Today, we’re talking with Ciarra Lynn the owner of Team Clean Pittsburgh.

It can be a difficult conversation when it comes to wages. Where do you even begin? There is no one right way, but there is a process I like to follow. It is something I share with Ciarra on today’s podcast and it’ll give you a CLEAR road on what you should do with your employees.

You might be wondering if you should pay hourly or per the job? I almost always will lean towards the side of paying your cleaners an hourly rate. In addition, I ALWAYS pay for their travel. After all, they didn’t sign up to be your employee to drive for free all around town cleaning buildings. Pay for that time that they’re choosing to work for you rather than spend more time with their families.

Resource Alert: How Much Should You Pay Your Commercial Cleaning Staff? https://oldsite.growmycleaningcompany.comcommercial-cleaning-staff/

Hourly + travel is our basic framework here. For travel, the best way is going to be paying for mileage.

By far the EASIEST way for you to pay for mileage is just to install a GPS tracker system that will tell you how many miles they traveled for the job. It is easy to install, cheap and usually very accurate.

Okay, so what is the actual hourly wage we need to pay our cleaners?

This is where we need to get some data on our industry. Particularly data that relates to our specific geography we’re working in. People in Pittsburgh get paid differently than people in Nebraska for example. We can buy a report that will allow us to see what the average hourly wage is for our specific industry. Once we have that data, we want to print it out and show it to our employees and pay 10% more than the average.

Resource Alert: How to Close More Commercial Cleaning Contracts https://oldsite.growmycleaningcompany.comcommercial-cleaning-job-bidding/

We want our employees to see that just by working for us, they are already getting a better deal than if they went to work for a different cleaning company.

It is best to pay a cleaner starting out a minimum wage. The minimum wage rate will only last for their training period. Typically, I like this training period to be 30 days. Within that 30 day period they will have cleaned several jobs, they will have had their work checked, checked others works and ideally trained another cleaner before exiting out of that training period.

It is only after the successful completion of the training period that they will get that 10% above average industry worker wages.

Finally, don’t fall into the trap of paying people for seniority. Instead, pay for performance. Also, try not to go above paying 25% more than average industry wages. Reserve that top tier for your best performers. Keep that rule and it is unlikely you will ever overpay your employees too much.

Alright, let’s dive into the Lightning Round!