Extra work.
Did you ever get to a customer's house, you've bid for a certain amount of time, or a particular
job, and you get there, and there's extra work?
What on earth do you do?
We're going to talk a little bit 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.
Today's show is brought to us by HouseCleaning360.com,
so if you're looking for a maid service,
or you're looking for a house cleaner, or a professional organizer,
HouseCleaning360.com has you covered.
Alrighty now, onto today's show, which comes from a house cleaner who wants to know ...
Escrita: Good afternoon Angela.
This is Escrita.
I have a question, hopefully you can help me with this problem.
I have a client that has a nanny, and every time we go and do the cleaning,
there is toys all over the place.
In the front room, in the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, I mean, toys all
over the place.
Balls, cars, trains, you name it.
I tell me client if there's any way possible, that the toys could be put away so we could
start the cleaning, but I don't know how to tell her without her getting upset, and plus,
it takes a lot of our time, and I don't charge per hour, I charge per cleaning.
Is your ... easy way that I could be able to ask her, maybe to tell her nanny to make
sure that the toys are put away so that we could do the cleaning?
Please help me out with this question.
Thank you so much, Angela.
Take care.
Angela Brown: All right, now that is a trick question, because we have allotted a particular
amount of time based on a person's house when we went to bid the initial contract, right?
Now, when you get to a customer's house, and it's really important to do this up front,
when you get to a customer's house and you're walking through the house with the customer,
you have to ask the customer this question, "Did you just pick up your house before I
got here, or is your house always in this condition?
If I give you a price based on this condition of the house, when I arrive every time to
clean, I expect the house to be in this condition.
If I show up and there's spaghetti all over the kitchen, or if there are toys all over
the house, or there's laundry and stuff strewn about, and there's clutter everywhere, it's
going to take a lot more time than I'm bidding for right now.
In the event that I get here and the house is just trashed for whatever reason, and sometimes
it happens, I either need to charge you more money, or I need to just pick up the clutter
and let that be the cleaning of the day.
So which is it?"
And let the customer decide, because the customer sometimes will say, "I would rather you pick
up the clutter, because sometimes my house is just cluttered, and I don't have time to
pick it up."
There are other customers that say, "I don't want to pay extra money to have you come at
your price and pick up my clutter."
All right, then from day one, let's agree that when I arrive, your house will be in
this condition, because if you're showing up now, and the house keeps getting messier
and messier, either the nanny needs to pick up the toys, or the home owner needs to pick
up the toys, or the child whose toys they belong to need to pick up the toys.
I don't really care who it is, but unless they have specifically contracted you to pick
up the clutter, then that needs to be a conversation that you have with the home owner, because
no one is paying you right now to pick up the clutter, and you have another house to
clean when you're done here.
Even though you're not charging by the hour, you're still working by the hour, because
we only have so many hours in a day.
No matter what you're doing, you're in essence working by the hour, because you're spending
some of your time in order to do that job.
If you have two or three houses in a day, whether you admit it or not,
it's on a timed schedule.
When the time for that house is up, you can't keep staying and cleaning, because then you
lose profits from the next house you're supposed to go clean.
Does that make sense?
So you do need to have a conversation with the customer, and just say, "Hey, listen.
When I bid the job, your house was in this condition, and now that I've arrived, every
time there's more and more clutter.
It's taking time that I don't have.
I did not budget the clutter time into the job and the price that I gave you.
Would you like me to charge you more money and take time away from another customer so
that I can expand your window of time, or would you like to pick up the clutter before
I arrive?"
Now, a lot of people when you give them the choice, they don't want to pay the extra money,
because house cleaning is not cheap, and they can inexpensively pick up their own toys,
or teach their children to put things away after they're done.
I've seen very, very tiny children that are well-trained to put their toys away when they're
done playing.
It is a learned skill, and it's something a parent can learn and teach their children,
and their children can learn it without the parents having to pay the house cleaner that
extra money.
So it's just a conversation you need to have.
Don't worry about if they're going to be offended.
It's an offensive conversation.
"Your house is a mess, you hired me.
I'm here, I brought solutions.
I need to help you, you need to help me understand what those solutions are.
Between the two of us, we can probably come up with some really great solutions
for your house."
But the two of you need to decide that.
Anyway, good luck with that, and we'll talk soon.
Until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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