Twenty-five houses in a day on a tight estate. About twelve where the houses are bigger and set further back. Same cleaner, same hours, same pole, same weather.
That gap is why it pays to plan a window cleaning round on purpose instead of letting it assemble itself. It works fine for a while. Then the driving starts eating the day and you cannot see where it went.
Plan a window cleaning round on what a day actually holds
The trade figures are consistent enough to plan against. On a compact round of average 3-bed semis, 20 to 25 houses a day is normal for one person on a water-fed pole. The full range quoted runs from 8 to 30-odd, and a supplier's own guidance sits in the middle of that spread at 15 to 20. The pole is not the variable. The map is.
The 40 minutes you never see going
One cleaner put a number on it. On a spread-out round, the driving, setting up and chatting at the door cost him roughly 40 extra minutes a day against a compact estate. Not a disaster on any one day. Over a year it is weeks.
Two rules of thumb follow, both repeated independently. A new customer three streets from an existing one is worth about twice one who adds 15 minutes to the drive. And a £10 house next door beats a £15 house fifteen minutes away. That one offends people. It is still true, because a round is not priced in pounds per house. It is priced in minutes.
Put the access-sensitive jobs first thing: locked gates, dogs in the garden, the customer who leaves for work at half eight. Do them before the day drifts, because by two o'clock they are a wasted visit, and a wasted visit costs you the drive twice.
How long is a cleaning day, really
Density also decides how much of the day is cleaning. Forum advice clusters on 4 to 6 hours, and the rule most often given is to plan on five or six, so weather and van trouble get absorbed instead of pushing work into next week. Above that the trade is split: some say an 8-hour cleaning day is not realistic, others say they do it.
Pulling a scattered round back in
A spread round comes back in three ways, none of them quick.
- Replace outlying, under-priced work with well-priced regular work nearer home, one job at a time as you win better ones.
- Use the annual price rise deliberately. One cleaner took his far-flung jobs from about £11 to £22 in one go, expecting most of them to say no. Them saying no was the outcome he wanted. Attrition after a big rise gets reported at around 7% of jobs, with turnover still up on the year.
- Canvass to fill the gaps rather than taking whatever comes. After winning a job, leaflet the 20 nearest houses: five either side, ten opposite.
If you are shedding outliers on price, give them the choice:
Just to let you know the price is going up to £22 from the next clean. You're a fair way outside my normal patch and I've had to price the travel in properly this time. If that doesn't suit, no hard feelings at all, just let me know.
The fixed day round, and what it costs you
A fixed day round means Baddow Road is done every fourth Monday, come what may. Whole streets go together, and the customer knows their day.
What fixed days buy you
Your route is written before you get in the van. Best of all, a wash-out explains itself. If a customer knows they are a Monday, they expect you back the following Monday and you do not need to send anything. Both models lose the same week to rain. The difference is that on fixed days nobody has to be told, which is quietly the strongest argument for them. Worth reading alongside what actually happens after a rained-off week.
Laying the week out on paper
Here is one cleaner's system, his and not gospel. What travels is the method, not the amounts. His £100 a day is the unit he lays a week out in, not a day's takings, and it sits well under the £150 to £250 a day quoted in the numbers a one-person round runs on. Put your own day rate in the divisor.
| Area | Worth per month | Days at £100 a day |
|---|---|---|
| Main town | £600 | 6 |
| Second area | £400 | 4 |
| Third area | £200 | 2 |
Read the month in that table as one four-week cycle, the way the round runs: twenty working days, Monday to Friday. The three areas take twelve of them. He keeps every Friday back for one-offs, mop-up and paperwork, which leaves about four days of slack a cycle for wash-outs, holidays and jobs that overrun.
What fixed days cost you
A customer who wants 8-weekly on a 4-weekly street breaks the pattern, and you get two choices, neither free. Carry them out of position, which puts you across town for one house. Or turn the work down.
The model only holds if you hold the slots. Every exception you wave through turns part of a fixed day round into a flexible one, without you deciding to switch.
Flexible means every customer runs from their own last clean
The other model runs each customer on their own rhythm. Four weeks from the last clean, whenever that was. Six for the ones on six.
It handles mixed frequencies without complaint, and customers do ask for all of 4-weekly, 6-weekly, 8-weekly and monthly. Which ones to offer is a separate decision, covered in what each frequency is actually worth.
Sliding a week is not sliding a cycle
Flexible takes the same lost week differently. Everybody slides seven days, nobody is out of position, because there was no position.
One slid week is not a new interval. The round goes out late and comes back in the same order: a 4-weekly customer gets done at five weeks once, then goes back on four. Sliding a cycle means the gap gets longer and stays longer, and that is where the models part. Fixed days give you a slot to come back to, and a slip leaves an obvious hole in it. Flexible has nothing to come back to, so a week lost in January and another in February quietly become the new interval unless you watch the dates.
Where flexible loses you money
What it costs you is density, and it costs it slowly. Once every customer floats, streets scatter across days: three houses on one road on Tuesday, two more on the same road on Thursday. Nothing broke. It just quietly got more expensive.
Which model your round is asking for
No verdict fits everybody, but there is a basis for choosing, and it is your map rather than your temperament. The question is whether you can fill a working day out of one street, one estate or one small area. Answer it off what you already have: count the customers in your biggest area and multiply by your average price, or count how many you get done in a day there.
Fixed days are the right answer when:
- You can fill a day, or most of one, from a single estate or a couple of streets.
- Most customers want the same interval, or the ones who do not can be grouped onto a day of their own.
- You want the wash-out to explain itself, and to be seen on the same street every cycle, because that is your canvassing.
Flexible is the right answer when:
- The work is spread and no area fills a day yet, which is most rounds in the first year or two.
- Customers are on a real mix of intervals and you will not turn that work away.
- The round is still changing shape month to month, so any day you fix now is wrong by spring.
If you cannot call it, run flexible and behave as though it were fixed: same streets on the same days as far as the dates allow.
What most cleaners land on
The compromise that keeps coming up is mixed frequencies overall, but one frequency per day or per area. Monday is a 4-weekly day. That estate is all 8-weekly. Within a day the route stays coherent, and you still get to say yes to the customer who only wants you every other month.
A few go further and cut the menu to two intervals instead of the four customers ask for, on the grounds that every extra interval on offer is one more way for a day's route to come apart.
How many jobs before it stops working
For one person, the repeated figure is 300 to 400 prime jobs across two or three areas inside about ten miles. Prime means the ones you would keep if you had to choose, properly priced and inside your patch. It is a ceiling experienced cleaners set for themselves, and they push back hard on beginners who want 400-plus.
One operator over 400 had quietly stretched to a five-week cycle, because he could not fit them in at four. Nobody decided that. It happened one late week at a time.
Customers on the books, cleans in the month
Two different things get called jobs. Customers sit on your books. Cleans are the visits you perform, and cleans are what pay you.
Say you want 200 cleans a month. Month here is the calendar month, twelve a year, not the four-week cycle the table ran on. So 200 x 12 = 2,400 cleans a year.
On a 4-weekly cycle each customer gives you 52 ÷ 4 = 13 cleans a year, so 2,400 ÷ 13 = about 185 customers.
On an 8-weekly cycle each customer gives you 52 ÷ 8 = 6.5 cleans a year, so 2,400 ÷ 6.5 = about 370 customers, up against the 300 to 400 one person can hold at all, where the 4-weekly version needs barely half as many names. The ceiling bites a long cycle long before a short one.
Same 200 cleans either way. Twice the customers, twice the addresses, twice the driving. So "how many customers should I have" is not answerable without "on what cycle".
A cycle that slips stays slipped
A slip from 4-weekly to 6-weekly is not slipped and forgiven. It retrains the customers. They start expecting six weeks, and when you pull them back to four you get "you're back too soon". Cycle adherence is worth watching more closely than customer count.
The plan is only worth what the round tells you
Whichever model you pick, it only holds if the round tells you the truth about where it has slipped to. That is hard on a sheet with a column per month, because a sheet can sort by postcode but it cannot tell you that the Kirkby lot are now on five weeks. RoundWiz does fixed days and flexible cycles both, keeps your streets grouped, and shows you what is actually due rather than what should have been. No per-customer fee either, so tightening the round never costs you more than letting it sprawl. It is £7.99 a month, nothing is charged for the first 30 days, and no card is needed to open an account. The features page covers the rest.