Wheelie Bin Cleaning

There seem to be more and more companies offering Wheelie Bin Cleaning franchises. This is a business I just don't get. Why would anyone pay to have their wheelie bin cleaned? Unless you are pouring rubbish into it without using bin liners, it doesn't really get very dirty, does it? Ours certainly doesn't. And I don't know anyone who pays to have their bin cleaned (although I suppose they wouldn't necessarily share this information with me unprompted).

But even if some people do pay to have their wheelie bin cleaned, I can't see how you can make any money out of it. I've just googled "wheelie bin cleaning" and got a bunch of companies wanting to sell me a franchise (and it is interesting that their primary aim seems to be to sell me a franchise, not to actually clean my bin. I'm always suspicious of any franchise company whose website is all about selling franchises, not actually selling the service being offered.)

Most seem to be saying that you can clean 150 bins a day, that's one every 3 minutes in an 8-hr day. That seems quite a lot, surely even the fanciest cleaning machine is going to take 30-60 seconds to actually do the cleaning leaving you 2 - 2.5 minutes to get to the next location. Possible, I suppose.

Those people that do pay for their bins to be cleaned apparently do so once every four weeks. So to get 150 bins a day over a four week cycle you need 3,000 customers (150 x 5 day week x 4 weeks). That's fully 3% of your allocated territory of around 100,000 households (that was the territory size in one franchise I was looking at). That's quite a high penetration: if, say, a quarter of households actually want to pay for a clean, plus there are, say, 4 other competing companies in your area, that leaves you expecting about 6% as a steady-state, well-established figure. So getting to 3% right away is going to be tough.

Or, to put it another way, you'd have to sign up 11 new customers every working day for a year to get to your 3,000. Is that doable? Seems unlikely, unless they are all coming over the internet or some other automated system. If you are having to go door-to-door to sign them up yuo wouldn't have any time to do the cleaning, would you?

I just doesn't seem to add up to me. I'm not at all saying these franchises are scams (at least one of them is a BFA member), I just can't see how it works.

Any wheelie bin franchisees reading this? Can you really do 150 bins a day? And can you economically sign up that many customers to provide that volume of bins?

Mike Watson, Guildford area franchisee also joins blogosphere

The 0800handyman family of bloggers has just increased by another 50% with the addition of Mike Watson (who runs our Guildford area franchise). His blog is here.

Epsom franchisee starts blogging too

I've been trying to persuade my colleagues to start blogging too, and Steve Williams, our franchisee for the Epsom/Sutton/Reigate area has started a blog. Here it is!