Why copying someone else's rate fails
A rate you copied carries someone else’s truck payment, someone else’s fuel cost, someone else’s drive times and someone else’s market. It might be double what you need or half. Either way you cannot tell, which is the actual problem: you have no way to know whether a busy month made money.
The method below takes about twenty minutes with a notebook and gives you a floor you can defend, a target you can aim at, and a way to answer “can you do it for $200?” with something better than a feeling.
Your cost per working hour
Add up a month, then divide by the hours you actually bill — not the hours you work. Most solo operators bill far fewer hours than they think, because driving, quoting, invoicing and maintenance are all unbilled.
| Line | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Equipment | Machine, surface cleaner, hoses, tips, replacement over its real life |
| Vehicle | Payment or depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance, tyres |
| Chemical | Hypochlorite, surfactant, degreaser, per job then per month |
| Insurance | General liability, and care-custody-control if you carry it |
| Overhead | Phone, software, accounting, licences, storage, marketing |
| You | What you intend to earn. Put a number here or the business will not. |
Say the monthly total is $6,000 and you genuinely bill 70 hours. Your cost per billed hour is roughly $86. That is your floor — before profit, before a bad-weather week, before the pump that fails in July.
Billed hours are the number people get wrong
Turning an hour into a square foot
Customers do not buy hours, they buy driveways. Convert with your own production rate: how much of a surface you genuinely clean in an hour, measured, not guessed.
A 20-inch surface cleaner at 4 GPM covers roughly 2,000–2,500 square feet of open concrete an hour once you count edging and the post-treat. At $86 an hour plus profit — say $120 — that is about $0.05 to $0.06 per square foot of machine time. The gap between that and the $0.20–$0.40 people actually charge is mobilisation, chemical, risk and the fact that nobody sells only open concrete.
Do the same arithmetic for siding and you will find soft washing is far slower per square foot, which is why its band is higher despite using less pressure and less machine.
Sanity-checking against the market
Now compare. If your maths says $0.55 for concrete and the market bands sit at $0.20–$0.40, one of three things is true: your production rate is too low, your overhead is too high for your volume, or you are in a market that will not bear your cost structure. All three are useful to know, and none of them are fixed by quoting below cost.
If your maths says $0.12, you are underpricing and probably tired. Raise it before you add customers — scaling an unprofitable rate just loses money faster.
PSI & nozzle quick reference
- 0 degRed
- Spot jet. Etches most surfaces.4000 PSI
- 15 degYellow
- Stripping bare concrete.4000 PSI
- 25 degGreen
- General concrete and walkways.3500 PSI
- 40 degWhite
- Siding, wood, vehicles.1500 PSI
- ~65 degBlack
- Detergent draw, low pressure.500 PSI
Raising your prices
Raise on new quotes first, not on the book. Take the new number to the next ten estimates and watch the close rate. If you win eight out of ten you were too cheap and should go further; five or six is roughly right for exterior cleaning; two means you moved too far or your presentation is not carrying the number.
- Change what you sell, not just what you charge. A written method statement and a certificate of insurance justify a higher number on their own.
- Give existing customers notice. One season’s warning turns a price rise into a courtesy.
- Never discount the rate. Reduce the scope instead — drop the walk, drop the post-treat — so the rate itself stays intact.
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