How to price recurring cleaning clients

One-off cleans are priced in the present. You look at the house, you think about your current wages, you quote. Recurring clients are priced in the past. The number was right on the day you set it, and then your cleaner pay went up twice, fuel moved, insurance renewed higher, and the price stayed exactly where it was.

Nobody notices, because a recurring client is the least troublesome part of the week. They pay on time, they do not complain, and the invoice is identical to last month. Meanwhile the margin has been quietly draining out of them.

Pricing a recurring client at the start

Four things to settle before you name a number.

• Time the job honestly, at the frequency you are selling. A house cleaned weekly takes less time per visit than the same house cleaned monthly. Price each frequency on its own measured time, not on one estimate applied to all of them.
• Include paid drive time and crew size. Two cleaners for two hours with twenty minutes of driving is 4.67 paid crew hours, not four, and definitely not two.
• Multiply by your cost floor, not by a market rate. The floor is what an hour of crew time must earn to cover wages, burden, supplies, overhead and margin — the arithmetic is in how to work out your cost per crew hour.
• Write down when you will revisit it. A recurring price with no review date is a recurring price that will be reviewed in a panic, three years late, after a wage increase you could not absorb.

And price the first deep clean separately. It is a different job with different hours, and folding it into the recurring rate starts the relationship below your floor.

Auditing the book you already have

The audit is the same arithmetic run backwards. For every recurring client, work out what they earn you per paid crew hour, then compare it to your floor. In practice the pattern is remarkably consistent: most of the book is fine, a handful of clients are badly behind, and those few account for nearly all of the damage.

Those figures assume a $36 floor and are worked out per visit, then multiplied by visits per month. The third client is not a difficult client or an unprofitable client in any way you could feel day to day. They are a client whose job grew — a dog, a renovation, a new baby — while the price did not.

Frequency changes the price, in both directions

Weekly work is worth a lower per-hour rate than monthly work, because the route is denser, the house is easier, and the revenue is predictable. Monthly and one-off work should carry a higher rate, because each visit takes longer and the schedule is harder to fill around.

If you charge the same hourly equivalent across weekly, biweekly and monthly, you are overcharging your best clients and undercharging your worst. Owners often discover the monthly clients are the ones underwater.

What to do with the ones below the floor

Not all of them, and not all at once. Sort the below-floor clients by how big an increase they need, then start with the smallest increases — a client who needs eight per cent almost always says yes, and three quick yeses will make the hard conversations easier. The twenty-five per cent conversations go last, after you have practice and after the easy money is already in.

When you get to those, the mechanics of the notice matter more than the number. That is a guide of its own: how to raise prices with existing clients.

Do the counting before the conversations

Every owner knows one or two clients who feel underpriced. Almost nobody knows the list, in order, in dollars per month. The list is what turns a vague worry into an afternoon of work with a number attached, and it comes out of the client data you already keep in Jobber, ZenMaid, Launch27 or a spreadsheet.