CleanEvolve said:
Just got in from doing a restaurant... I got a big day tomorrow. How many of you are still doing restaurants? ... I'm starting to hate these late night or early morning jobs.
I feel your pain, Aris. I loved cleaning carpets and I was fine with putting a 12 hour day in on the wand. BUT I HATED and DESPISED coming home, taking a shower, eating supper with the family and kicking back with the knowledge hanging over me that at 10:00 PM I would have to get back into a truck and head out into the cold night to clean a lousy restaurant or two.
So I finally got sick enough of it that we built our regular contract commercial work up enough so that we could form a route out of it. We had a commercial crew of two guys that worked a 40 hour week, starting at 5:00 PM Wednesday and Thursday plus all day on Saturday and Sunday- all of it commercial work with a few "had to be done on the weekend" residential jobs thrown in to the mix. Another big advantage of this arrangement was it gave me a crew that usually could swing back and do the initial extraction on a water loss without having to go to the hassle and expense of calling out my on-call technician for the week. (We paid triple time with a three hour minimum after midnight for a call-out.)
It is a great feeling to pop a cold one after a hard day's work knowing that your crew will break the $1,000.00 mark this night while you will be home sleeping like a baby. Plus pushing a scrub wand at 2:00 AM in some grease pit of a restaurant is probably not the highest and best use of the owner of the business since he will be trashed the next day.
Steve
http://www.StrategiesForSuccess.com
PS Now to get to the Critical Mass of a regular commercial route takes a lot of work too. But it is an investment that can pay off over the long term. We were still cleaning some of the first contracts I signed up when I sold the business 16 years later. Plus the fact that your business actually has written contracts will make it much more appealing to a potential buyer. For a step by step guide to how we built the route in my company go here for a free "no-spam" download:
http://www.strategiesforsuccess.com/755 ... commercial
Remember that you don't need to have enough work for a 40 hour week to start the "regular route" concept and get yourself out of night work. Once you have enough work for one night a week there are a lot of people that will cheerfully do this for extra part time work- especially since you should be grossing enough that you can pay quite well. Or you can go the sub-contract route mentioned above but your profit will be smaller and your control of how the jobs are done will be less.
