You being a building service contractor entail a lot of work and often times you may be expected to make wonders when it comes to floor care. Cleaning floors that have been neglected for very long periods of time can be taxing and when a client is on a tight leash you need to be resourceful enough to be able to provide an excellent service with a much minimized cost. There is always a way to provide the best provide an affordable service to your customer and yet still make enough profit. When a customer requests to redo the floor and have it waxed it is a great opportunity to start off with a clean slate.

When you are faced with a tight budget for a project, careful planning is required so that you can minimize all your cost. Initially you would need to find materials that are durable and would be able to sustain the amount of foot traffic and the everyday wear and tear. Don’t try to save money by buying just the cheap products from the local store. Find a good and reliable finish from your trusted supplier that will prevent you from future cost of maintenance. You would want a durable product that will require less buffing and burnishing to make it look good. Some times it is necessary to spend a bit more on your initial spending than having to redo everything over a short period of time. A quality finish for your floor will provide less maintenance and replacement for the future.

After you’ve installing the floor and made it look just the way your customer wants, you will need to schedule a routine maintenance to prevent rapid deterioration. Floor maintenance would require you to buff, burnish, and scrub and recoat the floor so that you can maintain the desired look of your customers. It is recommended that a monthly buffing or burnishing is done to help maintain the floor finish and looking shiny. Interim scrubbing and recoating must also be done periodically to remove scratches or take care of problems that could not be done through buffing or burnishing. It is common practice that floors are stripped and waxed on a yearly basis while scrubbing and recoating is done after six months.

Aside from the monthly and yearly maintenance you also need to create a program that would address the day to day maintenance of the floors. A good neutral pH floor cleaner should be able to keep the floor finish lasting for a very long time and saving some money for the customer.

Basics of Floor Stripping and Floor Finish

If you are planning to offer floor care service for you cleaning service, there are few things you need to know and some terminologies to understand. It would also be a requirement to have the knowledge regarding chemicals and how they work. Here are some characteristics, definitions and terminologies that you should know.

Floor Stripper’s characteristics:

• Floor stripping chemicals functions in such a way that they liquefy the current floor finish so that they can be easily removed without causing damage to the floor.

• Floor strippers have high alkalinity usually from 10 -14in the pH scale. Chemicals with high pH are on the alkaline side.

• Floors strippers usually contain high amounts of volatile organic compound that have very harmful effects to the environment and the people using them. However, currently there are now “green” substitutes for floor strippers that have lower VOC contents. This is now being recommended to a lot of customers for environmental reasons.

• Strippers are designed to go a long with a certain floor cleaning system and you would want to use a stripper that will fit with your particular floor finish.

Floor Finish Characteristics:

• Floor finishing is a liquid that is spread over the floor thinly to provide protection from wear and tear of daily use. Floor finishes are applied to floors so that damage from water is prevented.

• Floor finish is commonly made up of polymers, solvents, waxes, plasticizers and surfactants.

• Floor finish is designed to work with a floor cleaning system that particularly goes with a certain line of daily cleaners, burnishing chemicals and certain floor strippers.

Definitions:

• pH scale- a unit of measurement to determine the levels of acidity and alkalinity of a solution. The range in the scale is from 0 to 14 where the median 7 is neutral. The range of 1 to 6 indicates how acidic a solution is and 8 to 14 show the alkaline level of a solution. Pure water has a pH of 7.

• VOC or volatile organic compounds are organic chemicals that create toxic vapors for humans and the environment.

• Solids – substance that is left on the floor surface once the floor finish cures. This is commonly expressed as a percentage of weight. The higher the percentage means that more coating resides once the floor dries. This in no ways means that the higher the solid content means better durability or shine.

• Polymer – a synthetic compound with a high molecular weight. Solids on the floor usually has a 50% polymer content which forms as a thin film providing durability and shine.

• Wax Emulsion – wax is made up of anywhere between 5 – 20% of the floor finish which enabled the floor to be “buffed”. Due to slips and black marks and low durability, synthetic waxes are now used to forego the natural waxes.

• Plasticizers are substances put on floor finish to allow it to become soft and pliable. These allow chemicals to function together to create a film without the imperfections. They also add resistance to impact for the finish.

• Surfactants are used to augment the contact of two or more materials, commonly known as wettability. This provides the floor finish the capability to be spread evenly and easily to the floor.

These are just some of the things you need to start offering floor maintenance in your cleaning service. You can get more information from your local janitorial shops that would be happy to help you out on your needs and provide different options for you.

See: How to start a cleaning business

Pricing your Cleaning services comes with practice – in your own home that is. Practicing your cleaning skills at home is advantageous in a lot of ways. For instance, you can correctly list down how much time you need to finish clean up tasks that you will be offering to your clients. Aside from that, you can also make a list of how much cleaning products you will be using up for a single cleaning. Additionally, you can create a detailed list of the chores you need to offer. And more importantly, you can estimate how many hours you can keep on cleaning in a day without overly exhausting yourself.

All of these can be used you create your own bid estimate sheet. A bid estimate is a form your client fills out for you to know exactly what cleaning services they require. Residential and commercial cleaning have a lot of similarities but you may want to create separate bid estimate sheets for the two for specialized cleaning unique to each.

Generally, you will need a letter head of your business for the bid estimate sheet. This gives it a more professional look. Put in your business name on top of the page, and then you can put your name, contact numbers, physical address, an electronic mail address, or maybe your own website address at the bottom. Have your logo printed on your bid estimate sheet also; you can place it on the upper left corner or watermark it in the middle. You can do all of these through software in your personal computer.

Have blanks or boxes for the customer to fill out their name, address, mobile, home and office phone numbers, their e-mail address and the person you will be speaking with for the cleaning service. For residences, it may be the spouse or any other person living in the home; for offices it could be the manager.

You will also need to have the cleaning schedule cleared out, whether it is a one time cleaning task or a regular one. Just put in boxes for weekly, monthly or every fortnight cleaning schedules. The day in the week should also be specified and the exact date of the start of the cleaning. You should also put in a blank for the exact time you can start and end the cleaning.

Next, you will need a detailed table of the tasks involved for each area of the house or the office.

For houses, create a section for all the rooms of the house and the cleaning chores to be performed in each area. Have a space or a blank beside each task wherein the customer can tick off the chores they want done. For the office, it is almost the same except you will need to have an area designated for cubicles and private offices.

Both of the bid estimate sheets should have the hourly rates you will charge for each section or area of the space that needs cleaning. Bid estimates should be discussed with the client before and after a job is done to ensure agreement between both parties.