Barbara, i am now working only with my sister (it is our joint business) but we have employed people in the past. One of us will visit any potential new customer to see them, to see their home, to find out what they want, and decide if we can do / want the job.
There is no list of jobs and no contract. The client tells us what jobs they want doing and we price accordingly. I will admit that we are currently at our most flexible in terms of doing what people want because there is only me and sis involved, but when we've had staff we have had to be more streamlined and less task-specific, if that makes sense. Don't get me wrong, we don't analyse every last ornament on the matlepeice when we quote, we simply decide how long (based on experience) we are likely to have to spend in a house, based on its current standards and, if in the absence of regular cleaning so far, what it will probably be like after we've been going for a while.
We have never charged by the hour, when we took the business on they were already pricing by the work and we continued to do so. We have never once told a client we will spend an amount of time with them, yes, we may say 'around' this amount of time if they want to know how long the cleaning will take for the purpose of being away for the duration, but we make a very clear point of telling them they are paying for the work. On the few occasions where this has caught people off-guard, we make the point that your hairdresser as one example is unlikley to charge for his/her time, they charge for what you have done.
It is a long story and one which i dont say much about, but my sister and I never wanted to run a cleaning business, we kind-of took over the reigns from someone else in the family. Every time we had staff it caused us a headache in one way or another, to the point that we now currently do the work ourselves, although we are not ruling out expansion at some point. We don't make a massive amount from the cleaning but we like being able to please ourselves amongst other things.
