How much time will it take to clean this building? This is a question that cleaning business owners ask themselves all the time. After all, how do you know how much to charge if you don't know how long it takes to clean?
The time it takes to clean a building can actually be calculated and can help determine your janitorial production rates. You can do this by simply adding up the sum of all the individual tasks. In order to do that, you first calculate how much time it will take to clean any given area.
The hard part is that different people clean at different speeds. For example, two people performing the same cleaning duties may complete tasks in completely different amounts of time. Even with the same chemicals, tools, and equipment under the same circumstances, they may not clean at the same pace.
In addition, each facility will have its own unique cleaning tasks and requirements, layout, frequencies of service, and so on. The question then remains, how does a commercial cleaning company owner determine janitorial production rates?
Contributing Variables to Janitorial Production Rates
The amount of time it takes to clean is something the cleaning industry refers to as a "production rate". Industry production rates use the average time it takes the average cleaning technician to complete a specific cleaning task. This is also assuming they are cleaning a certain area/surface under average conditions.
While this can be a helpful tool to estimate your time, it usually isn't perfect. There are often other variables that may affect cleaning time. Some of these variables include:
- The building's age, current condition and soil levels
- The type of building (industrial, manufacturing, medical, educational, etc.)
- Frequency of service
- Special cleaning requests from facility manager/owner
- Condition of equipment (old vacuum in need of repair vs. new vacuum)
- Type of equipment (upright vacuum vs. back pack vacuum)
- Geological climate (snow, rain, etc. can slow down the cleaning time)
- Type of surfaces (flooring, woodwork, glass, etc.)
- New employee vs experienced employee (newbies are often slower)
- Location of dumpsters/recycle bins/exits
- Building size and classification (Class A, B, C)
- Number of building occupants
- And many more...
Sources for Cleaning Company Production Rates
There is a variety of resources for cleaning business owners to determine a “starting point” for janitorial production rates. Published industry data and benchmarking information as well as time and motion studies are a good place to start.
You can also access industry association reports and software to help in determining production rates. The Janitorial Store™, for example, provides members with a variety of information and resources in regards to production rates.
Here are a few resources members of The Janitorial Store™ can access for production rate data. The BSC Benchmarking Report contains averages, statistics, and other industry information. The American Institute for Cleaning Sciences (AICS) has released a report on commercial vacuum cleaner production rates as well. It details the results of a time-and-motion study using commercial vacuums. Read the article here - Time and Motion Study for Commercial Vacuum Cleaners.
The Production Rates Tracking spreadsheet allows you to track and calculate each building's production rate. It also has tabs for tracking task times for up to three employees.
This will give you a better idea of how long each task takes for your company. Cleaning Times and Production Rates document has a breakdown of cleaning times for various tasks and production rates.
Industry Janitorial Production Rates May Not Fit Your Cleaning Company
Always remember, however, that no production rate is a “fits all” for every company or situation. Published production rates are based on “average” cleaning times. These times can be inflated or deflated depending on the variables we discussed earlier.
Costs such as labor, cleaning chemicals, types of tools and equipment used, customer expectations, and other conditions vary. These costs can fluctuate greatly for each facility and each cleaning company.
That is why is it important to develop, track and use YOUR Company's production rates. Being able to reference your company's historical production rates and operational costs can help determine future costs.
Knowing your specific janitorial production rates for facilities depend on a lot of factors. Variables can include facility type and size, cleaning frequencies, as well as your managers, and cleaning technician's pay rates. Understanding these factors and average costs can give you a good base to work with.
By knowing these key factors, you can price your services better. It will also provide you with accurate data to determine production rates and prices today and in the future.
Collecting Building Information by Performing a Walk-Through
A common mistake cleaning business owners make is only using information from a specifications sheet or blueprints to make decisions. Often the information in these documents related to cleaning times can be incorrect, misleading, and/or outdated.
You should always talk to the facility manager/owner at the facility in question and perform the building walk-through. This is the best way to verify the actual cleanable square footage.
Taking your own measurements, identifying floor types, and recognizing variables in production rates is the most accurate method. Consider things like how many trash cans there are.
Ask yourself a variety of questions to get a better understanding of each facility. Are there lots of individual offices and cubicles? Is the office set up as an open-plan office? Is the staff workspace is uncluttered?
Are there after-hours employees in certain areas of the facility that will inhibit the cleaning routes? These are the types of variables that will affect the production rate and can be identified during the walk-through. These variables need to be identified in your walk-through and factored into your final proposal price.
The information gathered during the building walk-through combined with your company's historical production rates can help determine costs and price. Knowing your costs associated with a specific facility is a great way to ensure a profitable price. This is better than offering a price based on general information gathered from a blueprint, or specification sheet alone.
Understanding Your Cleaning Company's Production Rates
Labor is always the biggest expense when it comes to determining a price for a cleaning account. To determine your labor expense for a cleaning account, you need to figure out how many hours it takes to get the job done.
When bidding, it can be helpful to use the Bidding Calculators available to members of The Janitorial Store™. You can play around with different production rates, prices per square foot or hourly, frequencies, and labor costs. This will help you to price your bid profitably and competitively.
A cleaning production rate is not foolproof, but it will give you an average time per task under normal circumstances. You could also use an overall production rate for the type of facility and the cleaning tasks you are bidding on.
No situation is ever really "normal", so it's helpful to understand different circumstances that could affect your cleaning production rate. Keep the following circumstances in mind when walking through a prospects building. It will help you drill down past the industry average production times to find a more precise, profitable number for the proposal.
A further breakdown on factors that can influence janitorial production rates
Square Footage
Let's say the account you're bidding on has 2500 square feet of vinyl flooring that needs to be mopped. Using the Floor Care Production Rates Calculator, the standard production rate for mopping is 5000 square feet per hour with a 24 oz. mop head with bucket wringer. Based on those numbers that 2500 square feet of flooring should take 1/2 hour to mop (see image below).
However, that number doesn't tell the full story. You need to ask yourself additional questions to determine an accurate estimate for how long it takes to clean. Is the vinyl flooring all in one large area?
Is it broken up into two floors with four restrooms? Do you need to clean a break room, copy room, computer room, and utility room?
Do you think it will still take 1/2 hour when the floors are scattered throughout the building? Probably not. This may not be a "normal circumstance", so you need to take that into consideration. This is why you need more than square footage and a task when determining how long it takes to clean.
Task Frequency
Another thing to consider is how often are tasks being performed. If a task is done once a day, weekly, or monthly it can change the time it takes to clean significantly. Keep in mind that by lowering the frequency of a task, you're not necessarily reducing time and expense for the customer.
Emptying trash 2 days a week versus 5 days a week doesn't really save much time on a given service day and it might not seem like it would affect your janitorial production rate.
However, if your bid calls for emptying trash in a busy office twice a week, instead of five days a week, you may find overflowing trashcans, which will slow your workers down.
More goes into the task frequency than you may think in regards to its impact on your production rates.
Number of Occupants
The number of occupants can be another variable that could greatly influence how long it takes to clean. If you're bidding on a small office building with a few employees and very little public traffic, your production rates will probably soar.
However if that same sized building has lots of employees, and gets a lot of public traffic, then production rates will go down. A building with more occupants will require more time for cleaning.
You might also consider the type of worker in the building. If there are people who are at their desks 8 hours a day versus salespeople who are out of the office most of the day trash may pile up. Because of this, you'll likely need more time for cleaning.
Additional factors that can change the cost of your janitorial services
Type and quality of Equipment
If you give your employees the wrong equipment or give them equipment that has frequent breakdowns, then your production rates will be affected.
Another thing to consider is the layout of the facility you are cleaning. If you use the wrong equipment or equipment that isn't best suited for the job it could lower your production rate significantly.
For example, if your building has wide hallways and open areas, you would get the job done faster with a wide area vacuum or a backpack vacuum versus a 12" upright vacuum. Choose the right equipment for the task your employees need to do to improve your overall production rates.
The initial investment may seem hard to do in the short run, but your overall improved efficiency will be worth the investment.
Area of the Country
Buildings located in climates that have snowfall or lots of rain will have more maintenance required. This happens because of the additional snow, salt, sand, and dirt being tracked into the building.
Climates with high humidity can also affect production rates for hard floor care and carpet cleaning, as drying times are much slower. Be sure to include the area of the country you are servicing as you calculate your janitorial production rates.
Customer Standards
One of the intangible variables in regards to cleaning production rates has to do with customer standards. Is your prospective customer primarily interested in the price?
Then perhaps the "normal" production rates will be accurate. However, if your customer is dissatisfied with the current cleaning contractor because of poor quality service, then your production rates could be affected because you need to live up to the client's standards.
In a situation like this, you may need to perform some tasks more frequently or add more tasks to your specifications list to show you provide that high-quality service. Your clients may want certain aspects of their facility cleaned a certain way as well. This could cause your production rate to go down if these new cleaning methods take additional time compared to your usual cleaning practices.
The layout of the building
How the building is structured could also raise or lower your janitorial production rates. Is the building tightly filled with cubicles? Or are there many wide-open spaces?
Do you need to clean multiple floors or the building or is your client only located on one level of the facility. If your cleaning technicians need to bring their equipment and supplies to multiple different floors of the building it may take much longer to clean.
Treating every building and facility the same regardless of layout could end up hurting your profits if you underbid on the job.
Non-productive time
Do you factor in the time that your cleaning technicians might not be cleaning? If your technicians work an 8-hour shift, that entire shift won't be 100% spent cleaning.
You need to consider the time your employees spend gathering supplies, move around the building, take the trash to the dumpster, take breaks, clean up afterward, and put supplies away. This unproductive time is normal, but if you don't account for it, then you might be underestimating how long it takes to clean. Be sure to include time for these activities.
Supervisor hours
Does your client's facility require you to have a supervisor or manager on site with your cleaning technicians? If a supervisor is needed to supervise the cleaning staff, fill in for absent employees, or perform one of the shifts on a regular basis, then you'll also want to look at the wages being paid and factor this into your price.
How to Develop Production Rates for Your Cleaning Company
When bidding on a commercial building, it is helpful to use a standard production cleaning rates document, as discussed in the previous section. However, you may find that your own cleaning company works at a slightly different rate than the standard, so it would be beneficial to develop your own cleaning production rates standards for your company. There are so many variables that affect cleaning production rates, so developing your own standard may help you to bid cleaning accounts more accurately.
Here are some tips for creating a cleaning production rates standard for your company:
- Make a list of the cleaning tasks to be included in the proposal.
- Time yourself on performing each of these tasks in a building that your company cleans.
- If you have employees, time several of your best workers on performing each of these tasks as well. If at all possible, don't let them know that you're timing them. People tend to work faster than usual if they know they're being timed, and you want your numbers to be as accurate as possible.
- Tally up all the times by task and figure out the average rate.
- Besides checking the time on individual tasks, you might want to check the average hourly production rate for cleaning a building. To do this, check your employees' time on cleaning the entire building. Take the total square footage and divide it by the time it takes them to clean. For example, if you had a 10,000 square foot building and it takes 3.5 hours to clean, then your production rate for that building is 2857 square feet per hour (10,000 ÷ 3.5 = 2857).
- Check several buildings to get an idea of how your cleaning technicians are doing. If there is a building that has a much lower production rate than the rest, check into the reasons why and correct issues if possible.
Improve Your Janitorial Production Rates by Improving Your Cleaning Equipment
Unfortunately, many cleaning business owners can get caught up in the everyday hustle of running a cleaning business. Because of this, you can miss opportunities to improve aspects of your business. For example, you may not take the time to look at improving your current cleaning equipment.
You may also feel that by purchasing new equipment, you are only increasing costs and lowering your profits at the customer level. Although that may hold true in the short term, purchasing new equipment will produce better long-term results.
This happens because new equipment can reduce labor costs, improve productivity, and enhance cleaning quality. Having the right equipment can make all the difference when it comes to improving your janitorial production rates.
It benefits cleaning business owners to continually search out new developments and technology. By doing so, you can discover more efficient ways of cleaning. Starting with newer equipment can be one of the many effective ways to improve your janitorial production rates.
Conduct your own time and motion studies to get a more accurate janitorial production rate
Published production rate tables, time and motion studies, and manufacturer's specifications are all helpful tools when it comes to determining the most efficient equipment to use in your cleaning company. You can also conduct your own time studies using your current cleaning equipment.
You can then compare the time to clean when using a new piece of equipment. For example, cleaning the same facility with backpack vacuums compared to upright vacuums.
You may be surprised at the results. The Janitorial Store's Production Rates Table demonstrates that when carpet vacuuming traffic lanes with an upright vacuum. Cleaning technicians can clean at a rate of 13,333 square feet per hour. All things being equal, swapping out that upright for a backpack vacuum may increase the rate to 20,000 square feet per hour.
Besides the added benefit of increased production rates, you most likely will encounter better quality outcomes at your customer's facilities too. The more efficient your cleaners are at cleaning, the faster they will be at completing tasks on time. Not having to rush through the facility equates to better quality results, which equates to happy customers.
Conclusion
Knowing your janitorial production rates is invaluable to improving your company's understanding of its performance and productivity. With it, you will be able to identify your strengths, weaknesses, set goals, and monitor performance expectations.
Having this knowledge can help you effectively manage any changes to your customer's future needs. So rather than "winging it" when bidding on a new account, take the steps necessary to get an accurate estimate.
Start by performing the walk-through and determine the tasks required to complete the job. Then estimate the time to complete each task, and add up the total time.
Once you know this information, use your company's janitorial production rates and include all impacting variables. With this process complete, you can be confident and competitive on your final proposal price.
Bidding & Estimating for Cleaning Companies Are you confused on how to prepare bids for commercial cleaning accounts? If you bid too high, you might lose the job, but bidding too low might mean you won't make a profit on the job. Walking that fine line and bidding correctly can have a huge impact on the success of your cleaning business. This Ebook will show you how to bid, step-by-step.
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