On the Road....

[thecleaningdude]

Approximately how many hours a day do you spend driving and cleaning?

[Lounge Lizards]

Most of my work is within 15 minutes of my home.

Although yesterday & again today I traveled a long distance, 30 minutes each way to the job.

Yesterday was a leather lounge suite.

Today was an up-market hotel with Sisal carpet

I did this same Sisal last year when no other CC'er in Cairns would touch it, I was recommended by a firm over 1,500 miles south of me.

I can't really give an idea of time for each because our work ranges from Leather furniture cleaning, to residential carpet, upholstery & mattress cleaning, commercial carpet as well as commercial leather cleaning.

With our commercial carpet cleaning, our jobs range from one hour, to over the Christmas break, I may work up to sixteen hours a day on large contract work that we've been doing with the Cimex for over 13 years.

We also clean Oriental rugs at home as well as leather clothing, both of which are delivered to us & picked up from us, so no driving involved.

Twice a month we go to distant areas, about 1.5 - 2 hours drive where we do leather upholstery & if people have clothing to be cleaned, we take this home & deliver back the following week.
On these trips, we may stay overnight one or even two nights. When we do, we also clean the clothing after our days work and drop back the following day.
For the clothing, we tell people that we will be at a certain area for one hour on a specified day, so they can bring it to us & again pick it up from there.

We have three areas like this, so each area is serviced quarterly.

We like these "country runs", as it breaks the boredom of the same place, day in, day out, plus my wife has many Filipino friends that always wants us to stay there overnight so they can catch up.

   

[Barry-QDCC]

The area I cover north to south is about 30 miles.  East to west is slightly less than 40 miles.  I live about in the middle of that.   Like a lot of metro areas a 15 mile drive around here could take you 20 minutes - or it could take you close to an hour.  

I try to schedule jobs in a relatively close area to reduce driving but you know how that turns out sometimes. Years ago I got a bright idea to try to schedule jobs in City A on Monday, City B on Tuesday, City C on Wednesday, etc.  But again, that doesn't really work well at all either.

So while every day is different, I'd guess on days that I have 3 jobs scheduled  I'm cleaning on average about 5 hours  and gone from the house maybe 7 hours.   But that includes all my stops for drinks,  lunch, strolling around Home Depot.

Edited:  I am concentrating my SEO efforts on an area of 5 main cities closer to where I live.   North to south-15 miles  - - - E/w -20 miles. So I'm hoping to tighten things up a bit over time.

[Barry-QDCC]

Approximately how many hours a day do you spend driving and cleaning?

Come on Damon!!  You can't ask this question without answering it yourself!

[thecleaningdude]

When I was cleaning more the road time could easily be upwards of 10 hours or more. This would include the entirety of the day - driving, cleaning, driving home. 

I asked this question in a group and many members chimed in with similar answers. Travel time  can seriously stifle your hourly goal.

[Barry-QDCC]

When I was cleaning more the road time could easily be upwards of 10 hours or more. This would include the entirety of the day - driving, cleaning, driving home. 

I asked this question in a group and many members chimed in with similar answers. Travel time  can seriously stifle your hourly goal.

How much cleaning are you doing now?  Is your goal to eventually eliminate the cleaning part of business and just do the product sales end of the biz?  How are you cutting back? Stop marketing and just do repeat customers or ?

[Derek]

being that we are nearly 100% CGD cleaners, we often times travel for as long as we clean lol. not all of the time, but sometimes. too bad we don't get paid for travel time

i might have to look into working that into our price more  

[thecleaningdude]

When I was cleaning more the road time could easily be upwards of 10 hours or more. This would include the entirety of the day - driving, cleaning, driving home. 

I asked this question in a group and many members chimed in with similar answers. Travel time  can seriously stifle your hourly goal.

How much cleaning are you doing now?  Is your goal to eventually eliminate the cleaning part of business and just do the product sales end of the biz?  How are you cutting back? Stop marketing and just do repeat customers or ?

Between products and my mom (as you're aware of), this takes up a lot of my time. I still do some jani and the occasional job.