Watch Watchers

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Pricing questions are one of the most commonly-asked in Facebook cleaning groups. The post usually goes like this. There's an image of a house or details of the house or office. It is followed by "How much should I charge for this?" The only question I have seen more often in the last 7 years on Facebook is this one. "How do you clean this?" and there's a picture of something. I visited Angela Brown's Professional House Cleaners private group on June 5th, 2023 and answered multiple questions with the same response. I noticed there was a common struggle with pricing that I wanted to address, so I posted this the same day to the group.​Watch out for Watch-Watchers! Don't Charge by the Hour!I've seen this play out so many times in the cleaning industry and quite honestly, in many industries. Many of you are still charging by-the-hour. You can do what you want. You can make a case for it early on if you're terrible at numbers and estimates. But it will only attract "Watch-Watchers" and drama. These customers will time your every cleaning and you'll be penalized for taking longer ("Why am I paying so much?") or taking shorter ("Why were you so quick, what didn't you do?"). It sets you up to never earn more per hour unless you raise your hourly rates. It sets you up to have customers watching your every move and watching their watches. This is not good for you or your customers. Don't do this!Solution: Learn how to price. Know your numbers and stop making the excuse! You need to price badly in the beginning and learn through experience how long every part of cleaning a house or office takes. You'll never price badly again. You'll even learn how to set buffers on different types of jobs so you'll stop underestimating jobs, which we all do. The good news is that we underestimate less with more experience. Set by-the-job pricing, get your rhythms for each house, and speed it up over time with high quality. Your hourly rate that you calculate internally will skyrocket. I got mine to the $80-$120/hour range when I was solo for many years and this was pre-pandemic before prices shot up. I still average above my competitors locally as we build our team. By-the-job pricing is a Win-Win for you and your customers. The customer simply wants excellence and quality. They also want you in their house or office less. Minimizing our times minimizes our footprint into a homeowner's or office's schedule. The less we are there, the less they think about cleaning. The less they thing about cleaning, the happier they are. As long as the quality is amazing as usual, they win. We make more per hour and per day and we are happy. We win.I ended the post with this call to action. Feel free to discuss. I think this will have a lot of passionate responses. It's always fun to hear the feedback of others. Some agreed with me. Some did not. I want to share some points of view from both sides.Victor Jaramillo, Jr. – "Agree 100%. The only issue I transitioned to by-the-hour for initial cleans while I trained new staff but now that they’ve been with me for a few it’s time to switch to a flat rate as I calculate in my head. My staff will either maximize or minimize their hourly earnings based on their following our system."Bert Sloan – "Charging by the hour opens up a plethora of problems."Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website