Floors are the most heavily trafficked surfaces in any building - after all, that’s the whole point. But for an area that sees so much use and serves as the solid foundation of a facility, floor care and maintenance often goes overlooked by building managers.

As a stripping and waxing service provider, your job is to show your client how beneficial and aesthetically superior a freshly finished floor can be to their business.

Like any good building service contractor (BSC) already knows, the first step in drafting a strip and wax floor proposal is to perform a thorough walkthrough that will give both you and your client a good scope of the work.

Let’s go through the complete process of taking the walkthrough, what to look for, and the tools you will need to write successful stripping and waxing quotes.

Stripping and waxing in the commercial space can have many benefits to your client. It attracts more customers to the storefront, it helps employees feel like they are working in a safe and clean environment, and it adds a polished and professional look to the owner’s business.

As a building service contractor, your job is to make sure your client’s floors are in tip top condition and can stand up to heavy use.

Strip And Wax Tips

When you meet your prospect at the location, get ready to start taking notes. During the walkthrough itself, you won’t need all your stripping and waxing supplies, but you’ll want a good way to keep track of details that you can reference later. We believe that the best way to do this is to ditch your clipboard and go digital. This is why we designed Route; we have found that using an innovative service platform for stripping and waxing walkthroughs is far superior to taking down hundreds of messy notes by hand.

With Route, you can capture the details of every room you enter with the app’s Walkthrough Builder™ tool. The Walkthrough Builder™ will automatically save and organize your notes as you continue the tour.

It also allows you to record the square footage of the room and take photographs directly within the app for reference. This can be extremely helpful for stripping and waxing services in particular, because you will be able to look at individual sections of the floor when you’re building your proposal later. It can be hard to remember what the floors looked like in different rooms if you don’t have a way to go back and see them.

Your organizational skills and attention to detail is what will set you apart from your competition, so using Route is a great way to elevate your business from the second you step into your client’s space. Plus, you’ll be amazed how simple and detailed your walkthroughs will become when you let the software handle your notes.

Some important things to look for as you do the walkthrough are:

-The square footage of the floor(s) that need stripping and waxing services

-How dirty or damaged the floors are currently

-The amount of time it takes you to tour the facility

-The number of times per year the client is expecting their floors to be stripped and waxed

Why are these things important to your stripping and waxing service proposal?

Square footage is important because the size of the commercial space will affect your price. Usually, the larger the space, the less you will charge per square foot. Basically, the bigger the client wants to go, the better deal they get. However, consider charging a minimum price. Strip and wax jobs are time consuming and require many supplies, so make sure you are covering your expenses before writing your final proposal.

The level of dirt or damage is important because this will affect how much time and manpower it will take you to do the job. There are numerous pieces of machinery used in stripping and waxing floors, and depending on how good or bad the floors are, you might need different supplies.

The time it takes you to tour the facility is indicative of how long it will take you to treat the floors. Although this won’t be a precise number, any idea of time is very useful when deciding how to bid on stripping and waxing floors.

The times per year the client wants their floors stripped and waxed will obviously change the final proposal as well.

Remember that this strip and wax checklist is only the beginning, and any question you see fit to ask is worth asking. The more information you can get, the more likely you are to land the bid.

After you’ve taken your walkthrough, it’s time for you to generate a proposal.

This once-daunting process has been greatly simplified thanks to modern advances in technology and design. Not only are there resources online that provide business insight to contractors, but the proposal process itself can be done in the palm of your hand if you’re using Route’s Proposal Generator.

Strip And Wax Proposal Generator

One of the most intuitive features that Route offers is the Proposal Generator.

This tool allows you to import all your walkthrough data, including notes and photos into a template. You can also generate your own from scratch.

You may customize your proposal by adding the client’s logo, your tasks, and your company’s legal verbiage, and with a single click, you can generate a complete service agreement and scope of work.

You can also add any additional notes, costs, or special areas of interest before saving your final proposal.

Getting the proposal to your client and team is easy. Simply save it as a .pdf within the app and send it out. Generating a personalized proposal for stripping and waxing floors has never been simpler and more efficient for client and contractor alike.

However, you still may want to know what all goes into calculating stripping and waxing service prices. Even with something as revolutionary as Route’s proposal generator, being able to figure costs manually is a highly valuable skill.

Strip And Wax Calculator & Cost Breakdown

Stripping and waxing services in the commercial space can be extremely profitable. If billed correctly, your profit margins could be at or over 50%.

While using a digital resource like Route is the best way to get an accurate strip and wax bid, it’s important to understand what goes into finding those numbers and how you can do it by hand.

This example is going to be very basic and will only outline how to calculate one formula. The rest of the information is supplemental and can be figured in your own time.

When determining how much to charge for stripping and waxing floors, you will first want to calculate the cost of your cleaning supplies. Let’s use stripping fluid as an example. Usually you can get about 1,000 square feet of flooring stripped per gallon of stripper.

Next, find out how much the stripper fluid costs per gallon and how many square feet need stripped. If there are 10,000 sq. feet of VCT (Vinyl Composite Tile), and the cost per gallon is $20.00, take 10,000 (the total square footage) divided by 1,000 (the square feet per gallon), which equals 10. You will need 10 gallons of stripper, which comes to $200.00 or two cents per square foot.

You’ll also need to calculate the cost of the finish in the same way, but remember that you can get about 2,000 square feet per gallon of finish. Don’t forget to factor in how many coats of finish you will need to do. A good industry standard is to estimate 5 coats of finish for every 10,000 square feet of VCT.

Next you’ll need to add in the cost of things like mops, pads, additional solvents, and extra supplies. This will have to be an estimation, so it’s wise to keep track of these things on every stripping and waxing service job you complete. This is where being able to pull up notes from past jobs or walkthroughs in your Route app is extremely useful.

And last but not least, don’t forget the cost of your labor. This will ultimately be what gets the job done.

That is quite a lot of detail and math to be doing by hand for every single proposal you write. While it’s perfectly fine to do it this way, think about the time and effort you could be saving by doing it digitally on Route. Not only would all the formulas be automatically generated for you, but Route’s provides projections through the Estimator that help prevent underbidding and will save you time and money on all your jobs.

Conclusion

Stripping and waxing floors in the commercial space is one of the most important bids a BSC can land. This service greatly improves routines floor care, and it makes the client’s facility truly shine in more ways than one.

This is a big job that requires attention to detail, a high level of professionalism, quality products, experienced laborers, as well as many different kinds of cost analyses.

It can be overwhelming to try and write a proposal for stripping and waxing services by hand because of how many components the job takes.

However, a good BSC knows that efficiency and accuracy are what set a gold standard in the cleaning business, so the best bids are going to be the ones that are thorough and organized.

If you’re going to write your proposal by hand, make sure you’ve carefully calculated all your costs and checked them before sending out your final bid. You need to account for all your cleaning supplies, the square footage of the facility, and your labor costs.

Consider upgrading your proposal process with a simple streamlined platform like Route that was designed to give you a smarter, better experience as a BSC.

Don’t forget to be proud of the work you do. Stripping and waxing is a huge job that can drastically alter the look and feel of your client’s space. The results are noticeable immediately and your good reputation depends on how well you do the job. Keep improving your process with tips like the ones in this article and see how far you can go in making the world a better, brighter place to walk.