Wheelie Bin Cleaning
Now here’s a really neat little business idea. Some councils already provide wheelie bins for your rubbish and some don’t. I think as I write this Birmingham Council have just introduced this scheme recently.
There are a couple of companies already running a wheelie bin cleaning service but as I see it the market is still wide open for anyone who is willing to put that initial effort in and it really does work.
A friend of mine set up a business like this in the Leicestershire area a few years back and he was raking it in. He ran it successfully for around a year and a half and then sold it on as an on-going concern.
Profit Analysis
Let’s take a look at how this could potentially work out.
Your initial expense would be the equipment which involves a vehicle and a suitable jet wash. This is something you can purchase outright or hire on a monthly basis. Once you have the tools in place you are ready to roll.
If we take an average street with around 200 houses that’s 200 bins. The average time to grab a bin, clean it and put it back should be about ten minutes and once you get the hang of it probably five minutes. This takes into account the easy bins which are lined up and take only minutes to clean to the ones that are hidden and involve some detective work to find.
A very conservative charge would be £3.00 a month to clean the bins once a month. They shouldn’t need cleaning more than this as they mainly hold bin bags. And to most people £3.00 a month is no great expenditure to have a nice, clean and fresh smelling bin.
Seeing as most households will have at least two bins (one for recycling) this could actually work out to £6.00 per household.
Assuming you clean ten bins an hour working 7 hours that’s £210 a day. Once established you should have a different street lined up every day and even just working five days a week this amounts to £1050 a week. Times this by the average number of weeks in a year (4.333) and you have £4550 a month! Not bad going.
Even after taking off the equipment cost and maybe paying a helper this still leaves a tidy income. Going forward if you decide you want to put your feet up there is nothing stopping you from setting up a second and third cleaning van and just paying someone else to do the work. If you paid an employee £8.00 an hour that still leaves you with over £3300 per month.
If your costs worked out high say £2000 every month you still have £1100 left. Times this by the three operations you have running and you get £3300 every month by just supervising the whole setup.
As with everything else this requires some initial effort and by all means do your own calculations as I have only used examples above. You may want to charge £4.00 or £5.00 a bin or decide to pay an employee £7.00 instead of £8.00.
A Final Point
The good thing with something like this is word of mouth and ‘keeping up with the Jones’ is a sure fire way of getting more customers.
Bins need cleaning just like hair needs cutting and not many of us attempt our own haircuts do we!
