for those of us who are relatively new to alotta commercial CC'ing like me, when you meet your contact and goto measure up a BIG building, ask for a diagram of the building. this can save ALOT of time and will make sure you dont forget to measure any areas...when you get into those 15k-20k sq.ft. plus buildings, that can be easy to do, especially if they just want certain areas like hallways / aisles cleaned. otherwise it is pretty easy to get lost and either re-measure an area or miss entire areas.

what do you vet's do when you measure a job and they dont have a diagram?

thanx for any advice --- Derek.

BTW, when using a diagram of the building for measuring, i find it easiest to write the dimensions right on the diagram....that way you dont measure the same area twice and you know where you've been and where you haven't.

I count ceiling tile in an average office, than count offices, wide open areas I can usually guess pretty close. I don't do any by the foot, so usually I'm guessing time rather than size. sometimes I'll use a measuring wheel when I'm done to see how close I am. and too see what I came up to by the foot.

Brian

great tip on the ceiling tiles Brian, saves a LOT of time for me. they are typically 2' by 2' or 4' by 4'.

so Brian, even on large buildings with say 20k sq.ft., you will measure by the job not the sq.ft.?

how much would you typically charge for something in the 20k sqft. range?

thanx --- Derek.

My favorite way to do it is this.

Two of us SLOWLY walk the entire building. We open every door. We write down a description for each room or office. We measure the room and take a digital picture of it. We are careful to correlate the pictures on the memory card with the areas listed on the clipboard.

Then we return to our office. We enter all the data into an Excel spreadsheet. And then we drop little thumbnail pictures of each room into the corresponding spreadsheet cells.

Now we e-mail the file back to the client. We ask the client to select M, Q, or Y = stands for Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly. They understand their buildings wear better than we do so we can let them select the service they desire.

This approach has worked well for us. We have a photo of each section that we clean, so there are no questions. And we've allowed the management to decide at their own convenience which levels of service they would prefer. When we've used this approach we've found that it produces a fiercely loyal customer. I'm not sure why, but it does.




Rick Gelinas

WOW Rick, impressive! man that's some great stuff...real professional. i dont have excel, will have to look into it in the future.

thanx for the great ideas --- Derek.

Any spreadsheet will work for this, even the one that's in Microsoft Works.




Rick Gelinas

One of the large office buildings we do is around 13,000' per floor. We get $1000/floor. With a helper I can knock a floor out in a short day without working too hard. Since encapping it, its makes good money. I shoot for $75-80/man hour. Alot of times I'll just kinda compare a area to somthin else I've done about the same size, decide if I made enough on that one, and price acordingly. Pretty high tech huh Rick?


Brian