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Embracing Mistakes: How Making Mistakes Can Help Your Maid Service Succeed

December 26, 2020 in Business

Last Updated on August 24, 2023 by The ZenMaid Team

Every business owner has made their fair share of mistakes during the pursuit of entrepreneurship. But what separates growth from failure is how you react to these mistakes and learn from them. Everyday situations that might seem irrelevant or small at the time can turn out to be massive turning points for your business, depending on how you react to them. 

In this post, weโ€™ll share strategies and mindsets to focus on that will help you learn from your mistakes, prevent them from happening again in the future, and find innovative solutions to common mistakes that maid service owners make

Have you ever found yourself staring at the phone, client on the line, sweating over what number to say? You’re not alone. One of the most common questions among residential cleaning business owners is how much should I charge for my services?

Charge too high, and you might scare clients away. Too low, and you’re undercutting your value. It’s enough to make anyone second-guess their math skills. In this article, weโ€™re breaking down industry standards and how to calculate the best price to charge for your maid service. 

Now, letโ€™s get to it. 

Hourly vs. flat rate pricing:

The debate between hourly vs. flat rate is as old as the industry itself. Many seasoned experts advocate for flat-rate pricing as the golden ticket to scaling your business. It offers predictability for your clients and ensures you’re compensated for the value you provide, not just the time you spend.

However, don’t toss the idea of knowing your hourly rate out the window just yet. Understanding your approximate hourly rate is crucial for accurately setting your flat rates. It serves as the foundation upon which you build your pricing structure, ensuring that you’re not only competitive but also profitable.

The trick is to calculate your hourly rate based on your operating costs, desired profit margins, and the market rates, and then transition to a flat-rate model that reflects the value and efficiency of your services. In this article, weโ€™re giving you step-by-step instructions on how to determine this rate. But first, letโ€™s cover some industry averages:

Industry average prices for cleaning services

The standard flat rate for cleaning services can vary widely depending on the location, the size and condition of the space, the type of cleaning required, and the cleaning company itself. Here’s a quick breakdown of standard cleaning rates based on averages from HomeAdvisor and Angi.

1. Hourly Rates:

  • Standard cleaning prices also range from $35 to $60 per hour for each cleaner. 
  • The national average cost of house cleaning is noted to be $40-$50 per hour, per cleaner.

2. Per Room Rates:

  • The rate is about $30 to $50 per room.

3. Square Footage Rates:

  • Cleaning a 2,000-square-foot home can cost about $0.06 to $0.16 per square foot, which would total $110 to $320.

4. Flat Fee Rates:

  • For a typical three-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home, the cleaning cost usually ranges from $160 to $200. 
  • A one-bedroom apartment is priced at around $80 to $110.
Cleaning typeHourly rateFlat rateSq Ft Rate
Residential Cleaning
Standard Cleaning$25 – $50 per cleaner$100 – $200$0.05 – $0.16
Deep Cleaning$40 – $100 per cleaner$200 – $400$0.13 – $0.17
Move-In/Out Cleaning$40 – $100 per cleaner$300 – $400$0.13 – $0.20
Commercial Cleaning
Standard Cleaning$25 to $90 per cleanerVaries by size$0.10 to $0.25
Deep Cleaning$40 to $150 per cleaner$200 to $500N/A
Special ServicesVaries by serviceVaries by serviceVaries by service

Additional Services You Can Charge: For residential cleaning, add-on services such as changing bed sheets, laundry, interior and exterior window cleaning, fridge cleaning, oven cleaning, etc., come with additional costs ranging from $4 to $50 per serviceโ€‹. In ZenMaid, you can easily add these extra charges to your cleaning job. 

The pricing strategy formula

Now that weโ€™ve covered some average industry rates, letโ€™s break down a bit more. Everyone likes a good roadmap, right? Here are the four steps for how to find your cleaning service rate: 

  • Step One: Find your target hourly rate
  • Step Two: Calculate how much square footage you can clean in an hour
  • Step Three: Develop a pricing strategy
  • Step Four: Use the pricing formula

How to find the hourly rate for your business

The first step to finding an hourly rate for your business starts with doing local market research. When conducting your market research, consider these targeted questions: 

  • What are other businesses charging? More specifically, what are businesses the same size as yours charging? 
  • How often do they offer services?

The easiest way to find out what your competitors are charging is when prices are listed on their website. Unfortunately, that’s not very common. So, pick up the phone and call up your competitors to ask. 

Once you know what your competition is charging, try to understand how much you can get for what you offer. 

  • Will the demographic in your area pay for a premium service? 
  • Do you want to charge the same as a franchise’s cleaning business?

Facebook groups, client surveys, and competitors are great places to find these answers. 

After you’ve done your market research, you’ll need to figure out how to position your company in the marketplace. Are you just another residential cleaning service? Or, do you offer a premium, specialized product? 

When you know the direction you’re headed, the road to your pricing strategy is easier to find. Some cleaning services like to specialize in large homes or luxury homes. Others just want the โ€˜meat and potatoes’ of a basic cleaning service. The good news is that there’s plenty of business for everybody. 

Employee pay

The next factor that influences your hourly rate is how much you pay your employees. If you want to pay the bare minimum needed to hire people, that’s going to put you on the lower end of the hourly rate. 

If you aim to offer a livable wage with benefits, you’re going to need to charge more. There are no correct answers here, but you need to understand these factors when developing your hourly rate.

The average employee pay range for cleaners is $15.30/hour. You can use this for calculating your hourly cleaning rate. 

Consider your marketing strategy

The final factor for your hourly rate is your marketing strategy. 

Are you trying to grow your business? 

Your rate will need to be competitive if you’re hoping to grow at a fast pace. 

If you need to grow rapidly but don’t want to lower prices, read this article three ways to get more cleaning customers without lowering your prices.ย 

If your business has grown to a place you’re comfortable with, or if you’re well-known in the area, you can probably charge a higher hourly rate. And you can definitely charge a higher rate if you have a waiting list of clients! 

How many square feet can you clean per hour?

After you’ve found your hourly rate, understand how many square feet you can clean per hour. Now, at first, this can seem hard to find, but you likely already have the information you need โ€“ it’s just a matter of finding it! 

It’s important to know your square footage per hour because you will use it as a baseline for all your prices.

Use data from past cleaning jobs to learn how fast you can clean 500 square feet. You’ll want to calculate an average from your recent jobs. 

  • How long did the last ten *typical jobs take you? 
  • How many employees were on the cleaning job? 
  • How many square feet were the homes?

Don’t have any recent data? 

No worries! Start recording this data for the next week and then use it to find your average.

*Several variables can affect your average cleaning rate, so use only typical homes when calculating your average cleaning pace. Your typical homes are the predictable ones that are simple to clean, requiring only your basic cleaning services. (We’ll touch on how to avoid pricing disasters in these kinds of homes at the end of this article!)

How to find your pricing strategy

The next step to nail down your pricing system is to identify your pricing strategy. 

In other words, how frequently do you hope to charge for services? We’re going to use your pricing strategy to calculate our prices based on frequency. 

Do you want your main revenue to come from weekly cleans, bi-weekly, or monthly with extra fees?

Many residential cleaning companies push for bi-weekly cleans. Offering a small discount of around 5% is a great option to incentivize clients to choose these more frequent cleans. 

On the other hand, charging more for monthly cleans is a good way to help clients choose more frequent cleans. It’s often reasonable to charge an additional 50% for a monthly clean. 

We see too many cleaning business owners charge the same rate for bi-weekly and monthly cleans. When this happens, your client has no reason to choose bi-weekly over monthly. 

Determining an effective pricing strategy is crucial and should align with your current business standing and long-term goals. Assessing your booking rates and understanding your clientele’s price sensitivity are pivotal steps.

More factors to consider:

  • If you find that your services are in high demand, with a fully booked schedule being the norm, it might be an indication that your clientele values your services highly. In such a scenario, adopting a premium pricing strategy could be beneficial. This approach reflects the high quality and demand for your services and provides additional revenue that can be reinvested into growing and enhancing your business further.
  • On the flip side, a different approach is warranted if your booking rate is lower than desired and you’re struggling to cover your operational costs. Penetration pricing, where you initially set a lower price to gain market share and cover your fixed expenses, might be a viable strategy. This can help attract a customer base and establish a foothold in the market. Once a loyal clientele is built and market recognition is achieved, prices can be gradually adjusted to a higher point.
  • Alternatively, crafting custom packages could be a smart move. By offering tailored cleaning packages, you encourage customers to engage with your services over a longer term. This not only helps cover your fixed costs but also enhances each customer’s lifetime value, thereby boosting your overall profitability. Structuring packages that provide value while ensuring profitability will create a win-win scenario for your business and clientele.

To learn more about building a pricing strategy for your cleaning business, check out this article!

How to calculate your pricing

We’ve made it to the pricing formula. After you’ve gone through all the steps above, this next step is pretty simple.

First, take the square footage of your client’s home and divide it by your rate of square feet cleaned per hour. Then, multiply it by your hourly rate. The total number is how much you’ll charge for a single job in that client’s home. 

So let’s use an easy number as an example: If a client with a 2,000 square-foot home calls you looking for a quote, divide 2,000 by 500 (rate of square feet cleaned per hour) multiplied by $50 (an hourly rate.) The total one-time clean for that client is $200.

Bi-weekly rate

Offering a 5% discount for bi-weekly cleans is a great incentive for clients. Using the $200 example above, this would mean a client can have a 2,000-square-foot home cleaned twice a month for $380 (after the 5% is applied.) This is an example of a baseline bi-weekly rate. 

Monthly rate

Your monthly cleans can have an additional 50% charge to encourage more frequent cleans and account for the extra dust and dirt the home will accumulate between cleans. Using the $200 example, a monthly clean would cost a 2,000-square-foot client $300 (after an extra 50% is added.) This is an example of a baseline monthly rate. 

You can use this formula to calculate any specialty service in your business. Just play around with different percentages and values until you come to a reasonable and profitable baseline. 

Minimum rate

No matter what kind of service you’re offering, it’s important to set a minimum rate to avoid losing money on out-of-scope services. This will save you the headache of negotiating with a client who might only want a certain room in their home clean. Or perhaps, if they have a smaller home that would only require an hour of cleaning based on your square footage cleaning rate. Set this minimum rate using the pricing calculator and the base amount required to make a profit per clean. 

Factors affecting cleaning service pricing

Sometimes, you will find people reaching out to you for a quote, but once you get to the location, you find out there are a lot of factors at play that affect pricing.

Other than the factors mentioned earlier, here are some factors to be aware of:

  • Size of the Area to be Cleaned: The total square footage or the number of rooms and bathrooms can greatly affect the time, effort, and resources required to complete the cleaning task.
  • Level of Clutter: A cluttered space can take longer to clean as it might require decluttering before the actual cleaning can commence.
  • Type of Cleaning Required: Whether it’s a standard cleaning, deep cleaning, or a specialized service like carpet cleaning or window washing, different types of cleaning have different pricing structures.
  • Frequency of Cleaning: Regularly scheduled cleanings may be priced differently than one-time or less frequent cleanings.
  • Accessibility: If certain areas are hard to reach or the location is in a high-traffic urban area, it may add to the cleaning time and cost.
  • Special Requests or Preferences: Clients may have special requests such as using eco-friendly cleaning products or working outside standard hours, which can also affect costs.
  • Pet Situation: Homes with pets may require additional cleaning efforts like fur removal, which could influence the price.
  • Parking Facilities: In urban areas, the availability of parking near the location can be a factor as it may affect the ease with which cleaning crews can access the site.
  • Additional Services: Services like laundry, dishwashing, or organizing could be additional and would affect the overall pricing.
  • Supplies Provided: Whether the cleaning company needs to provide all cleaning supplies or some are provided by the client can also impact the cost.
  • Lifestyle Factors: Does the client smoke indoors? Does the client keep surfaces clean during the week? Do they host a lot of guests?
  • Urgency: Urgent or last-minute cleaning requests may carry premium pricing.

Protecting yourself from pricing disasters

With flat-rate pricing, you need to protect yourself from pricing disasters. We’ve all been there: after quoting a home, we walk into a cleaning job that takes way longer than estimated. There are mountains of clutter, piles of dust, and floors in need of a little too much love. So what do you do?

When taking any new job, set the precedent that you may need to overcharge if any visit takes longer than planned. An example line you can add to your contracts is, โ€œquoted prices assume average-sized rooms in average condition. Extra hours needed to clean will be priced with an additional $50 per hour.โ€ When a client agrees to this ahead of time, you’ve protected yourself from being underpaid. 

Then, when you find yourself in a job taking longer than expected (which is bound to happen at some point), take a break from cleaning to notify the client that an extra fee will be added to keep cleaning. If they give you the go-ahead, you can proceed and charge extra as needed. 

If the client declines moving forward, then you can wrap up the job without any penalty. Don’t wait until you’re at the end of a job to notify the client of an extra charge. 

Wrapping up

Your cleaning business’ success starts with finding the right rates to charge. 

Luckily, finding the perfect pricing strategy for your cleaning business doesn’t have to feel like solving a complex puzzle. With ZenMaid, you can take the guesswork out of quoting and make the process as clean and simple as the services you offer. Our software comes equipped with an instant booking form feature, making it effortless for your clients to get accurate quotes online directly from your website.

Say goodbye to pricing woes and hello to a smoother, more professional booking experience with ZenMaid.

Shift your โ€˜mistakeโ€™ mindset

When something goes wrong in your business, you can either repeat that process so that it continues to go wrong, or you can find ways to make things right. 

To make the most out of past mistakes, you need to look back at the milestones and situations that have shaped your business. The mistakes you make can reveal where there are gaps in your business and allow you to course-correct. 

These opportunities can change your business entirely and put you on a path for growth. Your mistakes enable you to create more opportunities to do better within your business. They also help to shift your mindset and reframe certain potentially negative experiences. 

Making mistakes and learning from them gives you the opportunity to change what youโ€™re doing and develop new and innovative solutions to any problems youโ€™re facing.ย 

Try to anticipate likely mistakesย 

Cleaning itself comes with a ton of unknowns and factors you canโ€™t always plan for. There are hundreds of things that could likely go wrong with any cleaning. A few examples include:ย 

  • Getting locked out of the property
  • Dealing with broken fixtures and equipmentย 
  • Pets escaping the home
  • Bringing the wrong equipment
  • Losing a clientโ€™s keys
  • Staff not showing up for work

All of these have happened to cleaners and maid service owners, and theyโ€™ve had to learn ways to anticipate them and plan for solutions ahead of time. Although youโ€™ll never be able to fully anticipate everything that can go wrong, you can have contingency plants in place that account for some common cleaning mishaps.ย 

You can learn a lot about what problems to look out for when you have a community of maid service and cleaning business owners that you can learn from (like our Facebook group, The ZenMaid Mastermind). Even without a network of other cleaning business owners, there are some things that you may be able to anticipate just by taking the time to make a list of what could go wrong during a cleaning.ย 

Create policies and procedures for common problems

While there are a lot of aspects of your business that might fall beyond your control (like the ones we mentioned in the previous section) you can have policies in place that will lessen the likelihood of them happening.ย 

You can create policies for your business that solve problems or make it so that you donโ€™t have to face them every time you do a cleaning.ย 

For example, some customers may have unruly pets that escape the second you open the front door.ย 

Ever had to chase dogs down the road because they accidentally escaped during a cleaning? It might be worth adding a policy that the owner must put pets in a particular part of the home or a crate during cleanings. You can frame the policy in a way that shows your customers that you care about the wellbeing of their pets and want to protect their safety.ย 

Document every mistake and how you fixed itย 

Anytime something goes wrong in your business, you can look at what went wrong and find ways to fix it at that moment. Even more importantly, you have an opportunity to prevent it from going wrong again in the future.ย 

When you encounter a problem in your cleaning business and find a solution, itโ€™s important to document the systems and processes you use to correct them. If something has gone wrong once, itโ€™s likely that it will happen again. Having a documented process on how you handled that situation, what youโ€™re doing to prevent it, and how to address it if it happens again can save you tons of time and headache in the future.ย 

Present solutions that benefit you and the clientย 

After an incident where Krissi had a shower door fall on her during a cleaning, she came up with the idea to partner with a handyman to give her clients the opportunity to fix things on their property in addition to a cleaning. During the first fifteen minutes of the cleaning, her team will walk through the home and identify anything wrong with the property and things that may cause a problem.ย 

Then they give their client the number of a handyman with whom theyโ€™ve created a partnership. This creates a win-win situation both for her business and the client. The customer feels good that they are receiving excellent customer service, and the cleaner can avoid unwanted injury or issues from the cleaning by identifying potential problems ahead of time.ย 

This one mistake became an opportunity to solve a problem that may have occurred again. It also creates a new way to earn money by setting up a partnership with another local business.ย 

Overestimate how long things takeย 

Picture this: youโ€™ve booked your first cleaning, done a walkthrough, either in person or virtually. You get to the clientโ€™s house, and all of a sudden, it looks nothing like it did when you did the walkthrough. You start cleaning and two hours in, you are still in the kitchen.ย 

You always want to do a good job to secure a good review, so you continue on with the session, which ends up lasting twice as long as you estimated. Sound familiar?ย 

Early on in your cleaning business, itโ€™s not uncommon to underestimate the time it takes to complete a job, especially for a first-time client. Once you have a fully booked schedule, underestimating your timing can hurt how your business flows. When booking cleanings, especially for new clients, always factor in additional time to create a better buffer for the appointment. This also helps ensure that youโ€™re not rushing to get the job done so you can make the next cleaning on time.ย 

Another way to make sure youโ€™re factoring in time correctly is to let the client know that they shouldnโ€™t clean or tidy up before you conduct your walkthrough, or they send you a virtual tour. You want to see exactly what state the house is in so that you can plan accordingly.ย 

In the same vein, itโ€™s a good idea to overestimate how long it will take to get to the clientโ€™s home before the appointment. Regardless of whether you have clear directions, there might be some unexpected issues along the way. Give your staff plenty of time to get to the destination without having to rush and build in a buffer time.ย 

Embrace the mistakes you make with open armsย 

Owning a maid service business comes with its own unique set of challenges and obstacles to overcome. Many cleaning business owners get knocked down and are forced to get back up time and time again. It takes a certain level of courage and resilience to work through difficult times and build a successful cleaning business.ย 

One of the most important things you can do as a cleaning business owner is to adopt a growth mindset and find opportunities within every challenge. Every mistake that you make comes with its own lesson. If you never do anything wrong within your business, your business will likely become stagnant.ย 

Mistakes force you to think outside of the box and come up with creative solutions to your problems. Rather than dwelling on the mistakes youโ€™ve made in the past, try to embrace your mistakes with open arms and view them as tools to help you grow.ย 

About the presenter

Krissi Foskett is the founder and CEO of BD365, Domestic Cleaning Business Network, and The Domestic Cleaning Academy. She started her eco-friendly cleaning business in 2016 and, within just 18 months, grew the company to over 100 domestic clients and a dozen staff, providing a tailored solution for domestic customers. In this post, weโ€™ll share Krissiโ€™s formula for learning from your mistakes and using them as an opportunity for your business to grow.ย 

This talk first aired at the 2020 Maid Service Success Summit.

The Maid Summit is an annual online event that brings together the most successful leaders in the cleaning industry, like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely, Amy Caris, Chris Schwab and more. Get free access to masterclasses and workshops that will help you to grow, scale and automate your cleaning business so you can get more leads and create more profit. Make sure youโ€™re on our email list to find out how to get free tickets to the next event.

If you found this article useful, check these ones out:

 

ZenMaid

Amar is the founder and CEO of ZenMaid Software, Inc. He started and ran Fast Friendly Spotless, a maid service in Orange County, CA. With the help of customized software to automate work he successfully operated the service in under 30 minutes per day. He created ZenMaid scheduling software to help other maid service owners do the same.

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