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Contractors Price Guide

 

Just
a note: The problem with using general numbers per square foot when
calculating a job cost is you are NOT looking at your particular job
or costs involved. Try using this little guide to see what you should
charge for a cleaning job.

Lets Try it:

 

  1. General Labor
    Rate
    (How much are your services worth an hour? – Including
    what you pay yourself in medical benefits) _______
  2. Equipment Rental / Purchase Cost (or average equipment cost per rental or
    if you purchased equipment, try taking the value of the equipment
    dividing it by 480 [the general work days in 2 years]
    and this will give you a general cost per day which you can convert
    to hours by dividing it by eight) So. If you purchased a pressure
    washer for $5000 then it would generally cost you $1.30 per hour
    to run not including the power source) ______
  3. Detergent Costs for this job (or average cost per job) _______
  4. Now how large of an area are you going to clean?
    (round off square footage, even for vehicles…) __________
  5. Now, depending on
    the amount of labor you have and the speed of your equipment,
    estimate how many hours it will take you to finish
    the job
    . (Example, 1 man, just you, using a surface
    cleaner
    (cleans 12,000 sq. ft. per hour) __________

Now lets use an example…

You have to clean a concrete sidewalk for a single business. Now the sidewalk has gum on it so you will need a product like Taginator to apply to it. 1 gallon of Taginator covers 250 sq. ft, so thats all you need for the spots of gum. The sidewalk is 75 ft long and 6 ft wide. Thats 450 sq. ft. You rented a rotary surface cleaner for $80 for the day. The business location is 100 miles away, up and back. One last thing, lets assume you pay yourself or crew $20 per hour.Lets get to work and calculate our time… The surface cleaner covers 12,000 sq ft and hour and lets say you covered to side walk twice to clean it. The surface cleaner cleans 12,000 sq ft per hr or 200 sq ft per minute. So take our sidewalk twice,
900 ft divided by 200 = 4.5. So it takes you physically 5 minutes to use the surface cleaner.The Taginator takes 30 minutes to use and 10 minutes for cleanup so we will use 40 minutes.So the job is going to take you 45 minutes to complete @ $20 per hour (or 33 cents per minute) = $14.85 in labor costs.So we have
the cost of our labor – $14.85 plus the Rental of the surface cleaner – $80.00 plusThe cost of the gallon of Taginator – $43.00SUBTOTAL =
$137.85plus your Travel Expenses – (ex. average cost per mile nationwide includes gas, insurance & repairs is 42 cents per mile) So take how many miles you have to travel both ways and multiple by .42. So we know its 100 miles up and back so that equals $42.00.$137.85 plus
$42.00 = $179.85.

Now we look at markup percentages.
This will determine how much YOU WILL MAKE on this job. This
is totally up to you depending on the area of the work and how difficult the
work is. Heres some examples…

Markup
Percentage
Markup
number
1%
0.001
10%
1.111
20%
1.250
25%
1.333
30%
1.428
35%
1.539
40%
1.666
45%
1.818
50%
2.000

 

So if your costs are $179.85 and you want to make %10 on the job, just multiply $179.85 by 1.111. Thats $199.81.

Now you have a job cost for this particular example. Record every job you complete and the costs involved. Soon you will have your own contractor pricing guide that you can adjust as needed. You are your best job estimator. You know how much labor is involved. This is a general example an
easy way to get started and cover your bases. This is in no way set in stone. Contact us if you have any suggestions or questions. BROWSE our
line of cleaning compounds here.

 

 

 

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