Janitorial buisness

Any tips on the janitorial buisness? Any good books to read? Im planning on ipening a buisness and start with small offices

My Dad does this for a living and it's easy money.

He does Sprint stores in a small region of the state. About 18 locations. He also cleans a few churches. Makes about $7K a month NET working a few hours every night.

>buy all the equipment you need
>get your business license
>get your liability insurance (most places won't even give you a chance unless you have it)
>get a professional looking vehicle with at least some basic decal doesn't have to be a full body wrap

You aren't going to land a contract pulling up to a intentional client with a floor buffer hanging out of the trunk of your beat up 92 Civic. Get a used solid white work truck or van and put a basic decal on it with your business name and contact information. Doesn't have to be fancy.

7-11 franchises are starting to outsource their cleaning duties now. It's cheap Mexican tier rates but it's probably a good place to start.

I would charge hourly. Be accurate in your estimates though. If you tell them it'll only take you 3 hours to do every thing once a week, then try to be as close to that estimate as possible. Don't go in there and take 6-8 week in and week out and except them to be a happy client.

Don't ever be rude. My Dad is a shitty business man. Other people have gotten him his contracts like his Sister and Girlfriend. He can't communicate for shit. He went to Verizon to talk about cleaning their stores and when they said they already have a company cleaning theirs, his "sales pitch" was to tell them how shitty their stores look and how he's taking his Verizon cell phone service elsewhere if they don't let him clean it.

Fucking retard.

Cool thats the type of replys im looking for! Thanks for the info

Can anyone reccomend some books on the buiness that was worth reading? So far ive ben reading janitorial bible by rob kravitz its good so far

They do it for free.

I'm a janitorial contractor.
I agree with most of this:
except I doubt what you drive matters at all and you should never charge by the hour.

other than that ask if you have specific questions.

Do you charge by square foot?
what would you do if you had an employee broke or stole lets say a $500 pro team backpack vaccuum?
How do you excite your customers?
Would your account get mad if you finish cleaning the building early and request a new contract?

>Do you charge by square foot?
no I estimate by the hour and charge by the month or year.
>what would you do if you had an employee broke or stole lets say a $500 pro team backpack vaccuum?
it would never happen since my people make about that much in a day or two of work and if they want a vacuum I'll buy them one.

but if for some reason it happened I'd fire the employee and write off the cost of the vacuum.
>How do you excite your customers?
I don't. Customers aren't excited about their janitorial service, and really they shouldn't be. If we're doing our job they mostly won't notice us.
>Would your account get mad if you finish cleaning the building early and request a new contract?
not sure exactly what you mean.
I clean for businesses and governments.
businesses and governments don't get mad.

>broke or stole
I missed the broke part.

I destroy about a thousand dollars a month in vacuums and other small equipment, one breaking won't even make a difference. It's a business expense. Learn to repair vacuums, and buy new ones when you need to.

>finish cleaning the building early
this is how contractors make money. Nobody will get mad because nobody knows how long we take to do a job.

Like if your contracted to finish a office for 2 hours and every night you clean in 45mins

your dad sounds pretty alpha

I worked for service master for sometime and the buildings required to call when you got in and call when you were leaving, ao they knew how long you spent in each building. At the time i did not think about it but if your paying for a certain amount of time and the guy is in and out in less agreed upon, but stull dis a great job would the account try to propose a new contract

that's why we don't contract by the hour.

For example a client needs 1500 feet of office with 2 restrooms cleaned 6 days a week. He thinks it takes 4 hours, I know I can do it in one.
He thinks $20/hour is a fair rate, so I charge him $80/day to do the work. This works out to $2080/month.

he thinks me or my crew is working 4 hours a day and grossing $25k/year. In reality I'm working 1 hour a day, getting all paid holidays, and making my money by going out and getting more work in that same time slot. Because if I can make $2k in one hour a day I can just as easily work 8 hours and make $16k/month.

I've never worked on an hourly contract and I never would.

they border on illegal since you flirt with becoming an employee rather than a contractor.

I wouldn't recommend working for anyone that pays you by the hour unless they're paying at least $75/hour. Honestly that's the minimum you should be making in most of the US just to pay your taxes.

>would the account try to propose a new contract
but yes, I'm sure they would.

if all of us refuse to work for those cheap bastards they'll eventually have to pay real wages though. If they want to pay by the hour they can hire an employee, not a service.

Jonni go to bed.

Thanks for the info i appreciate it. Few more questions for tonight if anyones still here.
What is the best way to learn to create contracts?
How do you convince your customer that your a better choice than their current janitor?
Is their any janitorial books i should definetly read before getting into this buisness?
Right now im working a retail overnight job and saving for all my equiptment and then im going to do all the legal stuff then marketing. Any suggestion for people just entering the biz? Also thanks in advance for everyones contributions

>What is the best way to learn to create contracts?
don't, your client usually has a contract on hand. If you must write a contract just use a Proposal/Acceptance sheet for contractors available at any office supply. Once you're making millions you can hire lawyers to write contracts if you want.
>How do you convince your customer that your a better choice than their current janitor?
Lower price.
>Is their any janitorial books i should definetly read before getting into this buisness?
contractors blue book
>Right now im working a retail overnight job and saving for all my equiptment and then im going to do all the legal stuff then marketing.
sounds good.
>Any suggestion for people just entering the biz?
learn how to do government contracting. It looks complicated but it's not. You can pretty easily make millions doing nothing other than that.

What contractors blue book are you refering to? Is it The 2016 Bluebook Cost Guide?

>Any tips on the janitorial buisness?

Yeah you had better invest in a pair of kneepads buddy. Don't want to fuck up your knees scrubbing the floors.

that's the one.

the part on cleaning isn't long, but you should have it memorized. Know how much it costs to mop a foot of tile. Know how many feet you can mop in ten minutes or an hour. This stuff needs to be memorized until you can do it automatically.

you should be able to look at a floor or other surface and know exactly how long it would take to clean, and what the average price to clean it is.

...

Thanks alot for the info!

no problem.
the main reason I steer you towards the blue book is if you do the math you'll see that we're charging $75-$125 PER HOUR for regular cleaning work. EVERYONE IS.

this is probably the most important lesson you can learn. Don't go in asking for $10 per hour. You'll go broke fast. It costs money to run a business. Most of your money.

>It costs money to run a business. Most of your money.
Keep in mind that your taxes alone on your own work will cost you 1/4 to 1/3 of what you earn. There's a 15% self-employment tax on top of your regular taxes. And you will have to pay taxes.

that's not counting the cost of insurance, advertising, and keeping a home office. Don't go cheap. Most of what you charge will NOT go into your pocket. Less than half is typical.

I'm cool with paying a shit load of money in taxes, that's the price of being a master vs slave as I see it. The whole reason I want to do this is when I worked a few janitor franchises and I learned about the industry I found out how much I was being ripped off as an employee. I know I did a good job cleaning. I did 2 big kindergarten's at night by my self, one of them being 2 stories at night for a shitty $300 a week paycheck while using the worst out of date 90s backpack vacuums ever. As long as I'm going into this business for now I just want to be able to be self sufficient enough to pay bills, not be a slave to anyone anymore, and have the biz on autopilot. Then I eventually crush my competitors with an iron fist and dominate as much county's and states as possible

It's certainly possible.

I've been doing it for 15 years now. I've grossed several million dollars over that time. I employ anything from 6 to 16 people a year, draw a salary around $100k average, and have destroyed or bought out at least 7 competitors that I know of. I've called myself retired for the last 13 years since that's how long it's been since I've worked an 8 hour day or a 40 hour week. I have a lot of experience managing businesses though, my results may not be typical. My pay is average for the industry though.

avoid franchises. They're good training but they're expensive. You can pocket all the franchise fee if you know what you're doing. My company started off as 2 franchises, the former owners dropped the franchise once they were established. I've seen their books, franchise fees suck ass.

>I did 2 big kindergarten's at night by my self
those two jobs probably paid enough for you to live comfortably on. I'd guess that would cost around $50k per year to clean in my area.

They suck big time. The first time I worked for the service master I thought I was going to a building with at least a logo on the door but I was dead wrong. The guy had a sketchy office in the middle of no wear connected to a postoffice that could not be identified and he had 3 super strange socialy inept employees, the owner did not have an accountant and fucked up all the time and was just unprofessional. The vehicle that was used for the carpet machine was an old truck all bent up from his employee crashing it. Most people go to a franchise website and are dazzled by all the professional pictures and everything but in reality their is a bunch of lazy get rich quick people buying the right to use a good name.

you can see it for yourself. They were two big buildings in Westwood and Dedham Massachusetts called KinderCare, lots of cheerios went up that shitty service master backpack vacuum lol

>service master
my company was originally a servicemaster and a merry maids franchise. Two years ago I bought out the servicemaster franchise in a neighboring town. Kept the contracts, dumped the franchise.

yeah, I could probably live off those two jobs alone. You probably could too.

Just for fun here's a pic of what we live with though. This is my garage, wall-to-wall janitorial supplies and equipment. My house is the same. On the plus side I write off about 1/3 of my house for business use. So my biz is buying me 1/3 of my house and a few vehicles. It has its perks.

That's awesome

glad you like. I can't wait for the day when I can dump the biz and the house and not have to live around piles of cleaning supplies and toilet paper! It is cool running a business and having real inventory and such though. A good feeling when you think about it. I never dreamed of being a janitorial contractor but I've always wanted to be a business owner. This is one of the easier ways to do it. And the pay is amazing.

If you made a million you could write a how to book on the biz and live off that. Turn it into a $5 ebook people would download off amazon or google play multiply that by the billions of people that could potentialy download that and your on ez street

a million is small potatoes.

I think the cutoff for small biz in our line of work is $15,000,000 per YEAR.

Nothing I've done is worth writing about, I'm extremely average as far as business owners go.

This couple inspires me. The fucking amount of money they made, if they did everything legal they could still have had enough to never work again and have their buisness on autopilot
www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-janitor-services-fraud-indictment-2015dec21-story,amp.html

Yea but a book title like From janitor to millionair is enough to catch the eye of potential prospects ready to dump their CC numbers into downloading cheap books

I've thought about it but I'd rather write a novel honestly.

I don't see millionaires as impressive things, and once you're my age you won't either. Especially if you stick with the office cleaning thing. It's absurdly easy to get a few million dollars worth of work.

what about the hundreds of thousands just like them that DIDN'T break the law?

this is simple stuff. they didn't make a lot of money. You could easily make more and not go to prison doing it.

Most definetly. The fact its just a immigrant couple with their own buisness and they got those big name hotel accounts. Definetly not inspired by their greed and how they treated their employees that was dumb on their part.

>that was dumb on their part.
it would've cost them maybe a couple hundred thousand to buy workman's comp and comply with immigration law.

they traded millions of dollars for years in prison. they could've kept those millions and avoided prison easily enough. Pay your taxes, follow the law. For every asshole like that there's thousands that will become millionaires without going to prison.

legal compliance actually pays better anyways, it's a requirement for most government jobs.

>it's a requirement for most government jobs.
for example I average 6 audits a year for legal compliance and I'm a tiny company. Don't do fraud, they WILL catch you. Not just the IRS, I get audited by insurance companies, employers, tax men, immigration.

it's part of the cost of doing business. Don't fuck it up.

Thats %1000 true. You can try to play anyone and they could be dumb enough to let it slip but if you try that shit with uncle sam hes going to come at you with everything he has

OSHA, MSHA, SAM, IRS, EEO, you don't fuck with the feds.

fraud in particular will ruin you for life.

How often do you get audited by the IRS? What would cause them to audit you so much?

Theres a guy here that does it. Think he posted in the hobbies thread. Ask him?

L.O.L. makes 7k and says shit lile that...

Kek janitorbro. U da mam

Man. Fuck...

$75 an hour. Mfw i have worled for umder $5 and my $18.50 is more than i have ever made

Fuck moping. I want the machine walmart funployees ride on

75 an hour is before you have to pay payroll, taxes, equipment, etc. I do janitorial contracts and the average net is roughly 20% of your gross receipts, if you aren't doing the work yourself.

Yup. It sure does.

Kek. Thats the spirit i com here for bro. Grab em by the pussy

God. I have fucked myself into working overtime since i was 14 fucking years old amd now im cripled and broken at 31 working (only) 50+ hours a week. Id honeslty like to see what my 1 man rock quarry makes. $10 a ton and 15/25 ton loads out the gate all day with the omly upkeep aside from crushing 3 months every other year if just me, my loader that never breaks or uses much fuel, and my little cuckshack. Im starting to see how these guys have like 50 fucking quarries.

Lol. I used to do motel carpets. Shit sucks ass

annually. I get audited because I make more than a quarter million gross.
$75 hour is min wage.
>75 an hour is before you have to pay payroll, taxes, equipment, etc
truth.
$75/hr is really about $20/hr after expenses
don't work for less

Dude. Build u a nice ass shop for like $50k. Or if u got land get a shitty old shipping container or semi trailer.

If you're working for yourself, look into residential window cleaning.

You'll be grossing about $40-50/hour.

Window Cleaning Resource has a lot of good information for starting your business, also with power-washing.

My Dad used to do windows, then he ran a janitorial company in the 90's grossing over a million, but it collapsed due to shitty illegal aliens with fake socials working as subs.

Basically fucked up his entire life, but window cleaning is chill.

So, if u took the time id buy it for inspiration and to fill the wifes library

Fuck. I guess its time i hoble aroumd scrubbing shitters again. Dammit

6 audits a year. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck

Dammit u triggered me. MSHA KEKS ETERNALLY BTFO AND DIE

you may have it for free, from me to you.

it's a short story but a profitable one.
sadly not one most people can follow.

I see. Cool

Sad. I saw a plumber flip shit and run away once. Whem he got back he said his boss had only him and 20 illegals. Hed pay those guys a descent wage and trap them. They were making too much money to quit and essentially just unliscensed plumbers but the boss pretty much then has 20 liscensed plumbers and he pays dick. The 1 legit plumber hat to jet because inspector showed up

Nice! Thanks

trillions of dollars in this one post
most people can't see trillions though
best of luck

Thank you so much for all of this.
Im hoping to take some of your advice and use it myself, Im in Australia, though, so alot of it like the government con tract stuff probably won be of use to me

I currently have a full time job, do you think it would be possible to start the business and work 7-3 weekdays? Or would I need 100% dedication from the start?
Is most of the work done at night and over the weekend?

I'm sorry, I truly have no idea how this works in Oz or any other part of the world.

I think it's a bit surreal that in the US a government mule, a fucking janitor can be a millionaire. I'd be surprised if other countries allowed this sort of absurdity.

>Is most of the work done at night and over the weekend?
yes, this is the case in my area. I work odd hours. In the US it's now about 4 am and i'm still awake. odd hours for sure.

I know nothing about government contracts here, I cant imagine it being too different from the states.
Id love even just a side business that I can do on the weekend or after work during the week. I have too much free time.
You seem like an intelligent guy, have any other ideas for a small business?

I'm intelligent but also pretty autistic.

which is to say I don't have a lot of original ideas.

I work janitorial, environmental, recycling, maintenance, and hazwaste jobs. As you can imagine these all flowed from one source.

I'm not a business genius. Just an autist that did one thing and did it well.

Dont just open a janitorial company if you never cleaned by your self or know how to use the machines. Get a job with a agency or franchise first to develop your skills. The smallest mop streak is going to have the account pissed so have your technique down and ready. The biz mostly takes place at night so you could have a day job. You gotta have %200 dedication

>I'm intelligent but also pretty autistic
I think thats the general population of Veeky Forums, myself included.

Thats probably true, it seems like a very unskilled job, but im sure theres still lots skills to learn.
Maybe ill try to find a second job (I could do with the money anyway) for now doing this, then ill look at going out on my own, could hopefully take a few customers with me too.

The smallest mark /streak/peice of dust/ can give the guy incharge of hiring janitor this reaction when he walks in

This is tempting for some but never ever fuck with anything from the building even if it has 0 value. A single peice of candy corn on the reception desk or a soda from the breakroom fridge will piss of the account big time and distrust you.

Actually come to think of it, most of these types of government contracts are dominated by the one company in my area.
Theyre called Broadspectrum and do just about all the schools/Unis/ government buildings here