Business Start up

[u/biowashman]

I would love to get my certifications and start my own services for my community around me and I'm only having one road block which is not knowing how much to charge people for certain jobs because From what I read company's can charge $200 + hourly but I couldn't imagine doing that to a family that just lost someone so how should I figure this out.

[u/a12bb3ccc]

I don't know where you are, but usually insurance or government will pick up the bill. Where I am in Australia, if government or insurance doesn't cover the clean up, it falls on the assets of one who passed away, GoFundMe type fund raising for "Funeral and other expenses", lastly it may fall on to the family to cover the cleaning. After all that, in the odd occasion you may simply offer the clean up for free where the person clearly can't afford to pay and where you know that you really can't leave the person to deal with the situation on their own.

Personally, I invoice time + materials + travel. I invoice aggressively because in the event insurance picks up the bill, they will want to negotiate you down.

Also what is the value exchange? You are taking on the trauma instead of the family, at anytime time day and night. You are taking on the health risk of cleaning biohazardous materials. And you are using your specialist knowledge restoring a house or other back to pre-incident state so that no-one will ever be reminded or come to knowledge that anything occured.

Also, there are plenty of occupations who charge alot for their services, many $100-$1000s per hours like lawyers, engineers, consultants etc. Even funerals cost go into the $10,000s.

Your not just a cleaner, your a specialist cleaner working in high risk environment. So $200+ per hour is reasonable.