

Nice reply.

Mike

[Ian_Giles]

Yep, spot on reply Williamx

Mike.

Don't forget, I am WFP so that alone makes me quicker than yourself as you are Trad.

The windows you are talking about ie, 3 panes of glass is what I would consider a standard window.
As a trad cleaner you should be able to clean this window to a good standard in 90 seconds, including detailing and the sills, but not including all of the frames.
Done trad, frames should be an extra cost.

I'm much like Williamx in that I work on doing the equivalent of three or 4 houses an hour - on average that is - and most of my houses are somewhat more than a tenner a clean.
If you are working trad, then it is very reasonable to be able to clean 3 or 4 standard houses an hour, not including conservatories and difficult access.

I guess I was mistakenly posting on this thread as if it was a WFP only thread, when of course it isn't.

Those bungalows you have mentioned sound fairly straight forward and should be cleanable in 20 minutes.

But you must remember that you are not charging your customer £30 an hour (or whatever figure) and a plumber will also have a minimum call out charge too, probably at least his first hour, regardless of how long the job takes him; 5 minute job? well he'll charge for the full hour, that's kinda standard.

Also;
For arguments sake, if you charge £15.00 each for 3 bungalows, all next door to each other, and to begin with it takes you 2 hours to clean them.
If, after several months your speed increases to the point that you can now do these 3 bungalows in half the time it originally took you, are you going to now only charge them £7.50 each?
and if after several more months you shave another 10% of the cleaning time, will you reduce them still further?
you may then perhaps convert to WFP and be yet quicker still, do you still cut the prices even further??

you see the point I'm making?
Just because your speed has increased it does not mean you are no longer giving your customer value for money, the price is good value to the customer.

I don't know what you charge per window or how long it takes you to do each of the bungalows you mention, but once you start to price per window/unit your pricing structure will benefit enourmously.

But you must also bear in mind that your earning potential as a trad window cleaner is not going to equal a WFP window cleaner.

The 3 pane windows you mention take me 30 seconds WFP, and that includes the frames and isn't rushing either.
My prices remain the same as I was charging when Trad, it's really stupid to drop your prices just because your are now quicker, should you do so, what with all the extra costs involved in WFP you will actually end out earning less than before!

Stopwatch yourself on one of these windows and see how your time compares, done trad 90 seconds should be your target time - but don't try and do it as if you are in a race! It should be at your normal cleaning speed.
It still takes a very competent window cleaner to do such a window in 90 seconds - (including detailing and wiping the sill)

Ian

[Kentish Poleman]

All of my customers can get a cheaper cleaner if they want. They don't, because they think that I give them value for money.

I am not bragging or living in another world, if a cleaner wants to charge £2-£3-£4 or £5 per house then thats great for them, if they want to target my customers on price, then they can.

I charge what I consider is my correct price and because I have customers who know they can get a cheaper deal and are still willing to pay me my rate makes my prices acceptable

Precisely,  99% of my customers can get cheaper, much cheaper. But, I think they prefer a smartly turned out company, one who did what it said it would do, and is 100% reliable. I have lost count of the amount of customers who actually pay more for my work than their previous cleaning company.

[Mike 108]

Ian – Thanks for the reply.

I timed myself on those bungalows this morning. I can just about do them in 20 mins, by not doing the frames – but I feel better working a bit slower and doing the frames – so it normally takes me 30mins.

I charge £7 but am about to put it up to £8

I charge per pane of glass (20p per pane at ground level, 40p per pane at 1st floor level, 75p per door/glass) – so a 3 pane window on the ground floor (bungalow) is only £0.60

Your arguments (points) and those of ‘williamx’ have convinced me of the following:

1.   I AM too slow – but at 61 years of age I am happy to plod along.
2.   I am charging too little for the excellent cleans that I am giving.  I am going to rectify that this month.

Incidently, half of my 2 storey work is now WFP work and, yes, it is more profitable.

Thanks.

Mike

[Helen]

    i wish....would we still post on forums if we were

[williamx]

I only use wfp now, but if I was using ladders, then my minimum charge would be higher.

When I worked out a business plan, I took in all the factors that can and do affect my business. (weather-holidays-cancellations-illness etc etc) I then worked out my various costs and I came to the conclusion that I would need to earn £30 per hour for the amount of hours I am willing to work, I know that on average I can clean 3 houses per hour, so my minimum charge had to be £10.

If I went back to ladders I would find that I can only do a percentage of the work I am currently doing, so my minimum charge would have to increase.

Personally I think that ladder users should command a higher fee than wfp users, just because of the harder work involved, never mind the danger that they face.

A lot of cleaners around the country are reading this and thinking, I wish I could charge that much, but there's no way I can.

I can guarantee you, that if 100 people called for a quote, and you quoted these figures, a certain percentage would be willing to pay this rate.

For example when I first started carpet cleaning, I worked as a canvassers for a very expensive carpet cleaning company, every quote I gave did not result in a sale, but a certain percentage did.

What I sold, was not that we clean carpets at a very expensive rate, but rather we offer an excellent service and aftercare package, the same applies to window cleaning, where is it written that a window cleaners must charge a lower rate than any other tradesman.

If your customers uses a taxi or bus, then they have to pay a minimum charge, if they change their mind and get off earlier, they don't get a refund.

They are all willing to pay a repair man a minimum charge of £20 - £30 or £50 just for them to come to their house, and have a look at the broken appliance, repairing it incurs more costs, so why can't you charge a smaller amount and you are actually doing the work.

So the next time someone asks you for a quote, tell them that you minimum charge is £10 or higher, if they look shocked, then explain that the service you offer is excellent and well worth the money, I mean, who going to pay for a crap job being carried out.

If they don't want to pay this then they can move on because you will get customers who will pay you this rate.

Why work harder, when you can work smarter.

[williamx]

    i wish....would we still post on forums if we were

If you want to look at millionaire's, then look to OCS, they stared window cleaning in 1900 and now they have a turnover of £600 MILLION a year.

As the old saying goes "wheres there muck there's brass"

[frames to panes]

DJW

          Which company did you work for?

£15 per hour for a printer. I also worked for a printing company as a no 3 and i earnt £14 per hour. The number 1s  earned nearly double that.

Bob

That's as a four colour perfector No 1 minder large sheet size. This was in one of the last decent sized printers in Somerset. There is nothing within forty miles paying more for the same job. We had people commuting thirty miles for that money. They are soon to loose their night rate and already have 20% deducted from all overtime working.

[sair]

i don't normally post on these type of debate although i read WITH INTEREST and enjoy.

i think if people wish to state earnings it should be done on turnover or profit after expenses  then work back to a hourly rate on a regular 40 hour week, if people want to discuss earning capabilities

at least then if you want people to see what you can or are doing it will give an overall view!