How to Set Your Pricing, Staff Pay, and Packages

Brought to you by expert maid service owners

Tips and advice shared here, have helped us grow our own maid services. With eight current and former cleaning business owners in our team, including our CEO and founder Amar, we know the maid service industry inside and out.

We partner with amazing leaders in the cleaning industry like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely and Chris Schwab and more, to provide you with the latest industry insights.

We’ve built the easiest-to-use scheduling software, built specifically for maid service owners! Check out ZenMaid

Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube

Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And in today’s solo episode, we are going to be talking about three different areas that we have to make some decisions on in our business and the pros and cons in each of these categories and subcategories.

And the reason I wanted to record this today was it’s something that I kind of talk about in a lot of episodes or allude to or mention in consulting calls, but I wanted there to be one resource hub for this particular topic. And so the areas that I’m going to be getting into today is going to be the decisions we need to make when we have the options of pricing, how we pay our staff members, as well as the services and packages that we offer.

Side note, if you are not looking at the camera, look at these glitter tinsel strands, right? If you, okay, do you guys know that this is a thing? Look at this hair. Isn’t that sick? Highly recommend getting tinsel put in your hair. It’s the festive season, but I would do this at any time of year, I must say. So always add glitter. That’s kind of my life motto, right? So big fan, big fan. I put a glitter emoji or a little sparkle down in the comments, guys. Hit that like, hit that subscribe. If you’re not subscribed, I would very much appreciate it. And let’s hop into this topic.

Understanding Your Pricing Options

And first and foremost, we’re going to talk about pricing guys and the multiple ways that we can price for residential specifically. I’m going to keep this catered to residential. Some of this is going to apply universally, but let’s focus in on residential house cleaning and how we can price. And so there’s several different options that you can go down – first being hourly, second being flat rate, third being a square footage charge, and then fourth being a hybrid model, which is really just marrying several of the options together, right?

So first and foremost, I want to talk about the pros and cons of charging hourly. And spoiler alert, if you did not know this, I run a cleaning company called Serene Clean. We are at a lot of money a month and we still charge hourly, guys. We have charged hourly from day one for residential for all appointments, initial appointments, maintenance cleans. We do hourly. And I know that that is shocking. And so many people will be like, that is losing out on so much profit. It’s better to be flat rates. What are you doing? Oh my gosh, right? And they’re not wrong. There’s absolutely detriments to charging hourly.

The Cons of Hourly Pricing

And so let’s go into the negatives first, actually, shall we? Let’s start with the bad side. So one of the biggest challenges of hourly is going to be you are losing out on potential efficiency related profits, right? So one of the benefits to allude to flat rate is that the faster you get, the more profitable you are being on those jobs, right? We’re hourly. It’s actually totally the opposite, right? If we get faster, we make less money. So that makes it challenging to really enhance our profits as high as possible with hourly. It’s always going to be the same each hour, right? We’re not going to get any more money out of that particular hour. It’s going to be that hourly rate. So that is a huge negative for sure from a financial perspective.

Obviously I’ll talk about the reasons why we choose hourly, but can’t be overlooked is that that is a potential detriment to charging hourly. Another really big consequence or negative of charging hourly is going to be the fact that people see that hourly rate and they can get all sorts of thoughts in their head, meaning the customer and the employees if they know how much you charge. Because I’ve literally been told, and let me know down in the comments if you guys have ever had this comment before from a client or potential client of, oh my gosh, $40 an hour, $50 an hour. I make $30 an hour and I’m a physical therapist or I’m whatever job you want to insert. Why do you think you deserve that? Or why would you charge that much? That doesn’t make any sense.

They get all huffy about the specific dollar amount, despite the fact that, of course, that’s not going all in our pocket, but they’re comparing their hourly wage as an employee, to what a company charges, right? But there is potentially going to be that awkward moment where, yeah, I do charge more than you make hourly. That’s irrelevant. These are the prices, right? So that being said, customers may bring that up to you. They may bring it up in flat rate as well, but it is something to consider that you may have to bump up against that and beat that objection.

And obviously there’s so much overhead associated with business. We don’t want to over-explain, but point being is that coming at it from, we pay our cleaners well. We have a lot of overhead and being a fully licensed, bonded and insured company, of course, has costs associated to protect you, your home and your belongings. So that’s sales Stephanie coming out if I were to try to go against that objection, right? We also provide all the tools and supplies. We have consistent quality control and standardized checklists that we follow and leave behind every cleaning. So when can we start? So if you wanted to use that as a sales tactic. That’s how I would say it and beat that objection.

But keep in mind that people might bring that up and they might get a little bit huffy about your chosen hourly rate. So that is definitely a negative. The other negative and something that we have to protect against is that cleaners, well, this is kind of how we pay, but they’re not really incentivized to go faster, right, based on how we charge. So keep that in mind that there may be, they may go up to the approved amount of time always because there’s just there’s no reason to do it faster, right? They don’t want to set themselves up to have to do it faster in the future appointments. Because if we start seeing cleaners are getting done, say, scheduled for four labor hours job, they’re getting it done in three and a half. Well, we are going to cut it to three and a half. And because we pay hourly as well, that’s going to cut back on that. So it all kind of has they all react to each other, if you will, how we pay and how we charge. So are the negatives of hourly.

The Importance of Production Rates

Let me go into the positives and why Serene Clean continues to choose to charge hourly in residential, despite the things that I just established. And because most people are going to say the biggest negative is going to be the profit, of course, you’re not going to enhance the profits as high as you could because of that. So that’s 100% true. No ifs, ands, or buts. Hourly is incredibly simple and it really protects us in a lot of ways, especially for initial cleans.

Remember, Serene Clean does not go out to jobs before we clean them for residential, unless it’s a very extenuating circumstance, perhaps a hoarder situation or something of that type of thing where we want to see it. Otherwise, we’re just going off of the information that they provide in the ZenMaid booking form when they fill it out. And so we are going in blind and the hourly really protects us, especially even if it is a typical home, but some things are taking longer, right? We’re just going to communicate that to the client. We’re going to add more time, right? So it’s very simple. It is the most simple way to charge, right? It’s just, it’s easy. It is very easy and it’s easy to bang out a lot of estimates, it feels like, because it’s just, we just go off of the information.

And no matter how you charge, guys, the way I can estimate correctly and accurately for any of these, you need to know your production rates, okay? You need to know your production rates. How fast does your team on average clean? Because even if you’re charging flat rate, even if you’re charging square footage, you need to know how much time to schedule out the appointment for, right? So we have to have enough time slotted in the calendar. That means we need to know how many labor hours it’s going to take on average, regardless of how we charge.

The Benefits of Hourly Pricing

And so the other positive of charging hourly outside of it feels very protective for first times going inside unseen. Another thing is if they haven’t had us for a while, we don’t have to play that gray area that you do with flat rate of, well, is this an initial clean again? It takes how long it takes, right? And then we just charge for that. It’s very, very simple. It’s easy to communicate to the cleaners. This is approved for X amount of hours. Do not go over. That type of thing.

So one of the main reasons that I have chosen to continue to charge hourly, despite the size of Serene Clean, is because we do so many limited hour cleans. And what I mean by limited hour is literally, it is we have them sign the limited hour agreement saying, I understand the whole house is not going to get cleaned. I am paying for four labor hours or 10 labor hours or whatever it is. And so for us, this is a huge benefit because a lot of times people in our area, where it’s a very rural area, we would be missing out on a ton of business of people who maybe are not comfortable with our full price of our full house clean for the initial clean, right?

If I give them a price of a thousand dollars for the first clean, they may balk at them and say, no, that’s too much. And you know how I can deal with that objection wise is saying, well, what is the budget. What were you thinking? They’re like, well, I was thinking 500. Great. We can absolutely work within your budget. What we’re going to do is just work off of your priority list, get through as much as we can that first visit, and then just keep chipping away at it at the maintenance cleans. How does that sound? Right? That’s how I would deal with that.

And so by doing limited hours, literally they buy labor hours from us and we stick to that and get through as much as we can. Of course, we’re working as fast as we can and getting as high quality as we can. There’s a variety of ways we could do it. And it really is customizable of they could literally change the rooms every single time they got us for three hours, lists on the counter or lists emailed to the office. And remember, guys, we do not let them take off tasks, they can just choose rooms, right? Start with kitchen, then do the bathrooms, and then these rooms after or whatever. So that’s how we handle it.

So they can change it every time, or it can be the same every time. It works really beautifully to give our customers options, if they don’t want the full shebang, or just as the recurring clean, they just have us come for three hours every time, then the house would probably take five maybe to do the whole thing. If it was a larger home, for example, I’m just pulling numbers out, right. And so that allows me to have three hours, chargeable hours as opposed to zero, because they wouldn’t take us if we just were like, no, you have to get the whole house, right? Or flat rate makes it more difficult to do that. So it’s very just straightforward.

And I would say honestly that at least a third, if not more of our residential clientele are on limited hour agreements of some flavor, meaning they have us not clean the whole house. It’s very, very common for us. So I would be losing out on so much business because of, and that could just be because of our area that that’s necessary. I don’t really know, nor do I care. I just know that it works for us. So that’s why I do that. And it just, it really is simple. And it’s very effective.

So those are the reasons I would argue for hourly, especially for newbies. Hourly is great to protect you, especially on those first times, because, again, ring in the comments who all of us have undercharged on an initial clean because we didn’t know how long it was going to take. Yeah. Raise your hand. Raise your hand. You know who I’m talking about. All right. Hourly helps us protect ourselves when we are still not good at estimating. Right. And obviously we could move to flat rate, but in the beginning it was very protective of me of no matter what, if it was going to take longer, obviously I still had to communicate that. But it was just very simple for me to say, I think it’s going to take this much longer. And we are going to work up to the approved labor hours basically. And so, yeah, it really is so protective on move out cleans on first time cleans when it is a little bit harder to estimate how long it’s going to take. So that is the reason I really like that.

Flat Rate Pricing Advantages

So moving on to charging flat rate. All right. Positives, of course, is going to be the opposite of the negatives of charging hourly. So it’s going to be flat rate. You can really, really suck every drop of profit out of that cleaning, right? Because we can get more efficient. And as we get faster in a home, our hourly rate technically is going up, right? So it’s amazing. Your cleaners are incentivized potentially to move fast. Well, that’s kind of a pay thing. So incentivization is kind of all related to pay. However, with flat rate, it kind of lends itself to going faster, right? It’s just going to go faster potentially than hourly clean. So you just, you can get way more profit, right? You can get way more profit.

Another benefit to this, and I didn’t mention this in the negatives of hourly, I have a feeling this is going to happen several times, is the client knows every single time what it’s going to be, right? They get one price. They don’t have to look at anything. It’s just, this is the price. And that feels very simple on the client’s end, right? So that is a huge positive of this is going to be your charge every single time. And obviously hourly, we can do that for if it’s a maintenance clean that takes four hours every time, it’s gonna be the same, but there may be variance. And for us, we charge in increments of 15 minutes. So if it goes over by 15 minutes, we’re gonna charge that. We may eat it if we decide that there’s no reason for that, right? But that is something to keep in mind too, is that if your cleaners are faster or slower, it’s just going to be the same price. So you don’t even have to think about it, right? Obviously from an auditing perspective, we want to think about that. But for the customer, it’s very simple and sleek and they like that, right? So those are the two biggest benefits of charging flat rate is going to be profit and simplicity on the customer side.

The Challenge of Scope Creep

When it comes to negatives for charging flat rate, the biggest one to me is just constantly battling scope creep, meaning you need to have such a rock solid scope of work that the customer understands and you need to have very strong boundaries about things getting added and what do you charge? Because now if you have cleaners, how are they making those decisions, right? So I’ll give you an example, right? So say we have a recurring client for, you know, 120 bucks per visit and you have this scope of work of things that you do every single time. And then they are like, well, can you get to this room? Maybe you don’t do all the rooms or something. Can you get to this room? Or can you add on these things? And all of a sudden, now your cleaner is being put in the middle of that. And is the cleaner the one that decides, says yes to that. And because now the cleaner is dealing with the money side of things, or if cleaner doesn’t say anything, and they just do it. Now we got scope creep and the boundaries are being crossed of what is allowed and what is not. So I find that adding things on in hourly is much more simple because you’re simply buying time.

So this is something I wanted to clarify is say you charge an add on price for appliances, like the inside of an oven or something like that. For us at Serene Clean, if somebody adds an oven, we don’t add an upcharge, we just charge for the extra time that it takes, which typically is going to be an hour. So they’re going to pay for an hour of our labor or however long it takes. Whereas with flat rate, we need to charge an upcharge rate. So you might want to put $50 for the oven or $60 for the oven or whatever. So that is something that you just have to consider, what are my prices for all of these different add ons, right? It can get a little bit messy. And you have to make sure that your cleaning techs really understand exactly what they are to do and what not to do.

So that if a client comes and says, well, can you just do this real quick, right? That typically happens in flat rate, way more where you’re going to feel resentful because all of a sudden you’re doing all of these things or dishes or something start pulling up. Again, hourly. It’s like, oh, if you want me to do that, it’s however long it takes instead of trying to say, well, okay, up to this many dishes, we’ll do this or whatever. So again, obviously many, many companies very successfully run flat rate. You guys just need to be cognizant and make sure that your cleaning techs are very aware of what is included and what happens when something goes outside of scope or something is more challenging or difficult. There is dishes everywhere. There’s clutter everywhere, whatever. We need to have really great communication between you and your techs on what that’s going to look like. So just keep that in mind. So that’s going to be one of the biggest negatives.

Pricing Challenges with Flat Rate

And then the other one is going to be coming up with pricing when you do have those situations that are taking longer, right? So you are almost beholden to get the damn job done for the price that you said. So if I said the initial clean is going to be 500 bucks and I get halfway done and we’re like, oh, it’s going to take way longer. And we maybe we need to add 150. It’s like, well, that feels way ickier for some reason from the client’s perspective than when we charge hourly. It’s like, yeah, it’s taking more time, even though it’s the same thing, right? It’s taking more time with flat rate, but you said you’d get it done for $500. So it just feels a lot worse to the client from the client perspective than when we’re charging hourly. They may still often be like, why are you taking so long? This is taking longer than it should take. But there’s just something psychologically that it does differently when you have to add more money on for charging flat rate during the clean, right?

So that’s going to be initial cleans. It may even be maintenance cleans for the first maintenance or something like that. So keep that in mind is you need to have a really great way of communicating. Even, you know, I know some people who charge flat rate where the cleaners do the walkthrough when they show up and they kind of confirm the price. Sometimes it’s hard to even do that at the beginning because you get into the cleaning and it’s like, oh my gosh, this is way out for whatever reason, sometimes it just takes a lot longer once you start cleaning. Because a brief walkthrough is like, yeah, it looks fine. It looks normal, but then you start cleaning it and it’s way worse or taking way longer. You said this was the price and now you’re in the job and now it just doesn’t feel great.

So be aware and make sure that you put in your client guidelines or when you’re giving your pricing out that, hey, this is based on this and you could even put up to a certain amount of labor hours. And then after that, I mean, we’re kind of getting into the hybrid of it all, you know, charging a certain amount per hour after this approved amount. So there’s some considerations there. So that’s what I would say are the biggest detriments to charging flat rate.

Square Footage Pricing Concerns

So going on to charging by the square foot, this is Stephanie’s least favorite. I will say the one pro is it’s very consistent and easy to, I guess, calculate because it’s just divide the square, or multiply the square footage by whatever cents you want to make. So that is a positive. It’s very simple. You can also do pricing really easily on your website because it’s just, it’s dead simple, right? That’s the positive is it feels simple. It sure feels simple, but on the back end, it’s a mess and your pricing is going to actually be all over for you from a profit standpoint because every house is different, right?

And so from a negative perspective, charging by the square foot, the only way it can work really well is if you have multiple per square foot prices based on different scenarios or based on different information or what type of clean that they’re looking for. So if you are going to do this, I would highly recommend you having an initial clean per square foot like cents or whatever. So I’m just going to pretend. I don’t know what the actual numbers are, the going rates are. But let’s say, you know, 50 cents per square foot on an initial clean or a move out clean. Right. Or maybe you want even to between the two, because technically a move out clean should have appliances, which is going to add way more time. Right. So we need to have that just like we have our production rates for charging hourly or flat rate. You need to do the same thing for charging by the square foot.

And then you also are going to want a maintenance clean cents, you know, whether that be 13 cents per square foot on a maintenance clean. But then what you could even do or what I would suggest to protect yourself is if they’ve got pets, if they’ve got kids, all of these different things that can affect, obviously, the timing of the cleaning. You’re going to want to add, you know, a couple cents per square foot or something. So it seems simpler, but it’s actually way, way, way more complicated internally for you guys to figure out what is appropriate pricing.

So because people live so differently and even in commercial, I’m a big proponent of not charging by the square foot because cleanable space is much different than the facility square footage, right? So you may have a factory where you’re only, it’s a hundred thousand square foot factory, but you are cleaning 50,000 square foot of it. And even going into that, what about the surfaces, right? What if you have carpet in a lot of the areas in one building and that same size building, they have all hard floors. So now you need to dust mop and mop. So that’s why I’m not a fan of charging by the square foot. Obviously, we’re using square foot information to give our estimates for hourly, but we’re not beholden to it.

Additionally, how the hell do you charge by the square foot if you want to do any type of limited hour agreement? It just goes out. What are you going to do? Go measure their house and be like, well, we’re chopping the living room off. And that was 100 square foot. So we’re not going to do that. That’s not scalable. So it just really limits your options. Oh, sorry. Going back to charging by flat rate, one of the negatives is it’s harder to do what I described in the pros of hourly, which is the limited hour agreement thing. So that concept is very hard to apply to flat rate. And it’s hard to apply to square foot. It’s darn impossible to apply.

So all of that money that I talked about and all of the clients that we’re able to get, you guys are going to have just more difficulties managing that or coming up with a price when it’s like, well, I want to have only these rooms done. Or what if they want to rotate, right? What if they want to do something like that? You really can’t offer that necessarily. It would be much more complicated to do so. So flat rate, that’s darn near impossible. It would be very challenging in order to say, you know, they want only a portion of the house cleaned or they want you to rotate tasks. How the hell do you do that with charging by the square foot? Right. So, and you may not even care. You may be like, no, we’re doing it the same. We’re doing the whole house every time. That’s all I’m going to do is offer that. And that’s totally fine. In my area specifically, where Serene Clean is, that’s just I know how many clients we would lose out on if we went that kind of hard line. No, we clean the whole house every single time. I just, I don’t want to cut those customers out. I want to be able to serve them. And so that is why, again, I’m attracted to hourly for that reason.

So keep that in mind that it can be done in flat rate. You can do that. You just have to be on it with making sure that the spaces that are approved and agreed upon in that scope of work are exactly what the cleaners do. And anytime if the client wants to change something, okay, we need to talk about the price potentially where for us charging hourly, it’s just so simple and straightforward. Hey, it’s going to take more time. Okay. Whatever the time it takes, it’s just easy. So the decision-making process is a lot more simple and we don’t have to get awkward or gripe over price potentially and bring it up all the time and renegotiate all the time. So yes, something to keep in mind.

Hybrid Pricing Methods

And then finally, a hybrid method is a great option. And so I’ve seen it done multiple ways. The most typical hybrid method is going to be charging hourly on the initial clean and then switching to a flat rate pricing for maintenance cleans. And I’ve even seen people do hourly for maybe the first two to three, the initial clean and then the first maintenance clean, and then give them a flat rate price that can work beautifully too. And again, I think that’s a fabulous option. It’s just because we want to really offer people some flexibility with what they want and why we just, honestly, it’s just simpler for us to do it, to do hourly. And so switching our model now would be very challenging.

So all of that to be said, when it comes to pricing and our options here, right? You can experiment, guys, especially if you’re smaller. You can experiment. You can experiment from one client to the next. I mean, they might talk for sure, but it’s okay. You are still figuring it out. So what I would recommend is trying both. At the end of the day, the basis needs to be, we know our production rates. We are doing audits. I estimated this for how long it was going to take. It actually took this much time. Okay. Our rates are off because I keep underbidding these jobs and we need to learn from this guys. We need to learn from this.

And obviously for us with hourly, it’s like, I thought our production rate when I started for first time cleans was 250 square foot per hour. It’s not, it’s actually 150 square foot per hour. So, you know, I just, and then that allowed us to estimate more accurately going forward because we were doing these production rate audits. So regardless of the way that you choose we need to know this information so that we can adjust things going forward. So do this for your initial cleans, do this for your move out cleans, and do this for your maintenance cleans, right? We need to be doing those audits.

And I do have, you know, production rate examples available on my website that you can purchase basically a spreadsheet that showcases how we do these production rate audits at Serene Clean. If you are interested, link in the bio. So that is everything with pricing guys.

How to Pay Your Cleaners

So moving on to pay, how we pay our cleaners. Now this is a lot of these things correlate, right? And so charging or paying hourly, paying a flat rate per job or paying percentage, right? That’s how we’re going to go through for how we pay. So at Serene Clean, we pay hourly for all cleaners, residential and commercial. So because we charge hourly, it makes a lot of sense to pay hourly. And you’ll notice that these things kind of correlate. It makes it simpler if we charge and pay the same way. Because if we don’t, we have to put some protective mechanisms in place.

So paying by hourly is the biggest benefits. I don’t know why I started with negatives. Why did I do that? That’s weird. Let me start with positives for all of these. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s Friday night, guys. I’m getting loopy. It’s literally Friday night. I’m recording this after dark. So you know, filthy rich cleaners after dark.

Okay, so the positives of paying hourly is what most people are comfortable with and most people understand. And it is very easy to explain when you are putting job listings out and people are applying because most people are used to being an hourly worker. Obviously salary does exist, but really, you know, it feels like hourly is most typical for the folks that are applying to our job specifically. That’s what they’re used to. So it’s very dead simple to explain. It’s easy to explain how the raises work. It’s just, again, coming back hourly is very simple to explain, right? So that is going to be the biggest one is it’s just very easy to understand. And it is what people are used to, right? And I’ll talk about why that’s kind of the negative in paying flat rate. And people like to know what, I’m going to work 30 hours, and I’m going to make this much, right? That’s what they like. They like that consistency, and it gives them a lot of financial stability and security, even if they may be making more, getting paid the other ways, but they like that hourly. So that is one thing to consider.

The Challenges of Hourly Pay

Now, the negative to paying hourly is there is zero financial incentive to haul ass and to clean fast, right? So we need to put protective mechanisms in place so that we don’t have people on hand milking the hours, right? Because why would they move any faster if that negatively affects their paycheck, right? The faster they move, the smaller their paycheck’s going to be. So we need to put some bumpers in place like we are bowling to protect it from going into the gutter. All right. That’s my analogy. This one apparently last week was a whack-a-mole this time we’re playing, we’re bowling. Okay. So we got to put our bowling bumpers up.

And so the bowling bumpers for paying hourly is going to be putting the approved amount of labor hours in all of the ZenMaid appointment notes. And they are not to go over that without explicit approval from the office or from the client, whatever, in whatever scenario we’re talking about. So they know that they’re not approved for that and that they will be getting disciplined if they go over time without getting that approval and without communicating that very early on in the job, like halfway through basically. So when they get kitchens and bathrooms done, hey, I think I’m going to need more time. This is how much, and this is why. So we can get that approved in enough time for the client. So we have to watch that and make sure that they are doing good on that. Same with commercial.

So that is an example. We charge flat rate, but we pay hourly in commercial. So again, what is the incentive to move faster? And for commercial, honestly, because those accounts are so important to us to not lose, I’m okay with them being a little bit slower, taking their time and being more detailed than perhaps paying the other ways. But it is something to consider, again, affecting profit, right? So if they are using every single hour that they are approved for, because that’s how they get paid enough or not enough, but paid the most that they can that day. Well, then we have to think about these things, right? So it’s all about making sure they understand what the approved labor hour amount is, and they are not to go over that, or there is going to be ramifications, or perhaps it’s just an unreasonable amount of time for the appointment if no cleaners can consistently hit our approved job estimating, right? So again, coming back to production rates, okay.

Or maybe that particular house, they just live harder. And so, okay, we thought it was going to take four hours every time it’s taking four and a half. We’re going to ask the client, hey, can we do four and a half hours going forward? Do you approve that amount of time? No. Okay. What’s the lowest priority room? What should we leave off? That’s literally how we handle it in that scenario. So yeah, again, it feels simple because it is, but that is how we handle that with hourly.

Paying Per Job

So paying a flat amount per job is very simple as well. However, sometimes it can be hard because depending on how consistent you are with your pricing, the cleaners pay per job, maybe all over the place. Right. And especially if you’re pricing lower two years ago, and you’re paying a lower amount for that job because you’re making less there and the same size house that in the afternoon for the cleaner is paying much higher. Well, guess what? They’re probably going to be a bit salty because it’s like, where’s the consistency, right? So you’re going to really have to watch the consistency with paying that way. I started with the negatives here, but the positive is it’s just, it’s dead simple, right? It’s dead simple and it incentivizes them to move faster when you pay a flat rate per job, right? This is the price for the job they’re going to haul. They’re going to haul.

And so again, if you’re charging flat rate, it increases your profit. It just doesn’t affect anything, right? Because it doesn’t matter how long they’re going to take. Your profit is going to be consistent for the job. So that is nice, that consistency. And you don’t have to worry about those variations. But from the negative side, like I said, the consistency for the cleaner, you’re going to have to really watch that because you may have different rates for different jobs. Even if those jobs should be similar, it just you could be grandfathering them in. Or if you choose to eat it and give your cleaner the same amount, you’re making less on this other job, right? Because it’s at a lower price to you, but you’re paying your cleaner more. So something to consider.

And then for this particular thing, meaning paying per the job, the bumper that we’re going to have to put up is going to be quality, right? Because they’re incentivized to move fast. And when we incentivize people to move fast, we are potentially de-incentivizing quality, right? So speed versus quality, we need to have both, right, in all of these types of pay. So it’s something to keep in mind that there needs to be a protective mechanism in place related to quality on this particular one. So that could be quality bonuses or that could be getting docked or their job rate getting docked if you have to send somebody back or if you get a complaint. So all things to consider.

And remember, they have to agree to this in writing. If you’re going to be doing any type of pay reduction related to for any reason, right, but specifically related to a quality infraction or a complaint, we need to establish how much is that going to be? And it just gets kind of complicated to make those decisions where for us, as you guys may or may not know, we have something in place of if we have to send somebody back, how we protect for quality is however long it takes to fix those problems. That first cleaner is getting docked down to minimum wage for that amount of time. So if the cleaning took four hours and we had to send a cleaner to fix it. And it took them two hours to fix it. Cleaner one is getting docked for two of those hours down to minimum wage. And so it’s painful to them and it incentivizes them to do good quality, right?

Not that we’re going to deal with that as much because we pay hourly. So their problem is going to be speed potentially. So remember they sign and agree to this and Wisconsin is where my business is based. It’s an at-will state. It is legal to do this. So check your local state laws or even country laws, because I know we have international listeners as well. So take that with a grain of salt. I don’t know if that’s legal everywhere, but it is in Wisconsin.

Pay for Performance

So finally going into pay for performance, which is a very popular method. One of the biggest positives to that is people can make really great money from day one. And it feels clear to them. It’s very nice to have because you’re basically giving them different rates. Well, there’s a couple of different ways I’ve seen it done, but you are basically paying them a percentage of the job and the rate could go up if you have great quality or it could go down if you have quality issues or any other types of issues, or that’s how it should be. I’ve seen some people where they’re just like, yep, they all get 42% of the job. That’s what I pay. And so that’s one of the detriments or something to watch for is having variations in that percentage that you pay to incentivize them to have high quality and good attendance or whatever that it is that you’re looking for.

So it can be really great. It can be very straightforward, especially if you charge flat rate, that’s very simple. One of the negatives though is obviously quality can suffer if you are just paying them a flat rate. The other big problem with this is it’s hard to explain to cleaners when you are interviewing how much they’re going to make because again, coming back to hourly, they’re used to getting paid hourly. So helping people understand this particular way of paying can be very complicated because you’re giving them a range of what they’re going to make. And so a lot of people will be leery about that because they’re like, I really want to know, what am I going to be making per hour? Even if it’s a better hourly rate, you’re going to be using things like, well, on average, this is what cleaners are making, or you can make this much or whatever. So, but there’s no really guarantee. So the guarantee is not as guaranteed as it could be for hourly, right? So that is something to keep in mind is that you’re going to have to be able to explain pay for performance very, very simply.

One of the other negatives, and I’ll kind of wrap up on this particular topic, the other negative is going to be the fact that a lot of people start pay for performance way too high and there is nowhere to strive to, all right? We have a huge pay range at Serene Clean. And if you guys want to go into depth on that, of course, I have a whole video or a whole podcast episode talking about how we pay, how the raises and the wages work explicitly. So if you’re interested in that, I do a deep dive into that policy and procedures for that.

But in layman’s terms, people really like to have psychologically something to strive for, right? We don’t ever want, nobody wants to feel stagnant in their job. So if you start paying everybody at this percentage, and there’s nowhere to go, well, even if it’s a great rate, it just doesn’t feel good, because you don’t have anywhere to go, you don’t have anything to strive for from it financially. So it’s nice in your job to have goals, you know, associated with financial gain. And so if you just all start them out here, and there’s nowhere to go, there’s no variance. Well, it can be too high. And I’ve seen that happen many times where people start everybody out at a really high percentage. And then you know, as your overhead increases, you may realize like, oh, this is too much. And maybe you want to bump it down or switch to hourly or something. And it’s kind of hard to make that transition. So do keep that in mind. I’ve seen a lot of people switch from pay for performance to hourly. I’m not going to lie.

And even, gosh, who did I have on that we were talking about? Once you get to a certain size, pretty big, a lot of times what you’ll see is companies pay hourly. So there may be some scaling issues as well with that. Not saying that there is. And obviously I’ve never paid this way. So I can’t tell you from my own personal experience, but I’m just trying to say things that I’ve seen. So I really like paying hourly. It’s very simple. It’s cut and dry. It’s easy to pay. So that’s kind of everything when it comes to how to pay an overview on the benefits and negatives of each type.

Service Packages and Options

So finally, when it comes to the types of services that we offer and what I mean by this is not like pressure washing, window washing, carpet cleaning, that type of stuff. That’s not really what I mean by this category. What I’m talking about specifically is the specific residential cleaning options that you provide somebody and the different packages that you offer. And there’s a couple of different philosophies. And even my conversation with Amanda Stovall, you know, the second one, the second episode where I talked to Amanda Stovall, we were talking about the book, What Should We Do? Which is a book I recommended her where you can have multiple different packages that people can choose from.

So that is amazing from a sales tactic. It is fantastic because we are giving people multiple options. So when we offer a lot of different types of cleaning packages, right? We have a basic clean. We have a deluxe clean. We have an ultimate clean, right? It gives people the luxury of choice and they like it. People like to feel like they have choices, right? So that is wonderful from the client perspective and something that Serene Clean lacks because we do not do that. We do not offer packages like that. We have two checklists, our standard clean and our deep clean checklist. And that’s it. That’s it. We either follow the standard clean checklist or we follow the deep clean checklist.

And the reason we do that is standard clean for us is probably what most people would call a deluxe or ultimate clean, right? Or a deep clean. Some people would call what we do deep cleaning at all maintenance cleans and all initial cleans. That’s what we’re following the standard cleaning checklist. And so we lose out on potentially upselling or offering a lower base package and getting more sales or maybe getting some of those people who are more on a budget where we’re just skipping certain tasks and they’re getting more of a basic clean, right? I might be able to capture sales in that manner. And that’s where Amanda was experimenting with different packages in that way. And it was working really, really well for her. And so there’s definitely benefit to that. And obviously negatives to how we do it at Serene Clean, because I’m missing out on giving all of these different kinds of service options.

But the benefit and the reason that we have chosen to do this is truly scaling and simplicity sake for the cleaners, because the more options that you give the client of things to remove and add on from a task level, the more you are opening up your cleaners to confusion and yourself to complaints because things get more complicated. Do you know how simple it is that at every initial clean and every maintenance clean, they’re doing the same exact thing, regardless, the same exact task list that is scalable. And that feels very simple to everybody. It’s, there’s no question. Yes. You do the baseboards every time. Yes. You do the ceiling fans every time we just do it all. Right. And we really can sell on that, very detailed cleaning at every single cleaning. And I said, I’m not a wipe down service and they may only want to pay for a wipe down service, but that’s not us. So I’m not getting those customers. Right.

And then for us, a deep clean is only in vacant homes or maybe post-construction where we’re doing the interiors of all the appliances, interiors of the cabinets and the closets. That’s the differentiating factor for us for a deep clean versus everything else, which is going to be our standard clean. So for our cleaners, it’s so simple. It’s easy to train. We don’t have to, they don’t have to ever worry about of, okay, do I do the baseboards at this house and making sure that they’re doing the correct thing. It’s also kind of hard to price, you know, baseboards throughout a house. That’s difficult because, you know, you’ll have to base that, you can’t just say, oh, baseboards will be an extra 50 bucks, because it’s based on the size of the house, right? We need to have a scale for baseboards and all of these things. What about ceiling fans? What if they want ceiling fans throughout the house? Well, we don’t know how many ceiling fans, right? So it can add layers of complexity when we start having these various packages. And then the cleaners have to be very, very good at checking their notes and making sure, okay, what do I do at this house? What do I do at the next house? Because it’s going to vary potentially every single day, where for us, it’s very simple, our cleaners know when they go in, they’re going to be following the standard checklist, or they’re going to be following the deep clean checklist. That’s it.

So what I would caution to you is if you are giving multiple package options, which is fantastic from a sales perspective, 100%, you need to be laser focused on excellent communication and training on what it is that your business offers. And honestly, this may be bringing up that you don’t have clarity over the packages that you offer and over the different options that people can add on, right? And maybe with those add-ons, your pricing might be all over the place. And then your cleaners might be making mistakes or getting complaints because, well, I didn’t do baseboards at my first house. And then I forgot to check or really pay attention to the notes. And so I didn’t do baseboards at my second house. And now we have a complaint. It opens us up to, again, confusion and complexity that, as you’ve noticed, Serene Clean has been built on keep it simple, stupid. That’s kind of been my methodology, even though there is more complex ways to do it where I could get more profit. I could upsell, right?

Where we’re just upselling time. We’re not upselling a service where it’s, okay, yeah, you’re adding your oven on, but that’s an hour, right? You’re just buying our time as opposed to buying a job, right? And that’s where charging by the job is fantastic. Having multiple packages is fantastic from increasing a profit standpoint, but all of the negatives have to be considered and they have to be accounted for.

Making Smart Business Decisions

So that’s the point of this whole episode is for you guys to think about the negatives of whatever choice that you make in these three categories and plan for it. We need to put the bumpers in place to protect ourselves. So I want you to think about, okay, I have chosen to pay this way. These are the negatives associated. How am I going to prevent the issues related to that choice? Or I’m going to offer all of these a la carte services. How do I prevent the problems with that? How do I know that I’m pricing correctly? How do I know that I’m scheduling correctly? Did I schedule enough time for the cleaners?

Because as you scale, having enough time for jobs is so important because the domino effect of that happening across multiple teams or multiple cleaners, as you continue to grow, it turns into a nightmare. So this is why for us, we keep it so simple. Nope. This is the checklist we follow every single time. You can buy a certain amount of hours. That’s very simple. I’m not saying it’s the best way. It’s the path that I’ve chosen. And there’s opportunity costs in all three of these categories for you guys.

So none of them are perfect. All of them have negatives. All of them have positives. You simply need to weigh each of the options in these three areas and make the decision that makes the most sense for you and at this time. And remember, we can always change. None of these are set in stone, but the bigger that you get, the harder it’s going to be to change and experiment. So while you guys are smaller, I very much encourage you to experiment and play and see what you think in these areas.

But keep in mind when you have staff and you start messing with their pay. Sorry, Grandma Betty. I know you’re listening. I’m trying to not say the F word. I’m really trying. My Grandma Betty listens to all of these. And she said she doesn’t like the F word. So I’m trying. I’m really trying. This is an improvement over the normal episode. So there you go, Grandma. I know you’re listening. So call me up and tell me that I did a good job, that I’m not swearing as much. It’s very difficult. Stephanie’s got a potty mouth. You guys know that.

So I just want you to be aware of these things. And once you start having cleaners and you start monkeying with how they pay because you want to experiment, they are not going to like that. So I encourage you to do this when you are on the smaller side, because once we start making decisions related to changing how people’s pay is structured, there’s a lot of consequences and a lot of emotions related to that because now you’re messing with people’s money. So keep that in mind. Experimentation is easier when you are smaller and it takes a huge upheaval for us to switch to flat rate pricing right now. Anytime I’ve brought up that experiment, my managers have thrown tomatoes and booed me because they’re like, absolutely not, Stephanie. We are not dealing with that right now because it’s never a good time because it would be such a colossal endeavor to do it because we have just built the whole business around charging hourly, paying hourly, right?

So keep that in mind that as you continue to grow, it’s going to be harder to steer the ship and change direction of the ship. So the size that you guys are at, this is a great time to be experimenting and just making sure that you are auditing the experiments and seeing how it goes. Don’t just be flying by the seat of your pants, make a decision. I’m going to change this one thing at this one time. How does it go? Take a couple of months. What do we think about this? What are we making per job? That type of stuff.

Closing Thoughts

So yes, all of that to be said, I hope this has given you guys something to consider and to think about your different options and which way you want to go in all of these areas. And no way is the wrong way except charging square foot. Just kidding. Just kidding. You can do that, but just do it the way I think about those things that I mentioned. There is no wrong answer here. It’s just, are we thinking through the choices that we have made and making sure that we are protecting ourselves from the negatives of those choices? Because all of them have it.

So hope this has been useful to you guys. I hope you’re having a fabulous week and business is going great for you. By the way, government shutdown’s done. That means that Serene Clean’s largest federal account has opened back up and we are back cleaning it. So Christmas party is still on guys. Because it was, not that I would ever cancel the Christmas party. But Christmas baskets for clients may not be happening this year because that’s a lot of money to be spending when we just lost out on a ton of money from the government shutdown.

So I’m really so grateful that that’s done, obviously for everybody whose jobs were on hold and they were not getting paid. Thank God that is done for everybody. And it’s still going to be very hard. Donate to your local food pantries if you can, and just be very kind to people because it’s been a very difficult time for a lot of people. And I feel very blessed that this was the only effect that I had, right? So keep that in mind. Be nice to people, guys. Be nice to people. It’s a hard time of year for everybody. So anyway, hit that like, hit that subscribe, and I will see you on the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye guys.

If you enjoyed this episode of the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, please be sure to leave us a five-star review so we can reach more cleaners like you. Until next time, keep your work clean and your business filthy rich.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• Serene Clean
• Serene Clean Production Rate Spreadsheet

QUICK TIP FROM THE AUTHOR

Simplify and enjoy your scheduling with a scheduling software made for maid services

• Have a beautiful calendar that's full but never stressful.
• Make your cleaners happy and provide all the information they need at their fingertips.
• Convert more website visitors into leads and get new cleanings in your inbox with high-converting booking forms.
• Become part of a community of 8000+ cheering maid service owners just like you.

Start your FREE ZenMaid trial today and discover the freedom and clarity that ZenMaid can bring to your maid service! Start your FREE trial today