How much salary should I pay myself as a house cleaner, when I'm hiring other people?
That is a great question and we're going to talk about that today.
Hi there I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question,
and I get to help you find an answer.
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It's just a really fun hub that will help you out in your cleaning business.
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Alright onto today's question which is from Anna, who has this question.
Hi Angela, my name is Anna, my cleaning business is very new but I have a question
about salaries and what I should be paid versus what my other people in my company should
be paid.
It is a very new business and I've started it all up by myself.
I'm the one who has invested in all of the equipment and the cleaning products, obviously
I've put in the time to research and find clients, and learn about cleaning.
I've put a lot of time and money into my small, new business so far.
It's just starting to pick up, three clients a week type of thing.
I want my boyfriend and my brother to join me, because they think that then we could
take on a lot more clients, they both are excellent workers and I think we could do
awesome work together.
Now, since I have gotten this thing off the ground and I'm the one who am going to be
purchasing insurance, and all these things, I'm the one who's communicating with the client,
emailing back and forth, administrative type things.
How would I know what to pay my brother and my boyfriend versus what I earn, because I'm
doing more work and I've made a bigger investment of my time and my money.
Thank you Angela.
Angela Brown: Alright Anna, congratulations on your new business, and welcome to the world
of cleaning.
There are a whole bunch of things that you need to consider as you're getting started,
and I can't give you a definitive answer on how much your salary should be because I don't
know where you live, how much you charge per hour is going to be based on where you live.
Let's say that you live in middle America.
We're not talking about California, we're not talking about New York, because all along
the coast, you're going to have a much higher expense living, and it's going to raise the
price of the cleaning.
If you live in the UK it's going to drop the prices, because the prices are about half
what they are in the US.
In middle America, let's just say for sake of ease that you charge $25 an hour as you're
getting started in the cleaning business.
That's about middle of the road in standard rural America.
If you do, my suggestion would be that you go somewhere around 50-60% of what you're
charging for the customer.
So, if you are hiring people already, you're going to want to pay them 50-60% of what you're
bringing in, in order to inspire them to keep coming back, but you still have to figure
out what your profit and losses are, you got to figure out what your expenses are.
Then you have to figure out you're going to have left on the table, and does it make sense
for you to go ahead and hire people at this point.
If you only have three customers right now, my suggestion would be don't hire anyone.
Completely book out your schedule until your schedule is completely full.
Now, what I mean by this, is if you're charging $25 an hour and you're working five days a
week, eight hours a day, that is $1000 a week that you're bringing in.
That is $4000 a month, that's just the simple math.
That doesn't talk about all the expenses and everything you have behind the table.
That's just the money that you're bringing in.
What could $4000 do for your business right now?
It could help you get up and running, it could ease the blow of having immediate bills to
pay, so you can focus on growing your business.
As you grow your business and you hire your
brother and your husband, or your boyfriend, as you hire these extra people, you're going
to have to raise your rates.
As you raise your rates, that will give you more money for advertising and more money
to pay yourself these things.
In the beginning, you're going to have a lot of sweat equity and you're not going to get paid.
I'm not trying to paint an ugly picture, but you have to be willing to absorb some of that
cost in order to get started.
You're starting out on your own and that is the expense.
When you jump into a franchise and you buy a franchise, they do a background check.
They make sure you have a business background because they do not want you to fail.
The next thing is, a lot of them require that you have a college degree.
They want to make sure that you know how to learn,
and that you will implement the things that you've learned.
They probably know you have a student loan that you have to pay off.
Another thing is, they want to make sure that you have $150,000 to $200,000 of operating capital
upfront so you have enough money to grow your business as you get going, so because you
started out on your own, you don't have to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars
up front, and you're not going to paying a 10% franchise fee to the franchise for the
rest of your career.
So you get to keep all that extra money.
The reality is as you get started, you're going to start out at a basic price.
The basic price is going to let people give your service a try, okay?
If you go in and you're like, "Well I know my worth, I'm going to charge top dollar"
You're going to have a couple of customers, but you're not going to have a lot, and your
schedule will not be full.
My recommendation is drop your price just a tad, so that it's more alluring to the other
customers that are out there that would not give your service a try at a higher price.
Once your schedule is full, the minute you think you have this figured out, that's when
everything changes.
You probably have enough experience now behind the helm of the business doing all the day
to day stuff that you know kind of what's expected.
You've been in enough contracts that you kind of know how to spin a conversation to your
advantage, and you know how to set boundaries and expectations with new customers.
So there's some things upfront that you need to learn before you start hiring people.
If your husband or your boyfriend, and your brother come with you on the jobs, you are
still going to be expected to do all the administrative stuff.
So, right now there's not enough money to pay them.
Even at $25 an hour, if you pay them $15 a hour, which is 60%, there's only $10 left
for you, that's for all the insurance, for your workman's comp, for all your cleaning
supplies, for your gas, for your advertising, for all that stuff.
There's actually not enough money to go around, and then you don't get paid.
So, my suggestion to you would be don't hire anyone yet.
Make sure that you have a completely full schedule.
I'm talking about just working solo.
Work solo until your schedule is completely filled, then you can start growing and expanding
your business as you're able to.
You're going to have to raise the rates on the customers, you're going to have to have
more expenses because you have more people, you have more cars, you have more jobs, you
have more advertising.
The expenses grow as your income grows.
So, there's a lot going on right here, and my suggestion is if you only have three customers
right now, do not expand.
This is not the time for you to expand.
There are lots of people that just want to run the business, and I love that entrepreneurial
mentality, but right now you don't have the goods for it.
You don't have the resources to bring in the money to pay you for your admin time, and
still keep everybody employed full time.
You can't take your boyfriend and your brother off their regular jobs for three jobs a week,
that's not enough money to go around.
Nobody is going to pay that much money to support three people,
it's just not enough money.
So my suggestion is work solo until your schedule is completely filled, and then start expanding,
try to keep your ratios at about 50-60%, meaning you give them 60% of the revenue coming in,
and you keep the other 40 for the business.
That allows you to put money back into the business and it allows you to pay for your
time as well, because your time will be streamlined,
and it will be amortized over all of the hours of different people working.
So that would be my suggestion for you, for right now.
Right now the money is not there.
Work solo until your business does grow.
Alrighty, that's my two cents for today, until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place, than when you found it.
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