How to set your hourly rate.
Excellent question and we're going to talk about that today.
Hi there, I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now today's show is brought to us by MyCleaningConnection.com
and on MyCleaningConnection.com there are
a bunch of resources to help you discover the ins and outs of your cleaning business.
So whether you're a do it yourself home cleaner or whether or not you're a professional cleaner,
you'll find stuff for both of you.
In fact, you'll find stuff if you run an Airbnb and you clean your place every day.
So there's all kinds of stuff on MyCleaningconnection.com
Go check it out.
Okay onto today's show which is from a new house cleaner that has this question.
Speaker 2: Hi there.
Hoping I can get some answers.
Just started my own small cleaning service and I'm struggling all the time trying to
figure out my hourly rate.
At this point, I am doing deep cleaning, organizing, and clutter houses that are horrible.
And of course they don't want to pay.
I am needing some guidance on do I do hourly or by job?
Every day is different and I'm struggling with telling my clients, "Well this will cost
this much per hour, but that will cost another per hour."
Please help me.
Angela: All right.
So what I hear you asking is how do you set your hourly rate for the different services
that you offer.
But what I also hear you saying is that you don't understand what it is fully that you do.
So this is a huge problem because if you don't know the services that you provide, there
is no way you can price them for the customer.
Now the fact that you're asking these questions is awesome because that says that you have
a desire to learn and to grow in the cleaning business.
So my suggestion to you is if you are in the United States, that you start out at $25 an
hour because right now that's an average price across the board.
And it's a fair price for somebody new to the business and somebody who's kind of figuring
out their way.
All right now having said that, it would be really easy for you to spend a Saturday or
a day when you're not working and sit down
and go through all the different requests that you've had.
When you get to a customer's house and a customer says,
"Well do you help me go through toy boxes?"
Okay, that's maybe not a normal request that you get, but you might get it again.
So you may want to sit down and write down toy boxes and what does that include.
"Well when I clean out a toy box, what I do is pull all the toys out of the toy box and
I go through all of the toys with the homeowner and we find all of the toys that the family
is no longer using."
The kids have grown out of the toys, the toys are broken, the toys are aged.
These toys are good toys, but nobody's playing with them anymore
and you separate them into piles.
And then you decide what you're going to re-gift or giveaway like to a thrift store or to neighbor
kids or what have you.
You figure out what you're going to throw away and then you re-organize everything and
you find a place for everything so that everything is neat and tidy and the kids can find it.
And they know where the toys go when mom says, "Go put your toys away."
"That's what that package involves.
Here's how much this package costs."
And so what you need to do is go through all the different areas of all the different things
that you do and figure out well what does that mean.
Because if you don't know that you sort toys and that at the end of this process you're
going to be throwing some toys away and you're going to be donating some toys, you can't
explain that to the customer.
If you say, "Well yeah, I can help you with the toy box."
You don't know what is involved and neither does the customer, but if you sit down and
you figure out about how long that's going to take, you know about how much money that's
going to be.
So you have a choice.
You can charge by the hour or charge by the job.
For a toy box for example, that might take you two hours.
And so you might say, "For the toy box project, that's a $50 project."
If you're going by the $25 an hour rate that you would be charging if you charged by the hour.
But if it takes you four hours and you bid $50, then now you've undercut yourself.
Does that make sense?
So you need to know how fast you can work and what it is you offer.
And if you want to just keep it on an hourly basis, if it takes longer, at least you're
covered.
At least you're making $25 an hour.
Now there's nothing to scoff at for $25 an hour.
Most businesses do not have somebody that's new that comes in and makes $25 an hour.
That's pretty unheard of in today's society.
And so that's great money if you're able to work every hour of the day.
And in house cleaning, you don't actually work every hour of the day.
You work a few hours here and a few hours here.
You might go a day or two and no jobs and then you work a few more hours.
So you have to make enough money to survive.
But it helps if you break down the services that you provide and know exactly what you're offering.
So what you may say is you may say, "Okay, your house is super messy.
So what I'm going to do for today is I'm going to come in
and I'm going to clear all the clutter.
We're going to take all of the clothes and we're going to put all of the clothes in a pile.
Then we're going to sort through even the dirty clothes.
We're going to sort through which ones you want to keep, which ones you want to donate,
which ones you want to throw away.
The ones that we're going to keep, we're going to wash.
Then we're going to find a place for those in a closet or a drawer."
And you have to be very specific about what it is you're providing because if you just
say, "Yeah we'll sort through all this stuff."
What does that mean?
And how will the customer know that you did a good job?
They will know a good job when all the clothes are gone through, you have a pile that goes
to the Goodwill, you have a pile that goes to the trash, you a pile that goes to the
laundry room, and then all the clothes that have been cleaned are now hanging on hangers
or they're in their drawers.
If that's how you explain it, then when you're done, the customer will go, "Yes that looks
like the vision that you explained to me.
I now understand.
Here's your money."
But if customers are not willing to pay, my suggestion is that they probably don't understand
what it is you're selling either.
And so if you come into a customer's house and selling is not your thing and you are
not good at selling and you're not good at putting together packages, you will forever
be frustrated in this business because the customer doesn't know what they're buying either.
Now I got news for you.
And this is the good news.
Customers will pay if they know what they're buying.
When the promise is clear, the price is easy.
So you have to make the promise clear.
"Here's exactly what I'm going to do.
I have six different packages.
Here's how much this package costs, here's how much this package costs."
And so on.
Now if you don't want to price per package, you can say, "I can do this project in probably
three or four hours.
So we're talking $75-$100 for this package."
And you can give a range.
And that way it gives you a little bit of free time to make sure that you do the project
and do it correctly.
Because the easiest thing in the house cleaning business is because we want the business,
we undercut our price.
And we say, "Oh I can do it in two hours."
No you can't.
No you can't.
And by giving the customer that price, then the customer says, "Oh well it's only $50."
But then when you're not finished, then they get ticked off with you and they say, "Well
why are you not finished?
You're a lousy house cleaner."
And even though you gave them a steal of a deal on price, now they feel like you did
a lousy job because you didn't keep your promise.
So what you need to do very first and foremost is know what you sell.
Number two, know how to present what you sell.
Number three, price your products and services correctly.
And then number four, set realistic expectations with your customers and clients.
Because if you come into a house and the term that you used was "really messy houses,"
if you come into a house and it's really messy and it's going to take you 28 hours to clean
this house, then you need to come in and say,
"Okay this looks like six days' worth of work.
And so we can break this down into four and five hour packages so that we are able to
accommodate your entire house.
But it cannot be done all in one day.
It cannot be done in a weekend.
It would be unrealistic to assume that a person could do this in a day or two.
Not possible.
It took years to build up this kind of accumulation and it's going to take some time to renovate
it and reset it."
And so when you set realistic expectations and you can do it in a very polite way.
You don't have to shame the customer.
The customer knows why you're there.
They know.
But once you are very clear and you set realistic expectations, then the customer will say,
"Well all right.
I mean I guess that's reasonable."
And you can always ask the customer, "How long would this take you if you cleaned it?"
And the customer will try to give you some kind of a time, "Well I don't know.
Two, three hours."
"So in two or three hours, you could clean up all of this stuff?"
"Well okay.
It might take a little bit longer."
"Okay when you say two or three hours, are you talking about sorting things?
Are you talking about eliminating stuff at the same time?
Or are you talking about just bunching it up into a big pile?"
Again, be very clear about what it is you're talking about.
Because when you're clear and the customer is clear, the price is easy.
Alrighty that's my two cents for today and until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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