ronnie,
ill tell u tomorrow, im on ciu on my phone and its a pain to type.
basic version is i charge a day rate that after everything is paid out im left with enough money that im happy with.
dean
Well from reading that, Ronnie you hit the nail on the head when you said that most national companies just use min wage labour. They do it so they can make it pay.
However in all honesty Dean you aren't a national company rather a window cleaner whose round happens to encompass the whole country. These national companies will have higher overheads than you and that is how you are able to compete. This is an interesting policy as the potential is there to earn slightly more than the average window cleaner and if you are charging a day rate then there is no downtime provided that priced your day rate accordingly - you earn from the moment you start the traveling to the job so although you only do say 4 hours you are paid for the full day.
However the one problem I do see is that if you plan to scale it up then suddenly the costs are going to go up and that will leave you with two choices:
(1) continue with what could (after costs) be considered a low day rate and therefore less profit or
(2) increase your day rate to cover the increased costs.
The problem you are left with is that you will have to accept low profit margins (less than average local domestic cleaner - like for like) or run the risks of someone coming along and undercutting.
You could argue that nationwide window cleaning has had it's day - A few people saw the potential and then exploited it for all they could. They knew what could be achieved and did there best gain a monopoly - the trouble was that there was competition who were onto the same thing at the same time. Therefore they tried to price each other out of the market and the age of cut price national contracts were born. The one thing they did manage was to (as a general rule) convince the big national chains that these companies could lower the overheads and therefore contribute to maximising profit.
Of course, this drive to reduce the costs resulted in lower standards being applied but over time these lower standards became accepted (think about this who is going to complain, a manager of a store maybe? WOW!!! the real people who run these chains are the accountants and the directors ie people whose involvement on a national scale will be looking at the spreadsheet costings. True they might see a store local to them that is substandard and pull the company cleaning it up but IMO it is very unlikely that they would realise that they had the same problem on a national scale).
I read your earlier post and googled nationwide window cleaning. I would say that 90% of the companies sub contract at least a part of their work to local opertators in order to obtain nationwide coverage.
This to me is the problem with the day rate system. I can see you making a decent living but as a full blown national business the system is flawed and if you try to scale up you own operations you will be priced out of the market as outlined above.
Of course it all depends on how far you want to take things but if that is the direction you wish to take then you are going to have to think about this and come up with an alternative.
