How to start a cleaning business: 12 – Time hacking week 2 data

If you can measure it, you can manage it – Peter Drucker

I’m currently tracking my time in a bid to increase profits. The idea is to see how long each job takes and how much time I spend travelling from job to job. I can then calculate my real hourly rate and identify strategies to optimise the business.

Now that the second week of the experiment has come to a close, let’s take a closer look at the numbers below:

As with week 1, lets explore some of the highlights (and lowlights) of the above data:

• Average hourly rate (Commercial) – $34.65
• Average hourly rate (Domestic) – $32.98
• Best hourly rate – $47.21
• Worst hourly rate – $13.56
• Total weekly travel time – 6h 58m
• Total weekly income – $1240

Right away I can spot that there are serious issues with some of my commercial rates. They are currently on par with my domestic rates, when realistically they should charged at around 1.5x higher. There’s also some room to take on additional clients as I’m only working around twenty six hours total over the five days.

I’m disappointed with a lot of this data, particularly the commercial hourly rate, however I’m excited for what we can achieve. I think it will be easy to increase our earnings with a little effort.

In next week’s post we’ll create a baseline to get an overview of our current business model. This will also give us a reference point to track the effects of changes as we begin to implement strategies to increase revenue, further decrease costs and improve our bottom line.