Should You Break Down Man Hours On Your Commercial Cleaning Proposal?

A commercial cleaning business owner was asked to submit a proposal, but the customer asked for the invoice price to be broken down by man hours. He believes they want to know if the all the employees are really needed. He's wondering what to do.

Here is some of the feedback received from other cleaning business owners:

1. If they are paying a flat rate monthly and are happy with the service, why should they care how the money they pay you is spent? That's really not any of their business!

2. When a client says that usually a bean counter is trying to get involved so he can figure out if they should go in-house. Let them know you can break this down but the time involved in doing this is costly and you would have to bill them for your accountants time and make it expensive for them to get this cost even though you can spend the time to do it yourself.

3. I never really objected to giving them man hours once I was able to determine from them why they wanted them. I would explain all the hours such as cleaning, recruiting, training, supervision, accounting, etc. I made sure never to alienate them.

I reminded them that level monthly invoicing was one of the advantages of using a service such as ours in addition to us doing all the recruiting, orientation, training, supervision, etc. etc. It gave me another opportunity to sell them on my value to them.

Don't ever tell them they don't need to know that or something that implies that. You may not have to give the information but you won't keep the customer either. Many times, not always, I was able to discourage the process by explaining all the details outlined above.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Click on the Comments link below to post your feedback.

Comments

[Rick Crombie]

I agree with #1. We are asked to provide specific tasks to preform for a quoted price.

As long as we fulfill the agreement to their satisfaction, it really is none of their business.

Of coarse it would not be explained to the to the customer in that fashion.

You could simply say you are sorry but it is company policy that we do not provide that kind of information.

If that's a problem for them, find another customer. Someone who will not scrutinize and question everything you do.

Sorry but I do not need that kind of stress!

Give it to your competitor to keep them busy, putting out fires.

While you are soliciting someone not so anal.

I look at it as a warning sign as to just the beginning of what could turn out to be a problem customer.

I doubt if they get asked by any company to break it down how they will accomplish any job that they are doing.

In more than 30 years in the commercial cleaning industry I can count the times this has been asked of me on one hand.

[anish]

could you please advice me how much sequirev meter one person can clean per hour,

if there is any basic methode to calculate the manpower for a project please send me.

[Sharon L. Cowan]

This kind of question needs to be handled professionally so not to put the customer on the defensive. There will be some municiple contracts that require this information however for routine office cleaning, that is not the norm. I found the best way to handle this question was to reply simply that I was unsure of the exact time required. It would be better determined after a few cleanings and that a lot depended on who was doing the cleaning. I never gave an exact answer as I feel this is privileged information and not necessary to share. It matters that the contract is followed and the quality meets the expectations of the client.
Sharon Cowan
Maid For Success