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| Thursday, July 29, 2010 |
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| [Saturday, January 14, 2006] |
| I'm interested in bidding on cleaning a hotel with 97 rooms. No lobby or restaurant cleaning, just rooms. No supplies, labor only. What would be a good way to bid on a job like that? It requires $1,000,000 liability with $2,000,000 umbrella and $10,000 bond on each employee. |
| Foodservice/Hospitality/Hotels - Lisa Oliveira |
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Answer # 1:
National averages range from 14 to 18 rooms cleaned per day per housekeeper or around 20 minutes for occupied and 30 minutes to clean after a check out. Depending on the carpet, obstructions, room offsets, litter level, and vacuum used, halls would probably clean at 5,000 square feet per hour (+ or - 20%).
Here is an example of how to calculate labor; use your actual numbers.
If your labor rate is $8.00 an hour you would add:
1. Payroll costs and workers comp. (It might be around 15%)
2. Misc. expenses such as uniforms, vehicle etc. (perhaps 4%)
3. Overhead such as insurance, phone, advertising, etc. (say another 15%).
This would bring $8.00 up to $11 an hour. If you desired a 30% profit you would divide $11 by 70% = $15.71 hourly billing rate.
You would take this basic formula and plug in your actual figures (labor-hours per day times hourly billing rate).
Gary Clipperton
National Pro Clean Corp
(719) 598-5112
www.nationalproclean.com
Answer #2
If this is your first and only job (you report “no company yet”) you may find that the cost of the liability and bonding will increase your hourly rate so much that you will be unable to compete with outfits that can spread the insurance cost out over many clients. Be certain to get these costs from your insurance agent, keeping in mind that the charges will likely depend on your projected payroll and will be confirmed and updated each year by the insurer. Don’t pay a premium of $1000 this year only to see a payroll audit require an additional $2500 at year’s end.
Also, make certain that the bonding actually covers loss to your client due to dishonesty or carelessness rather than covering only you for the loss of a work apron or dust cloth. The latter is no doubt cheaper, but probably isn’t what the client had in mind when requiring one.
Look closely at the supplies they are giving you for your laborers. Are the vacuums even in running order? Are they sized for the job you need done quickly in order to keep your labor costs down? Are there maid carts in working condition? Being tied to using equipment and supplies purchased as inexpensively as possible by folks who think a back pack vac is something to suck cracker crumbs out of camping gear can leave you terribly frustrated and cost a lot of money in the long run.
You will probably need at least 4 people to cover a 60% -70% occupancy, using the figures from Answer #1. Figure into your estimate the costs of recruiting and training new housekeepers.
Lynn E. Krafft, ICAN Associate Editor for ATEX
lekrafft@juno.com
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