When you're running a small skip hire business it is easy to get trapped by what pricing your competitors are offering and feel that you have to offer better pricing than them. Small businesses struggle understanding the value they offer the market compared with their competitors and get stuck delivering their bins to customers desires rather than optimising their schedule to what work can be completed efficiently.
The bad news is that you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to offer your customers the cheapest price on the market then you'll have to cut costs and optimise the work you complete so as to get as many bins into your schedule each day as is possible (deliveries and pickups).
Perhaps surprisingly for many, their are a number of cost cutting measures you can take to improve your bin turn over rate that don't require any further capital investment. One simple way is to reduce the distance from your depot (bin storage) you will travel. The affect of this simple change will increase the number of jobs you can service in a single day. SIGNIFICANTLY. Of course with this change you may need to reduce your standard hire so that you don't need to have more bins.
We've put together a skip bin hire pricing spreadsheet that you may find very useful to look at how some of the policies could be used to improve your bin turn over rates or to help you understand some of the costs associated with delivering your services.
It must be said that pricing your services can be done in many ways and some of the various costs can be allocated in different ways to how this has been done in the spreadsheet. One item of note is wages being counted as a cost of service delivery rather than an overhead.
Additionally if you are not sorting your waste the calculations may be simpler than those presented which actually include some calculation of the costs of hand sorting waste at the depot. Costs have not been included for any automated sorting but that could definitely be arranged.
The last factor that the spreadsheet calls attention to is the affect of stacking bins or even just the efficiency gained by completing a pickup with every delivery. Using automated route optimisation and skip bin hire management software to select bins to collect and make sure jobs are completed efficiently can result in driving 60% less kilometres per job.