rates per hr

[desi 14]

When doing residential work, do you guys have a certain rate per hr you try to stay at ?

thanks

[squirtgun 122]

We shoot for $150 minimum an hour but there are 2 of us working.That's $75 per hour per person.

[Celeste 341]

Desi,

When we first started out, we actually avoided the per hour mind set....we concentrated on doing the best job we actually could do without putting pressure on ourselves to make x dollars per hour. The more jobs we did, the faster we got without losing quality so then our per hour profit went up. At first, we also were not doing multiple jobs in a day (as we both had other jobs) so it was no big push to do a speedy job - point being, if we weren't washing, we would not have been doing anything else so what was the big deal if it took us longer to do a job? Being on a job site in a neighborhood is free advertisement. Since going full time without the " regular job paycheck safety-net", we do try to stay within a reasonable parameter of time in doing a job, however, it is still difficult to put a price per hour as some of our clients pay us quantity rates. Example, we have a driveway & sidewalk "contract" for $145.00 each...period. Some are bigger than others, some are nastier than others, some we can squirt with a water hose and are done in 15 minutes.

I'm not at all saying that setting a per hour goal is a bad thing....we just found that initially it did not work for us because we were a bit unrealistic and got frustrated when we did not meet the goal. To answer your specific question (since I got sidetracked) we try to make somewhere between $65 - $125 / hour depending on the type of job and whether there are two of us or not.

Celeste

[CCPC 26]

For now, I try to average $60 an hour.

[One Tough Pressure 580]

When doing residential work, do you guys have a certain rate per hr you try to stay at ?

thanks

Sure I try to stay at the same rate for most jobs, but what that rate is doesn't matter to you in $ amount.

Reason for that is the way you stated the question, leaves way to many variables. While some make a payment for their equipment, some do not. Some have a million dollar insurance policy, while some have $300,000. Some have a crew and some do not.

You get the picture, everyone has different overhead, so they charge different for tha same job.

Yo u need to figure your expenses and then go from there.

[Mathew Johnson 123]

I shoot for 80-100 per hour for houses and 50-70 per hour on decks. Sometimes I bid a little too low for the time, and on other jobs I sometimes make a little more per hr than expected.

It all averages out.

[Aplus 525]

I don't put a lot of focus on the $$ per hour. Some you make out well on, and others not as well. I prefer to look at the bigger picture, which for me is weekly $$.

[John T 744]

If I work alone my target is $60-$100(Depends on the job I'm doing) when I work with another person its $90-$125 or so and when I work with both of my guys its $150 plus. A great day for me is whenever I crack a $1000/day like I did a few times cleaning bldgs and a Condo Complex this past summer. But then again I live in one of the most expensive area's where the value of a buck falls thru the floor due to everything being overpriced.

[John Orr 206]

I charge what I feel is a fair price to wash a house. When I first started, that meant about $50/hr, now, it means about $100.

Alan, When I started, I carried $300,000 liability - until I found out that $1 million costs the same! Apparently, there is a minimum premium.

[John T 744]

Commerical work I should add that I tend to charge by the square footage or by linear footage.

Since I am coming up on my 10th year in this business I can pretty much size up the potential residential work before me and give out a price on how much I'll charge without measuring anything. I do this by thinking how long it will take me and then I figure how much an hour I want from this job then I multipy the two.

Another reason why I don't measure out the Residential jobs is because its a little time consuming ans with me working 2 jobs most of the year my time is limited.

[Craig 111]

From everything that I hear and read.. hear and read.... You're supposed to charge by the sq. foot. I agree with John T. I hardly ever charge by the sq. foot. I look at a job as a whole, whether it be a house or a 500,000 sq. ft. building. I look at it in sections, figure out how long it's going to take me, add in my costs (including fixed) and decide how much I want to make per hour. ADD all of those together and you have your bid.

In the end it all comes out the same and it took me a lot less time to bid it out.

[PressurePros 249]

From everything that I hear and read.. hear and read.... You're supposed to charge by the sq. foot. I agree with John T. I hardly ever charge by the sq. foot. I look at a job as a whole, whether it be a house or a 500,000 sq. ft. building. I look at it in sections, figure out how long it's going to take me, add in my costs (including fixed) and decide how much I want to make per hour. ADD all of those together and you have your bid.

In the end it all comes out the same and it took me a lot less time to bid it out.

Hey Craig, thanks for pointing out my misread on the other post, I got overly excited that I could actually answer a question and didn't read closely enough. On to the topic..Its excellent that you have refined your bidding process but what happens when you are in a multiple bid situation? Two theoretical scenarios arise..

One, the potential customer may want to see exactly how you came up with your number. I have had customers outright ask me how much I charge per square.. Do you really want to tell them how much you are charging them per hour?

Second one..what if you are mistaken? Using one of your examples..A 500,000 sq ft building has a huge margin of error in time taken to complete. What if you are off by as much as a whole day? You could end up being the highest bidder or being the lowball bidder.

If one's goal is to run a nice little business that will pay the bills, and they are always going to be on job sites then the "eyeball" method probably works fine. I am a numbers person so I need something more consistent. What happens if you grow to the point where you would like to send someone out to do estimates for you? Would you trust someone else to estimate YOUR time and ultimately, your pay? I use spread sheets for every kind of work I do, and I measure every rail, step, joist or wall. It's just better business.

[Craig 111]

Ken,

Great point and I understand your reasoning.

Either way leaves you open to criticism. One square that you are cleaning may be dirtier than another. Are you going to charge the same for both squares?

If a job I figure will take me 10 days to complete turns into 12 days, then I analytically and logically look at the job and figure out what I could have done to either A) Speed up the process (a little too late though), or B) What I could do differently next time.

So far my intuition and better judgement has saved me an incredible amount of time. Time is our most valuable resource. I reinvest it into talking to more customers, networking, selling myself and my business. Sometimes I may be high and sometimes I may be low. I guess it's just the risk I run. But like I said above, if you charge by the square one may take longer than the other. What happens if you spend longer on more squares than you thought? Then your 0.30 cents/square foot just turned into 0.28 cents/ square foot. In my mind it's the same difference.

I also see your point in not having a number to give the customer if he askes "what do I charge per square." I can't tell him, nor would I want to or feel I need to. I would simply explain to him that it's really impossible for me to charge by the square. I just cant. One area may require a different cleaning solution than another and different techniques, hence it would take longer or it may go more quickly. I bid my work by the job. I do tests on different areas of the building to see what will work the most efficiently, so I can make your building look sparkling clean and make it the most cost-effective I can for you and your business.

Ken... this is just the way I do it. I like to run on intuition and feel. I feel the customer, the job, sell myself and use suggestive selling. I don't have the patience to measure every detail. I did that on a strip mall one time and it took me 6 hours to bid the job. Drove me crazy. After a while I learned what I could clean, how fast it would take me and what our market would bear (pricing).

To answer you on training someone to estimate for me- I would hire a salesperson. And a dang good one at that! :^)

I think a "nice little business" is one that pays the bills AND puts $10 to $20K in the bank a month.

[PressurePros 249]

Craig,

You're definitely correct in that both methods of estimating can end up shortchanged, but I still hold firm that from job to job the highest level of consistency will come from a rate based upon area measurement. I guess there is no real right or wrong answer but its very hard to teach someone intuition. (Something with which you have obviously been blessed ) I sometimes allow optimism to lead me to believe that a job will turn quicker than it actually does so your method just wouldn't work for me. I still would argue that unless you split yourself in half to become that 'dang good salesperson', you would end up with three employees going out and three employees coming back with different estimates. I have had that happen.

And for the record, I share your enthusiastic definition of a "nice little business". Figure on a $30k gross per month to achieve that kind of income. At that level, you will beg for things to be as standardized and "cookie cutter" as possible.

[PATZPW 14]

Since i'm a little guy and this is extra $$ my min is $50.00 an hour on the average. But i

do jobs based on a whole, instead of by the hour or by the foot.