The question of the day yesterday was
What is the going rate for bidding a janitorial job of a school facility?
from someone who had checked out books on starting his own janitorial service. He had checked out these books but they didn't tell him the exact fee setting schedule and of course they weren't exactly up to date, and didn't go into depth about bidding for educational facility cleaning.
Start your own cleaning service
Cleaning up in the service buisiness
& on order :
How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Cleaning Service with CDROM
None of these books had the "going rate"....
The square foot cost... We have print copies of square foot costs for building construction, such as
Building Construction Cost Data
but nothing for cleaning.
I went in search of such an schedule using Special Issues.
I believe in dumb searches with Special Issues because I never know what the taxonomy is, like "supposed to be" so I just typed in "bidding" as the keyword.
And this isn't one for Business and Company Resource Center. This content is not indexed in there.
Bidding is the word the patron kept saying. Special Issues, although clunky* is looking for words that would be in a well established industrial magazine title. These mags all have their own neat jargon words you can't be expected to predict. SI is better than google when this is the case. Google is next to useless when you don't already know the source you are looking for. Google is a way for hungry new websites to advertise. But the best content -- a time tested well established industrial business magazine isn't always trying to advertise that. Special Issues has its own subjects -- once you are in a magazine entry, on the right hand side.
* clunky because if you click the back arrow in Special Issues, because of the way our pc's are set up, they don't check the site every time it is visited, therefore you will a gobblydgook page and have to go back and back and redo the search--don't be scared just hit back back reload reload, you may even have to log back in...
The dumb search never produces the answer but lets me see into the results note the correct subject to click through to the good list. Searching "bidding" found all kinds of contract industries' trade mags, and we scanned until we came up with a janitorial-ly looking one, and clicked it. Typing "cleaning" would have worked too!
The magazine was called ICS Cleaning (devoted to surface cleaning like carpets and floors so although it wasn't his kind of cleaning at least it was cleaning) Well, on the right hand side of the page for ICS Cleaning were the SI subject heading links, one of which was "Maintenance and Cleaning" which I clicked through on. 36 results came up. The first one was American School and University Magazine. I went in to that and was thrilled to see the following
April
Annual Maintenance & Operations Cost Study for Schools (1971)
This means that since 1971 this magazine has published the annual figures on M&O costs. Highlights include
- The median school district spends $94,000/yr. for custodial/maintenance equipment and supplies.
- The mean public school district has 39 full-time custodial, 15 full-time maintenance and six full-time grounds personnel.
- The median amount of square feet maintained per custodian remained fairly constant at 25,173 from 25,444 square feet last year. Square feet maintained per maintenance worker, however, jumped to 100,720 from 87,931 square feet last year. Acres maintained per grounds worker dropped slightly to 40 from 41 last year.
The Governor Kulongoski may like to get a link to this magazine too, since his new Oregon State budget boosts schools:
Construction Guide (strategies and concepts to ensure successful education construction projects)Top 100 School Districts and Colleges Facilities (ranked by size of facilities)
Annual Official Education Construction Report (1974)
content:
TABLE 2
--------------Nat'l Median ----<1,000----1,000-3,499------->3,500 students
Total Payroll ----$2.08 ---------$1.71 --------$2.14------------ $2.37
Custodial** ----$1.47 -----------$1.13 --------$1.47------------ $1.71
etc
The National Median can be adjusted with the ACCRA cost of living index upping for Portland to by 14% as Portland is listed (in Oct 2008 end of 4th quarter) as being 114% the national average Cost of Living.
It would be sad to see a public library tell people to just use the web. This is a micro business on a shoestring budget. I typed in janitorial bidding into google and I'm innundated with "buy our software for only $595 ... horrible websites with all caps shouting "buy this" buy this but no ANSWER, no "going rate" which is all the guy wanted. "Or at least a ball park figure" as he had said.
I hope if you ever can't find someone's industrial or business related question, remember I have a knack for this and I am happy to help!
Jill
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