It’s really your judgment. What I would try to reason out is if you give a lower price for weekly would the reduced time be worth the lower price? You want your hourly or daily goals to remain intact.
How much time and effort is going into this job?
You should get paid what it is worth to stay in business.
Do you have $$ goal? That will determine if you are pricing it right.
Discounting for the sake of discounting isn’t really sound practice.
At a certain point on storefronts it will take a given amount of time to just go through the motions of cleaning. Take a clean window and time yourself, and then add whatever percent longer you think it will take for each interval, with allowing time for moving around things and the store. If they can’t pay the minimum for a clean window regardless what it comes out too then its not a good account.
You need to look at what your daily pay is; what your weekly pay is; what your monthly pay is, then average it by the hour - since in this business you may not work everyday all day.
Certain times of the year I feel I get paid either weekly, bi-weekly, and sometimes monthly when business is slow!
For that reason I do not focus too much on “hourly pay” but rather am I charging enough to stay in business and WANT to do this.
Since you mention $175 monthly Commercial I assume they are not big Commercial but more store front and office?
To see how your hourly rate is actually working out (no guessing), average out about $1.50+ per minute of work time.
$1.50 x 20 minutes = $30 per hour - 10 $30 jobs in a day = $380 @3 1/2 hours of actual work (add travel time and set up to each job can add another 30 minutes to an hour). “IF” you can consistently land 10 commercial jobs in a day.
$1.50 x 30 minutes = $45.00 per hour - 10 $45 jobs in a day = $450 @5 hours actual work.
So what I am saying is don’t set an arbitrary “Hourly Rate” for yourself without knowing how you got to that number.While $40 or $50 per hour may sound nice from a workers standpoint, you are a business owner and things change exponentially with cost to do business. It may seem like minimal overhead - and it sort of is compared to Brick-N-Morter businesses - but put ALL of your numbers on paper, include billable and non-billable hours, cost of supplies, gas/oil/vehicle maintenance, and see what you come up with. Don’t forget taxes DBA license and such.
Now how much should you charge for 20 minutes plus? Commercial may take more than a few hours.
@Roman_Gav think of it this way. Charge enough that you can make enough per hour to grow, because if you suddenly double your price alot of customers won’t be too happy because you set expectations. I went through this even though I thought I was charging enough. If your new and don’t think your fast enough to charge what you want then figure out a fair price based on your level of service and then get better so you can make what you want per hour. Remember, a fair price is the price you and 70% of your potential customers agree on and are both happy with. If you can make $150/hr out of that there is nothing wrong with that. You took the risk to start and own a business, so you should reap the rewards.
Example, can you lose 30% per hr to hire employees? Don’t limit yourself in case you want to hire in the future.
Garry is spot on. Really like your way of thinking on here.
I have been doing commercial storefront and offices for a long time. Personally, I do not care for commercial work. However, there is nothing wrong with grabbing a few 2-3 story buildings monthly for 400-500-- I am speaking generally of the 20-30 dollar accounts (you have to set at least a 20 dollar minimum to do a store, I don’t care if it is just 3 plates-- you can’t grow a business on lowball commercial work-- UNLESS you are doing it the “wrong” way (No taxes paid, etc, etc…won’t get into it but you know where I’m going). Every year, inflation and cost of living rises. You HAVE to raise prices on your work, but IF you can really overbid the job and land it-- you give yourself a few years before inflation catches up with your 2020 price. The only other solution would be mass QUANTITY, but do you see where we are going here? Mass amount of LOW PRICED jobs…cool if you are doing this as a hobby and for some part-time income-- but hard if you have employees on the books with workmans comp, and pay them a living wage (700-800 a week here in FL, at least where I live)
Commercial stores are hurting now, last thing on their mind is the window cleaner. I have done weekly stores, twice a month, monthly, quarterly, yearly. Unless your route is very close together, you will have a very hard time servicing any commercial job 2x a month…when you get busy you will see what I am speaking of. Then, if you don’t bid them ACCORDINGLY (to inflation, time to get there, time spent)…you will not want to go do them if you have a better job waiting for you. Then you become “the guy that doesn’t show up”. It happens fast, this is why I stay out of commercial for my own personal business. If I can land a nice big building monthly, that’s a different story— but I have seen first hand what happens when you underbid your commercial route. You go out of business…and the storefront owners have a heart attack when you come in higher priced after the cheaper guy who went out of business-- ironically enough.
