Open a Cleaning Company?

Question

I would like to open a Cleaning Company for cleaning common areas in Condos, or Buildings, here in Chicago, but before I do that, I want to know how much I can charge or how can I make my estimate to the clientes.
Thank you for you help.

Answer 1

There's a couple of ways of tackling this and I suggest using both of them:

1) Put feelers out to other established cleaning companies and ask them to give you an estimate on cleaning your house/apartment.

Be prepared that they will want to send someone out to look at the size of the home. Square footage dictates price more than total number of rooms. A three bedroom mansion has a lot more square footage than a 3 bedroom condo.

2) Time yourself on cleaning with a simple kitchen timer. It may sound silly, but getting an idea of how long it takes you to vacuum a standard size 12 x 18 room is critical to helping you price your service. You should apply the same logic to other tasks like cleaning a bathroom, dusting, doing windows etc.

If you don't know how long it takes you can't price your service accurately. If you offer to clean a 3 bedroom house for $25 and find out it takes you 3 hours to get it clean (hypothetically) then you've just earned about $8/Hour (not too good).

The other thing you've got to factor in once you have your timing down is your cost of doing business.

You're going to have transportation costs, cleaning material cost and travel time all to factor in. You need to be aware of all those things.

A good snapshot of your competition as well as what you're capable of will get you on your way.

Good luck!

Answer 2

Interview cleaning companies or call and ask cleaning companies for their estimates.

Sounds like you will need to do research from people who know the business. Also you'll probably need liability insurance in case anything gets broken, damaged or stolen.

You might want to model your business off the "Clean Team."