I’ve been doing lots of residential contracts lately. Working on recurring service pricing. But I haven’t landed even one storefront, business, or anything commercial really.
How are people pricing these jobs? $5/pane is clearly too expensive, as I’m winning none of these bids. Thoughts?
Also, how do you (or do you even) break down pricing for recurring customers?
Yearly?
Semi-annual?
Quarterly?
Monthly?
Weekly?
What are your pricing structures for each?
Something that I just started doing that seems to be well received is that I price people a “discovery” price - a one-time service rate - then I base my recurring pricing on time-on-task rather than by pane. I want to incentivize recurring services. A business is only worth as much as it’s assets if they have no recurring revenue to speak of, so I’m working on changing that.
First I must caveat that my response does not directly apply to the Canadian market, but I am having a similar experience here in Florida.
I would say 80% of my jobs are single story residential work, 15% are two story residential, and only 5% are any type of commercial. What I have come across is a difficulty to find commercial clients that understand and accept that there is a price premium for higher quality work and better/safer equipment/procedures.
Most counter bids I am told about are cleaners coming in at $1.00 - $1.25 per window per side for ground level work. These are typically cleaned on either a monthly or bi-weekly frequency. And all of the cleaning is traditional work.
I usually do WFP on all my exterior work unless it is a new customer. I charge $1.75 per pane per side for ground level, $2.50 for second level, and $3.50 for third level. On the interior if it is a maintenance cleaning I have a pure water misting system that attaches to my carbon fiber pole and allows me to do high level interior work from the ground without lifts and ladders which I emphasize to the clients as being safer since you can’t fall to the ground if you are standing on it already. Trad work on doors only since they are usually the only ones with heavy hand prints and marks.
I actually use the fact that I am not charging them extra at the first time cleaning as a selling point. I usually push the liability insurance issue by saying something like, “I’m just using pure water like cleaning with the rain. There’s no soaps or other detergents for people to potentially slip on and I don’t need to use a lift or ladders for the higher areas so there is no chance for a fall or for something to fall on someone.” Any reason they can find to not face a lawsuit usually incentivizes them to pay a little more or at least accept your bid and maybe negotiate for a discount.