what is your annual cost of cleaning supplies? that's an interesting question and we're goingto talk about that today. hi there. i'm angela brown and this is ask a house cleaner. this is a show where you get to ask a housecleaning question and i get to help you find an answer. now, today's show is brought to us by mycleaningconnection.com and there's a resource section in there where there are a whole bunch of books on, checkthis out,
how to create your own cleaning supplies. so, it's going to save you a boatload of money. they're sponsoring this show because you wantto know what the annual cost of cleaning supplies are. all right. here's a question that comes from a housecleaner and her question is this. speaker 2: how much do you spend on cleaningsupplies in a year? i want to start my own business. if i do go the cheap route, how much wouldi spend in a year? angela brown: all right.
what is the annual cost of cleaning supplies? it's kind of an interesting question in thesense that it's hard to say. i don't know if you have just one employeeand you have five houses, or if you have no employees and you have 10 houses, or if youhave 30 employees and you have 300 houses. i have no idea. the annual cost of cleaning supplies is goingto scale up or down depending on how many people you have in your business and how manycustomers you serve. it's also going to determine are you makingany of your supplies or are you buying them all from the store, ready-to-use?
then the next question is, are you buyingready-to-use products or are you buying concentrates? because concentrates are strong, you dilutethem, and you put them in your spray bottles and it stretches the concentrate over a largeramount of spray bottles than if you just buy an already ready-to-use product off the storeshelf. because if this is a matter of figuring outhow much money you need, what you may want to do is you may want to create a little reserveso that you have the opportunity of buying detergents and supplies and concentrates versusa ready-to-use amount. my suggestion if you're not sure is go tothe store, do a price check at your favorite store for the products that you want to use.
this is assuming the products you want touse are at your favorite store. you could also jump on amazon and get a goodfeel for what some of the prices go for. then you could take a week or two of cleaningand find out how much supplies you're using. now, the rule of thumb is you're going touse about a half a bottle of spray at every single house for whatever it is you're doing. an all-purpose spray, a window spray, or aglass spray, you're going to use about a half a bottle. one bottle should get you through two houses or maybe two bottles get you through three houses.
maybe you use a little bit more than half. it's going to determine on how you clean,how you spray. are you spraying your rag? are you spraying the surface itself? it's going to depend on your cleaning styles. once you've determined about how much youuse in a week, you can factor out the price and times that by 52 weeks. or if you take two weeks of vacation, 50 weeks. then, once you have that price factored out,what you may want to do is create a budget
for that amount. now, you have a game you can play with yourself. you can say, "i either need this amount ofmoney." i'm just making up a number. let's say it's $1,000. "i need $1,000 for cleaning supplies." so, the $1,000 would be your budget. now, once you have that $1,000 budget in place,if you decide to create your own cleaning supplies that are some nontoxic, organic suppliesfor pennies on the dollar, it might only cost
you, let's say, $400 for the exact same suppliesthat would do the same kind of job. that way, you have an extra $600 that arein your reserves. if you budget for $1,000 but it only costsyou 400 for the supplies, that $600 savings rolls over to the following year. then as you expand your business and you takeon more accounts, instead of going for the $400, you can still budget for the $1,000. but now you have an extra $600 that's insidethat reserve. that gives you a little bit of a window towork with as you hire new people and you buy more supplies.
what do you factor in for your business? my suggestion is factor in a little bit morethan you think you're going to need because sometimes the prices on things go up and sometimesyou're not available or it's not available for you to buy the cleaning solutions or detergentsthat you want and you might have to pay a little bit more in shipping to have them shippedin from somewhere else. so, save a little bit more money than youthink you might actually need, but budget in enough that you're able to get your jobdone. that would be my suggestion and i love thefact that you're trying to figure it out in advance so that you know how much money it'sgoing to cost you to be in business.
but the good news is this. you're not going to spend $1,000 upfront buyinga year's supply of cleaning supplies. that's just not wise. because let's say that in five months fromnow, you decide to get out of the business for reasons you don't know yet. it could be that something tragic happensin your family and your entire focus changes. so, you don't want to be stuck with a year'ssupply because you bought them on sale because you bought them in bulk. you want to buy a little bit as you go.
my suggestion is to start small, buy whatyou have today. as you have more money coming in, you canreplenish those supplies. but figure out and keep track of the suppliesthat you spend. when you do your taxes at the year-end, you'llhave a really good grasp on what all of those cleaning supplies cost you. this time next year, and this is a caveat,if everything stays the same, if you have the same number of clients, if you have thesame number of employees, everything stays the same, and there's no inflation, the cleaningsupplies should be about the same amount. they could also go out a little bit.
you can get new employees. you can get more houses. but you'll have a good figure on how muchthey cost for your area for the amount of customers that you're servicing. all right. that's my two cents for today. until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.