Dear Tenacious-
Wow! You decided to go into this business without knowing what to charge? I have to admire you for your willingness to venture into the unknown! I have no point of reference to answer your question, and here are the reasons why:
I don’t know whether you are going into residential cleaning or commercial cleaning, and I don’t know whether you are going to clean by yourself or whether you are going to have employees. Also, are you opening a cash business, or are you going to be legitimate and pay taxes?
How much is your time worth? I am not being facetious; this is a legitimate question you have to answer before we can proceed. Let’s assume you decide you want to make $25.00 per hour of cleaning time. It is simple math for you to figure that if you have a cash house cleaning job (which I would NEVER recommend, but that is another conversation!) which will take you four hours to clean, you should charge $100.00 for the work. However, when you get caught (and you will!) you will have to cough up for the taxes you didn’t pay. Therefore, you need to figure about another 30 to 50 percent for taxes, or a range of $32.50 to $37.50 per hour. And that is on the low end.
Also, have you figured insurance into the equation? You need to be covered in case you have liability for something that happens to a customer’s home, property or person. That cost has to be allocated so that a proportional piece of it is being borne by each client.
Then there is the matter of employees. How much are you paying them? An office cleaning employee in my area makes between $7.00 and $12.00 per hour, and you have to figure out in your state what your labor burden cost is. In my area it is 31%. Therefore, an employee that I am paying $10.00 per hour actually costs me $13.10 per hour. How much profit per hour do you need to make on each employee?
Also, WHEN are you being paid? If you have to finance the payroll out of your own pocket for 30 to 45 days you need to figure out your cost for that money. If you are being paid on a C.O.D. basis, which is usually the way cleaning houses is done, then you don’t have that additional expense.
All those figures have to be taken into account when you price out the job for the customer. So you see, I can’t tell you what to charge. What I CAN tell you is what factors go into your pricing.
Good luck!
|
