Hi members. I was asked by a local home painter to bid on a home roof cleaning yesterday. The roof off white tile and worked out to 5300 sq ft with quite a bit of cut, really hard to reach spots and 3 full sides of heavy landscaping. I was told by the painter that my initial bid was about $500 high compared to the other guy he feeds work to. He's well respected in our area, and has been in business for 42 years, so he knows what he's talking about. I'm actually going to ride around with him on Friday morning to look at a few others and he's going to clue me in on the local market pricing. My question is, round about, what would you have bid on this. PMs are fine, and I'll share my original bid with you too. Photos coming soon
We dont discuss pricing on the open forum of the internet. I am sure you understand why. Set up a time to chat by calling Jackie at the office so I can help stear you on pricing this.
Hi Derek, I sent you a PM, however, I'll add the following -
I'm always high on our jobs. The "competitor's" are using pressure washers, walking every sq. foot of the roof, breaking tiles, and the stains will regrow 2-3x as fast compared to SoftWashing.
SoftWashing SHOULD be more money. Don't get caught up on what one painter tells you, regardless of how respected he is. He is 1 customer out of the tens of thousands you will encounter. Roughly 30-40% of your customers will tell you you are too high in price. However, 60-70% closing ratio on your jobs is more than enough to sustain a very profitable business.
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Brandon Vaughn
All-Clean! SoftWash Gresham, OR brandon@allcleansoftwash.com www.allcleansoftwash.com 503.887.6404
Thank you, Brandon for your reply and PM. I replied back and would appreciate your returned input on it. As long as we keep pricing out of the public side, I wouldn't mind if you made your opinion of the situation I'm in public, good or bad, if you feel it would help others
AC, I'm sorry if it came across that I was trying to start an open discussion on this. That wasn't my intention, as I do completely understand the reasons not to.
Any further PMs from anyone else would also be well received.
Derek, unfortunately almost all of this awesome forum and bulletin board has been set up as 'viewable by the public', so your commentary, pics and strategy are now out there for all to see-especially in your local area.
I learned this the hard way by simply commenting and trying to help on another post here, where the poster titled it something like "Just cleaned my first roof'. What ended up in my local market on Google was the title "Just cleaned my first roof" as the heading, and then right under it was my company name! Without someone actually clicking on the heading and reading the entire post it looked like we just cleaned our first roof!!!! Obviously not a confidence builder for prospective customers, and absolute gold for a competitor!
I've highlighted this issue before here and suggested better 'signals' in the 'Recent Posts' area. So unless and until this is remedied-be careful what you post here!!
......just sayin'...
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Steve Mazzuca President/CEO
2625 Townsgate Rd. Suite 330 Westlake Village CA 91361
433 N. Camden Dr. Suite 400 Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Derek, I would suggest being even more careful if you post on other forums as well. There is another forum that is hosted for roof cleaning out of Florida and I'd posted there a handful of times and not only did issues like what Steve pointed out happen, but about half the links I clicked on took me to the forum post. however, the other half redirected me directly to the forum owners business website. So if you post on another Florida based forum and someone did a search for your company or name it is possible that links would send your potential customers to another companies site, hijacking your customer. I'm not saying it was intentional, or just maybe how the programming on the search engines worked, but the result was the same. Although to compare apples to pears, I haven't had that issue with this forum.
AC, I'm sorry if it came across that I was trying to start an open discussion on this. That wasn't my intention, as I do completely understand the reasons not to.