[bad trippy]

I would quote £8.50 for outisde . £20.00 in and out

[Pittmonkey]

This one of the reasons I dont bother with shop fronts
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6o2zWv6REQ&feature=related

[martinsadie]

This one of the reasons I dont bother with shop fronts
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6o2zWv6REQ&feature=related

[wfp master]

£4 take u 5 mins ish

[Ian_Giles]

£3.50=£4.00 outside only...it's only a few panes of glass and not including the top ones and done trad I would only need one dip of my wagtail to do all the panes.

Some silly prices being quoted, £12.00? That's ridiculous.

I do a great many shop fronts, but they are only worth it if you have a lot of them, it's a catch 22 situation, if you have to travel in to just do one shop like that then you are going to want £8.00 maybe £10.00 because of travelling, parking so on, have enough of them and a price of £3 or £4 is a very good price indeed.
Lets face it, a standard semi detached house for most is a tenner or less and that might be 10 or 12 full size windows...so £12 for 6 panes of glass!!!! You just have to be joking.

Ian

[Sapphire Window Cleaning]

I'd charge £6 outside and £10 in and out.
I see £3.50 and £4 posted here, bloody hell undercutting!!!!
its silly prices like this that drives prices down guys.



Matt

[martinsadie]

I'd charge £6 outside and £10 in and out.
I see £3.50 and £4 posted here, bloody hell undercutting!!!!
its silly prices like this that drives prices down guys.



Matt

rubbish i do a row of them on a main rd cheaper than that ,once a week and bill them monthly start early and dead easy ,good work

[andyjm1]

I would have said a fiver, but only if I was passing that way anyway 

[Ian_Giles]

I'd charge £6 outside and £10 in and out.
I see £3.50 and £4 posted here, bloody hell undercutting!!!!
its silly prices like this that drives prices down guys.



Matt

Driving prices down?
You just have to be joking, £3 or £4 might sound like it is stupidly cheap, especially if you are used to doing houses at £10 or £12 a pop, but if you have specialised in shops and commercial then the price is very good indeed.
I start my shops at just after 7am most times, by 9am I've finished most of those that need doing and I've turned over somewhere around £150, squeaky or Tosh can varify that as both of them have done my shops on the odd occasions I've had a small holiday.
A great many of my shops are around the £4.00 mark, a couple are £2.50! but I can still do well in access of £100 in under 2 hours (and as those two will testify, I am really understating my turnover there).
If you want shop work you have to be competitive, but unless you have a lot of them you just can't compete with he high street window cleaners already in situ!! As I said in my previous post, it really is a catch 22 situation, getting enough shops to make good money is really hard work as they are so sought after, getting a toehold is not at all easy...

Ian

[Sapphire Window Cleaning]

YWCS yes I do know what undercutting is!
its when you deliberately charge less than your competitors!
YWCS would you charge £4.50 for a 3 bed semi just to get the job??
I have around 15 shops that I clean on Fridays and none of them are charged less than £5.
I look at earning £30 per hour and if one shop takes say ten minutes I will charge £5 for it.
Always think it will take longer than it actually does, this way you wont lose out.




Matt

[johns window kleen]

I did a sprinkling of such shops a while ago, charging from £4.00 to about £8.00.
However the guy whoose sewn up the high rd was doing them for a lot cheaper, and as word spreads you loose em.

I have no probs with this, as its business, but what I dont understand is if the retailer thinks that a price of £6 or £7 weekly is a good price, why do people do em for £2.50 or  £4.00, when they could get the higher price.

I understand the basic business principle here "Stack em high sell em cheap" but I think as a trade we undersell / undervalue ourselves at times, especially if you look at the gleaming Jewellers windows, which they do need to keep their top notch image, and charge top prices, yet some mug is doing em for £3 or £4quid, when on a purely economic basis its worth much more in the true scheme of things.

Some things are weirdly valued just so some can keep loads of shops at low prices, and deflect competition. In all honesty I wish I'd done this, even though job per job its undervalued work individually.  Same applies to domestic really but its harder for people to establish a monopoly.

Moral is many make this appear a low paid trade on purpose, but some times it bites us on the arse.

[Sapphire Window Cleaning]

WELL SAID JOHN 
You dont see plumbers and electricians undercutting each other and de-valuing their jobs.
So why window cleaners?




Matt

[johns window kleen]

Simple, heres my top three.

{1} Supply and Demand.

{2} No need to spend thousands on qualifying to be able to do the job, so any one can get going, without having to recoup large investment.

{3} Un level playing field. Ie, all the plumbers I know and work for live in large detached houses, with 2 or 3 vehicles, so they all charge roughly the same amounts to maintain said lifestyles.
No plumber does it for beer money, but unfortunately we're in a trade that is full of the "beer & fAg money" bracket, and that is our competition.

[Ian_Giles]

This is veering slightly as it tackles a slightly wider range with regards pricing.
Lets try to stick to the specific one with regards the shop front in question, or even shop fronts in general....


Where shops are concerned it really isn't a case underpricing in most cases.
I charge as much as I can for the shops I clean, but I also know I have close competition for the shops that come along.
With the shop in the photo it is only...what, 5 panes of glass?
If you have several shops nearby then at £3.50 to say £5.50 it is good money, even at the lower price of £3.50, and it is still less than 5 minutes actual work to clean them. If the top panes were also included my own price would be more like £8.00, maybe a tenner, to me it would not matter if they are frosted or clear, the cleaning of them would still be the same, and those smaller panes would take as long to clean as the larger ones, done properly you would need a pointer ladder to reach them.

In Chepstow there are two proper jewellers - neither of which I clean! - my price for the one would be no more than a fiver and the other no more than £4.00 (bear in mind they are both in the middle of a great many other shops I do in town) and that might sound cheap but it would be darn good money for me, a pro-rata rate of over £100 an hour, and that is the crux, even though these prices might sound cheap, when, like myself, you are a window cleaner with an awful lot of shop fronts to do, my pro-rate is above £100 an hour.
the jeweller would be on no more than me!! For the jeweller to pay out £4.00 would equate to little more than a pittance to him it's true, but I would never base my prices on how posh I perceived his business to be...whether charity shop or posh shop my prices are the same.

Now there is a town not far from me (15 miles) a fairly posh little town centre...actually not that little...it's high street is very wide! where the guy who has the largest chunk of the shops charges ridiculously low prices, I priced and got one job (not a shop, a much larger premises) that he was doing for £80....my price was £260....I gave my price without knowing his, was staggered when I found out how cheap he was, but I still got the job.
But his bread and butter work is his shops and even though he is ridiculously cheap he makes a very good living indeed.


Ian

[Sapphire Window Cleaning]

Too true John  
The question is should we introduce legislation into our trade that requires all window cleaners to be competantly trained through apprenticeships.
After saying that there are builders out there that arent qualified, but still advertise as builders.
Customers think all we have to pay out is fuel from what we earn. some of my custy's were gob smacked when I told them how much I pay out in expenses each week. lol



Matt

[Sapphire Window Cleaning]

Sorry Ian.
like I said I would charge £6 for just the outsides and £10 in and out.
There is one benfit to cleaning shops, that is the customer is always in and always has money on them lol.



Matt

[johns window kleen]

Ian, I know what your saying about bulk turn over at cheapish prices = fantastic hourly rate, and I said that I wished perhaps i'd gone down this route, for numerous reasons.
But the topic did evolve into another area, regarding the devaluation of what we actually do by ourselves.
Your right we do not descriminate between the types of  businesses we clean the windows of, and generally most would charge the same for a charity shop as we do a jewellers, irrespective of their turnover or ability to pay. But that can't be right ,can it?
This is what us window cleaners impose as best practice is it not?

I bet their business rates are set on the actual trade carried out at the premises.


You mention £100 per hour, and I bet some are thinking wow whats the scope for undercutting that  {Not me, I've got too many ethics on this point} but that really is what me and Matt are saying, where does this all stop?
 Why do we do this to ourselves? Plumbers & Electricians don't.

Competition is healthy generally, but not if pricing becomes so reduced it drastically effects the earning potential within the trade.

[Sapphire Window Cleaning]

Sorry Glen just reread the post I thought it was all the glass on the shop.
if its just the 4 pains and the door then it would be about £4 but I wouldn't travel there specifically just to clean that shop. if that was the case then you would have to charge something for travelling, maybe £2-£3 so it would make the price £6-£7 just to do that shop, but I would try and sell the inside clean as well, just to make it worth while.
The main town that I operate around is going down the pan as shops are closing down every month. Most of the shop keepers want their windows cleaned once a month as the main high streets are now pedestrianised, and the windows dont soil as much as they use to when the busses ran down there kicking out all the diesel and oil etc.



Matt

[Ian_Giles]

You mention £100 per hour, and I bet some are thinking wow whats the scope for undercutting that  {Not me, I've got too many ethics on this point} but that really is what me and Matt are saying, where does this all stop?
 Why do we do this to ourselves? Plumbers & Electricians don't.

Competition is healthy generally, but not if pricing becomes so reduced it drastically effects the earning potential within the trade.

John,

The thing is, alhough I can earn at a pro-rata rate of £100-£150+ an hour doing shop fronts, an outsider coming in would not be able to undercut me, and the others that are in town also doing shop fronts would struggle to do so too, just as I would struggle to undercut them.
The prices have found their own level due to intense competition.

If some one were to come into town and undercut me on one of my shops, they would have to undercut me by a significant margin, so a £5.00 front would have to be cut to a £2.50 front, and at that price, especially as they would not have any work in the town it would be a total waste of time.

Some years back, one of the other guys who cleans quite afew of the shops, and in fact used to work for me and even knew a great many of my accounts and how much I charged for them attempted to undercut me on every single shop I had in the town...how many do you think he managed to take off me??
Not a single one is how many
Shops like a very regular service, once they get a good un' they won't let him go.

Glen is like myself, totally agree with his post, Matt also has a good point to make too, on my commercial side, in particular where shops are concerned my trade has dipped hugely, not that I've lost any work due to being undercut, its a case of shops closing down, retiring or coming to end of lease and not taking up a new one. And no one is moving into these empty shops, it is quite alarming to see the rate at which town centres are closing down...they are dying on their collective arses. greedy landlords jacking up the rents, councils wanting massive business rates and the end result is the increasingly rapid death of the traditional town centre.

Crazy really, town and borough councils should be doing all they can to breath life into their town centres, but the astronomic cost of having a shop in today's town centres, coupled with highly restrictive and expensive car parking is driving businesses into the giant, out of town shopping malls.

And oops! I'm the one now guilty of rambling on at a tangent!

Ian

[johns window kleen]

Yeah it sounds very precarious on the High Streets at the moment.

Maybe the rise of virtual and e-Shopping will eventually mean the end of a lot of high street retailers, due to the very high costs and overheads, irrespective of the recession.

God knows what will fill the empty shops. Pubs? porn brokers and tatoo parlours.