People frequently ask me how much money somebody can make in the carpet cleaning business. FTC regs prohibit a franchisor, or someone like myself offering a business opportunity package, from making annual earnings claims. So instead I sometimes point out what I've managed to gross in a week, or - in this case - in a single day.

Yesterday I achieved a personal best of just over $3400. My morning job (working alone, I might add) was a row of 3 small condo buildings in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. (small in the sense of 8 to 10 condo units per building). The job consisted of 1260 s.f. of hallways - on three floors, and six flights of stairs, or 104 stairs (these are buildings with high ceilings, hence the high average stair count) These are walk-up buildings (no elevator) so getting myself and my equipment up to the fairly small hallways on each floor involves a fair amount of stair-climbing. For this I was charging the property management company between .30 and .35 per sq. ft. of hallway. The per stair rate was $3. I started the job at 8AM, and finished at about 1:45, without any real break. Equipment for this job: my Challenger and my 6" stair tool. Invoice for this job: $753.
The second job of the day was my annual job at the national headquarters of OXFAM America, the famine relief agency. This started at 4PM, and I had one person working with me. He had his daughter (age 13) visiting him for part of the summer, so she came along too. She was assigned the job of keeping the 2-gallon containers of cleaning solution mixed and ready as the tanks of our machines ran out.

Normally the Oxfam job is to clean their extensive network of hallways, as well as their conference rooms, big lobby area, and lunch room. That job has been billed at .17 per sq. ft. (12,615 s.f. x .17/s.f. = $2144.55) This year the facility manager also wanted to have many of what they call "pods" (cluster of cubicles) cleaned, as well as the more heavily stained parts of other pods. There was really no way to accurately measure this add-on portion of the job, so we agreed that I would add 25% to the cost of the previous job (I had already agreed to do this year's job at last year's price) So this year's OXFAM job was $2144.55 x 1.25 = $2680.65.
Equipment for this job was one standard Challenger, one Orbitec CX-20, and one Cimex 24" machine. Since they wanted this work done with a bio-based cleaning product, I used Vacaway's Encap-Green. My helper for the evening and his daughter had to leave at 9PM, and I worked alone until 10:15. I usually pay Jim $20 per hour, with a minimum of $100 per job. And I paid the daughter $10 an hour for her efforts.

Total gross revenue for the day: $3433.65.
(less about $150 for labor)

I wouldn't want to work these hours every day, but every now and then? Just fine!

Good job Mark! But you forgot to add the fine print at the end of your post.
"Results not typical"

Outstanding!

between the CX20 and 24" Cimex:

which cleans better?

which cleans faster?

I would say that the results have been comparable, but that the Cimex has a bit of speed advantage. On jobs where a lot of soil has built up, I prefer the Orbitec, since I can lighten the encap "load" as well as get brighter results since I am removing actual soil with my cotton pads, or even with the semi-absorbent green-striped scrubber pad. If the job mainly entails scrubbing away spills, spots, and that kind of thing, I am more likely to go with the Cimex.