Changes to pricing and schedules

As many of you are aware, I only set up my business in January 2020. It has been a challenging environment in setting the business up due to coronavirus and consequences of lockdown, principally with the school closures (I have two primary school age children).

However, other significant and difficult areas of running my business are getting the pricing and scheduling at an optimum level to ensure that customers are getting value for money whilst I can earn the correct amount of money, and ensuring my overheads are met.

Scheduling my rounds is proving to be challenging with customers all on different schedules. I made a decision at the start of the year that I will only be offering a cleaning interval of 6-weekly for new customers. With some discretion, I may allow 12-weekly but the cost will be slightly higher to take into account the windows and surroundings will take longer to clean.

How will this affect existing customers?

I'm already in the process of contacting individual customers and moving them onto 6-weekly schedules. I will continue to do this but on a gradual approach. I may allow some customers to stay on either 4 or 8 weekly schedules but this will depend largely on their location.

I'm also informing a selected batch of customers who I believe are on a rate that is too low for me to sustain in the longer term and am unfortunately having to increase their fees. Pricing has been a difficult challenge over the past year and I am sure some of you can appreciate I wish to be paid at the market rate. I may lose some customers by increasing their prices but I simply cannot continue doing some jobs where it's not financially viable for my business.

I apologise in advance to those that will be affected by any changes to my scheduling and pricing.

If you have any questions, please ask away.

Thank you.

Shaun