Hi all,
My name is Steve I am 42, married and have three girls I am based in Cirencester, Gloucestershire the capital of the Cotswolds. I have been my wife's carer for the last 5 years or so. Now the girls are older they can start taking care of themselves which frees up time for me and have been racking my brains of what I could do that could potentially pay well and be flexible and then it hit me...
I am about to have a go and start window cleaning (using traditional methods) in my area and decided to search on the net for help and advice which is how I came across this superb forum. Having read through 100's of posts over the last week I must congratulate this forums members for the amount of help they give others, there are certainly many wise owls out there with lots of experience under their belts. Anyway that's enough of the soft soap for now time to get to the point.
First thing is charging and fully understand from reading other posts on this subject that it very much depends on where you are etc.
Thus far this is what I am thinking:
Minimum £10
£1.00 per window opening
£2.00 per window leaded or Georgian Style
Inside cleans just double the price
Conservatories not to include roof will be priced at £1.00 per say large window.
Does that sound justifiable considering the area I'm in?
One of my reservations is the area I'm in there are some Terraced properties that have 3 standard windows at front and 4 to rear and would not take very long to do, however you would need to walk around the back and past at least one house to get to say the middle one in the Terrace. So in that example going by price structure it would be £7.00 but would minimum £10 be a bit high?
Next point is frequency I can't decide on 4, 6 or 8 weeks, I think I would like to do 4 weekly but have a nagging feeling may be considered to often?
Now the next thing is and I'm probably being stupid so please forgive me, is lets say for example you are doing 4 weekly and you have a full round and you pick up some new good paying work and they want 8 weekly how do you factor this in because when it's time to do them on the 8th week you should be doing your 4th week ones.
If you are doing 4 weekly do you just divide the week Mon, Tues, Wed etc and book jobs in on the days or do you do it as a list for that week as you may want to juggle some around to make things more compact and efficient.
Or do you do it as a list of jobs that week, say you can manage 50 jobs a week and week 1 is full and someone while you are working that week asks you to do a job do you say I'm full this week and book them in on a week where you have space etc. (Sorry to be dim) I just want to get it all straight in my mind.
I will probably keep it all written down to start with but have read about various programs George for one and have downloaded the trial version, but I am also looking at Round Management system Version 1 by Snowdream Software
http://www.snowdreamsoftware.co.uk/home.html which looks much cleaner and user friendly to me. Does anyone know or have have any experience of it?
I have started to purchase some equipment and used Midland Ladders who have been recommended numerous times on here, the ladders I have purchased can be seen here
http://www.midlandladders.com/products/Double_3_5m_11_5ft_Trade_Light_Industrial_Ladder-11-7.html I also included a pair of factory fitted Supagrip feet, does that seem okay? I will also buy a safety ladder device in due course.
I have the other tools of the trade equipment to buy and will look around for best prices etc. Any recomendations, free delivery would be good.
So sorry to ramble on for my first posting please be gentle with me, I'm sure there were other things I wanted to ask so will need to post again.