Do you ever do this?

You show up to an empty job and its an easy clean....you know right away its just going to be a sweet job...and then, you realized you need to really slow down and kill some time so the owner will not freak and feel like you just blew through it?....I did this a few days ago and from time to time get one like that....even though I took my time and told him it would be about an hour......he still questioned me....I asked how the carpets look and he said...well, true!

I mean its empty, We have good equipment and solutions etc....and we need to slow down. I puposely took a call to help me slow the time only for the sake of the custy

I generally take the opportunity to turn "CSI" on jobs like that. You know, a burn test, ph test, the old golf eyeball the slope kind of thing. It kills another 20 minutes and looks like you are some kind of chemist......they also will not see another cleaner do that and that impresses.

Yes, I do......... same with most jobs, I'm not in a hurry and want to make it a good show in addition to the best cleaning/service they've ever had, also.

I certainly wont leave a job until im happy, any longer is just to make them happy.

Yeah it happened to me last week.  so I cleaned a runner for her to eat up some time. But usually it's the other way around it takes me longer than it should.

as long as you appear like a real business and not just some guy cleaning carpets.. hand them business cards with other material, like brochures explaining what you did there, they see the expensive equipment, and all your appearance is solid across the board then they understand.

people pay big money to bigger companies and dont blink an eye all the time, if you show up in jeans and a t shirt with nothing but maybe a business card then they might question the 250$ bill for a little over an hr of work

^Good point^

A lot of people pay much more for a lot of home services than we usually charge.
Some look at us like professionals, like the rest of their service people, and some don't. I try to avoid those ones that don't, usually renters in a lot of cases.

whats funny is renters usually have a $250 carpet cleaning deposit on even a small 2/3bdrm house

but they still want the craigslist 95$ guy so they can keep the extra,    then they loose the whole deposit because the job sucks


I was doing rentals for a pm company a long while back,     really small 1bd ground floor units and was charging 165

then I found out they all had 250 deposit,   so I upped the price and they found another company lol

Most PM's I've worked for kept the whole deposit...period, didn't matter who cleaned or how well.

It was normally the PM who would hire me to clean the unit, but at the cheapest prices possible in order to hold onto the rest of the deposit for themselves.