So who always thinks that what they haven’t got is better than what they have got?
For many years now most of my work has been commercial, my daily bread and butter has been shop fronts and many window cleaners envy those doing work such as I’ve been doing over the years.
Easy money innit? No ladders, couple of panes of glass, all done in a couple of minutes, £3.50 please love and on to the next shop…sorted!
Well no, not really; it took bloody years to build up lots of these shop fronts and I don’t have enough of them that I can do just these and nothing else.
For the most part the work itself is pretty easy but shops are a real bind on your time.
You have to be as regular as clockwork, when you have enough of them to be considered worthwhile you also have to get up very early to get around things like parking restrictions, shops that open early and need the insides doing before they can put their display in, shops that you have to get done before the punters start shopping and so on.
Collecting can also drive you potty,
there are times (often) when you are queuing longer for your money than it takes you to clean the windows in the first place.
They are the hardest fought for accounts too, they are usually very loyal to you, but shops don’t stay in business as long as you might think!
You can’t just keep putting up your prices either, at say, £2.50 for a small shop front it will only take you about a minute and a half to do, you just can’t put them up year on year, for one thing they would dump you pronto, there is always a choice of at least 2 or 3 others that work most town centres and they’ll be only too happy to take them off you!!
They are a bind in that if you want a holiday you have to arrange cover for them, they’re worse than pets!!
(except you don’t have to feed them)!
The other week I was up at 5am and in work for about 6.30am (well I have to wake up properly :
) and I’d finished cleaning my shops by 9-9.30am Cup of tea, a roll and a quick read of the paper. It’s now coming up to 10am and time to do all my collections, this takes at least 45 minutes to get done, then it is up the road to a couple of other shops in a different part of town, it’s only 10 minutes worth of work, but by the time you take in travelling time it’s another 20 minutes.
What with one thing and another it is close to 11.30am before I can get going to some domestic work.
I start them at 12pm and I’m all done and back home for 3.15pm
It took me from 6.30am up until 11.30am (5 hours) for the shops in total (including a 30 minute break) it took from 12pm until 3pm to clean the domestic accounts.
The money earned was almost identical from both the domestic and commercial work, the domestic earned me 50p more…in 2 hours less.
But the kicker was that after being home for 15 more minutes I had to go off and do just 2 shops worth £11.00 between them….the shops were 8 miles away and have to be done every week.
A real bind…
My best accounts are the medium sized offices and a few pubs, I’m talking about the kind of jobs that would take you about 5 hours using trad, now these are brilliant! I only wish I had a round full of them.
With WFP, what took 5 hours can be done in an hour and a half and you charge the same as you did before..top banana!!
You want the really big accounts?
3 or 4 days worth for 2 men?
You keep em’ then, you’re welcome to them, eggs and baskets spring to mind!
My next best accounts are my domestics, maybe it is because I am now WFP, but I can make more money in a day doing these than I can doing shop fronts.
Collecting is a pain no matter whether you are doing shops or domestic, but with the domestic work, if they are not in then I expect them to post me a cheque, either with the S.A.E. I provide them with or under their own steam.
That is actually working really well too, God, but I hated going out doing collections!!
So for me the greenest grass is the medium size office block, followed by well priced domestic and then the shop fronts coming in last, not that they are bad of course, they’ve paid my bills for a couple of decades, but the bind of them gets me down at times.
Another problem with shops is that when there is a change, such as the customer deciding that they want them done every 2 weeks instead of every week it can make quite a difference in your earnings too.
So bring on the domestics! Let me squirrel out a few more offices (and of course you don’t mind travelling a fair old distance if you are going to knock out £120 in an hour and a half!!
) I reckon I know which side of the fence has the greenest grass!!!!
Ian