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Growing Your Business |
When it Comes to Municipal Sweeping, Knowledge is KeyBryan Szeremi, of Szeremi Sweeping Service, LLC, runs six broom sweepers and five air sweepers from his location near Sacramento, CA. Although he has operated his own company for only five years, prior to that Szeremi was involved with a sweeping company that ran 15 machines.by Bryan Szeremi with Ranger Kidwell-Ross
To any new guy, I'd say do your homework and then keep doing it. First, decide what kind of sweeping you want to do, then figure out how much your overall costs will be and what you want to make. Even then, it's very important to keep doing your homework at all levels, from machine maintenance to researching insurance to going somewhere like WorldSweeper.com to keep learning. First, figure your base cost and equipment cost: how long will your gutter brooms and main brooms last in the proposed application? Ideally, you will want to know your maintenance cost/hour for all costs associated with your sweeper under any given application, whether street sweeping, construction sweeping or milling. Usually this will be in the area of $80 - $95/hour for a broom machine. Over time, I've seen some competitor bids coming in as low as $60/hour. What happens is these companies don't make any money and can't buy new equipment, backup sweepers, or even keep what they have in good repair. In our area, educated contractor sweeping bids are typically in the area of $115 to $135 an hour. There is less money available for municipal sweeping. You have to also keep in mind that some of your cost info may change with each contract you bid on. For example, some contracts call for using union workers. Besides potentially changing your hourly operator cost, this can pose other problems if your workforce isn't already unionized. Where we are, many general contractors require that their subcontractors use union workers. Similarly, some contracts will call for payment of prevailing wages, while others won't. In our area, the cost of prevailing wage jobs runs about $10 an hour higher than the non-prevailing ones. Historically, most municipal jobs in this part of Northern California had been prevailing wage contracts. However, more recently the regular maintenance street sweeping bids appear to be coming out as non-prevailing wage contracts. Other bids are requiring that we bid both ways. Once you know your costs, you can move on to estimating your cost of sweeping a particular contract. In my experience, the bid process is a matter of translating what we know we need to get per hour of sweeper operation into whatever format that's called for, whether it's center-line mile, curb mile or whatever."
Editor's Note: Be sure you recognize whether the bid calls for:
"For example, let's take a contract calling for sweeping 2,000 curb miles. If we figure we need to get $120/hour to cover our costs and have a normal profit margin, and we estimate we can sweep at an average speed of five miles an hour, our bid will be $24/curb mile, or $48,000. Before I started this company, I did a survey to figure out what was important to the people I expected to become my customer base. The top answers were they wanted their sweeper to be ontime, reliable and available whenever needed. Interestingly, lowest possible price wasn't ever one of the top answers. Especially with milling companies, what they want is a highly reliable piece of equipment that will show up on time and do the job. Whether or not you have a shiny new sweeper isn't as important as whether or not it can keep up with the task at hand. Milling companies, especially, don't mind paying more if they can count on the service, in which case you can make more and have the money you need to keep your equipment in top shape. My advice is to develop relationships with other local sweeping companies so that you can handle any work needed. In my experience, if you help customers get what they need whenever they call, whether you can do it yourself or not, they'll make you the first call they make the next time they need a sweeper. When we can't handle a job, we call around to our competitors until we get them what they need. The other factor with road sweeping jobs, especially with milling work, is that you must have a backup sweeper(s) ready to take over when, not if, your primary sweeper breaks. When you are doing maintenance road sweeping for municipalities you may have the luxury of not adhering strictly to the planned schedule. That's never the case with milling. In our company we maintain a rotating maintenance schedule such that we always have a sweeper or two on hand to fill in when there's a breakdown. Unless you can do that you won't get and keep a good reputation with your customers. In our area there are also some local laws regulating sweeping equipment. For example, all diesel engines have to be compliant with the rules of our local air quality district, and our auxiliary engines now have to be registered with that agency at a cost of several hundred dollars per year even when the engine specs are compliant. If an auxiliary engine doesn't comply, it may have to be replaced. Under today's new air quality regulations in our area, if you didn't know that fact when you bought your sweeper it can be an expensive mistake. You may reach Bryan Szeremi via email sent to szeremisweepin@msn.com. Ranger Kidwell-Ross is editor of WorldSweeper.com. You may reach him via the contact form on this website. |
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Parking Area Sweeping Contents
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The most important factors to know going in to any street sweeping bid are your overall overhead costs and costs per hour of sweeper operation. This has to include everything, from your office expenses to your employees to average cost for sweeper maintenance and the eventual replacement of your fleet.
Once we have a number for our overall costs, possibly including higher than normal maintenance costs for that particular type of sweeping, we then have to figure out how many miles we can do per hour. In other words, we have to come up with the average speed we think the operator will be able to run the sweeper during the job.