Important news. June 25 - Pricing and Staffing
In brief: we'd like to provide an excellent service to our clients which means reliability and quality. In order to achieve that we've had to pay our staff significantly more than the typical minimum wages and that will have an impact on pricing to our clients from June 25 onwards ( unless they are already on the new pricing introduced in April 25).
Quality jobs
At Cosy our values are professionalism, reliability, quality and friendliness and in order to achieve these, particularly the reliability and quality parts, we clearly need to have good staff. Of course every business says the most important asset is their staff, however in the cleaning Business it's common to pay minimum wage or very close to minimum wage. Minimum wage is currently £12.21 per hour and the so-called living wage is £12.61 per hour.
Staffing and recruitment - Daventry and minimum wage
As we live in the Daventry area we made a decision to try and recruit in Daventry. However we found that the quality of staff and the ability to recruit is very poor and very difficult. We find that many people seem to be relatively happy with the benefit lifestyle and as a result are not really keen on undertaking any amount of quality work that we could rely on. It's common to find people that only want to work 16 or 20 hours, due to benefit thresholds. Whilst we can happily work with these lower hours, the problem is the motivation of the worker and the quality of the work they provide.
As a result it's been hard for us to provide the reliability, continuity and quality of service that we want to provide to our clients. So, a couple of months ago we decided to address this issue.
We decided essentially not to recruit in Daventry and looked further a field into the major towns of Rugby, Northampton and Banbury. In addition and perhaps more importantly we decided to pay a standard wage of £16 pounds per hour for a cleaner and up to £17 pounds per hour for a senior cleaner.
We also decided to make most of our staff employees and therefore they are entitled to benefits such as pension, holidays and we pay employee and employers NI.
True cost of aa employee with NI, pension, holidays, training
Please bear in mind that the true cost to an employer is significantly above this rate. On top of the hourly rate we have to add:
Holidays accrued at 12 percent - given that we provide 20 days holiday for a full-time employee on top of public holidays.
Hence for a full-time cleaner being paid £16 pounds an hour the true cost to us is very close to £20 pounds per hour. So, please don't expect to obtain a service for £15 per hour,
New prices / rates
Given this, and the fact that we need to make a profit, our prices will rise for new customers and for existing. Our base rate for new customers, since April 25, has been £22 pounds an hour which. This rate assumes a minimum of three hours per regular weekly clean with automatic payments. Automatic payments just means there is no need for us to manually raise invoices and the process is very efficient both for ourselves and yourselves. The invoice and payment is triggered automatically when a job is finished.
Rates for bi-weekly or monthly, ad hoc or work or deep cleans will be at rates of £23 and £25 per hour respectively.
For existing customers, a pay rise will be introduced from August. It’s also pretty normal to apply an annual uplift as costs in general go up - inflation and the increases in minimum wage and NI are all contributing factors to this overdue price rise.
Additional services
However, our base rate of £22 pounds an hour will allow us to operate at only a very small profit. Therefore we will soon be offering additional higher value services such as oven cleans and carpet cleans and ultimately to undertake all work inside and outside the house including things like windows, gutters, patios, gardening and car detailing.
Providing arrange a wide range of services to our clients will hopefully allow once to continue to make a profit and grow as a business. We believe this approach is necessary to enable us to build the resilience in the business and to provide you with ongoing reliability and quality service.
We hope this makes sense and you understand our reason for a price rise.
There are also two related emails below on our expanded services, and new holiday policies, these are mentioned briefly below.
Julian & Anna
Our expended services include everything inside the house which beyond standard cleaning includes deep cleans, oven cleans, fridge cleans, carpet cleans & window cleans. We will also do outside the house including window cleans gutters and walls as well as patios and drives. In addition we have also introduced gardening services (www.cosygardeners.co.uk) and car detailing services (new website coming soon). This will allow us to provide care on everything inside and outside your house.
As a result of reviewing our prices and as we are coming into the summer season we have also revised our holiday and cancellation policies. We will send an email out on the shortly but in the meantime please review this blog article explaining our holiday cancellation policy.
