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The Install: The Creep Sheet in a Cleaning Company
This week’s teardown found about nine thousand dollars a month hiding in an auto repair shop’s pricing file. This Install walks The Creep Sheet into a cleaning company, where the price is a contract signed once and the cost moves every time you give your crew a raise.
Your monthly revenue is a total, and a total is where the problem hides. Here is the sheet at work in a cleaning company.
An office cleaned three nights a week for twenty five hundred dollars a month cost fifteen hundred to service a year ago. After a raise in the spring and two supply increases it costs seventeen hundred. Same building, same nights, same price on the invoice, and the margin has slid from forty percent to thirty two. A worked example, not a client.
Twenty Accounts, Three Columns
Write down your twenty biggest recurring accounts, not the one off jobs or the move out cleans. Column one is what each cost you to service twelve months ago, hours times the loaded rate plus supplies. Column two is what it costs today. Column three is what you charge, straight off the contract. One page, with a date on it.
The Eight Percent Rule
Circle every row where the cost is up more than eight percent and the price has not moved. Below eight percent is normal week to week noise, a crew member out sick, a slow night. It is never all twenty. It is three or four rows, and they are almost always your longest standing accounts.
Four Decisions for a Circled Row
Raise the price, and on a twenty five hundred dollar contract the move back is two hundred dollars a month, a renewal letter with thirty days notice. Change the scope, because the client added a floor and nobody priced it. Change the spec: frequency, crew size, a tighter route. Or let it go, because an account that cannot carry its own cost is a subsidy. One decision at a time, then let it run a month.
The Creep Sheet is inside the free Small Business MBA.
Twenty rows, three columns and the eight percent rule, as a fillable page in the app, not a download you have to print. It is free, it is not a trial, and every tool this season lands there.
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