How to write an estimate for a professional organizing job

A good estimate does two jobs. It tells the client what will happen and what it will cost, and it tells you how many people you need and for how long. Build it from the work itself, zone by zone, and both jobs get easier.

Break the job into zones

At the consultation, walk the space with the client and name each zone: the pantry, the upper kitchen cabinets, the hall closet, the garage wall with the bikes. A zone is a piece of work you could finish and photograph on its own.

For each zone, note three things:

• How full it is, in your own shorthand
• How many decisions it will need from the client
• How much is likely to leave, since purging and hauling take time

Zones make the estimate easy to read, and they make the job easy to change. If the client wants to start smaller, you take zones off rather than recalculating the whole thing.

Turn zones into crew hours

For each zone, estimate the hours it takes one person. Your own past jobs are the best guide, which is a good reason to record how long each zone actually took. Then add the time around the work:

• Setup and staging at the start of each day
• Breaks, if you bill for the whole visit
• Clean-up and the walk-through at the end
• Drop-offs and returns, if they are yours to do

Crew hours, not days, are the unit. Two organizers for four hours and one organizer for eight hours are the same eight crew hours, and the client can choose which suits their schedule.

A worked example

The numbers below are an example to show the arithmetic, not a suggested rate. Use your own.

Zone	Crew hours
Pantry	3
Upper and lower kitchen cabinets	4
Kitchen drawers	1.5
Setup, clean-up and walk-through	1.5
Donation drop-off	1
Total	11 crew hours

At an example rate of $80 per crew hour, the labor is $880. Add a product allowance of, say, $250 for bins and drawer dividers, and the estimate is $1,130, with the product shown as its own line.

With two organizers, 11 crew hours is one long day or two shorter ones. Say which you are planning, so the client knows what to expect on the calendar.

Say what is and is not included

A clear estimate lists what happens to the things that leave, who buys the product, whether shopping time is billed, and what happens if the job runs over. Running over is the question clients worry about most, so answer it: whether you will check in before going past the estimate, and how extra hours are charged.

Send it the same day

The best time to send an estimate is while the client is still thinking about the consultation. If you can, write it before you leave the driveway. A clear estimate that arrives that afternoon often turns into a booked job the same week; one that arrives next Thursday has to compete with everything else on the client’s mind.

Keep the estimate with the job

When the estimate is accepted, it becomes the plan for the job: the zones, the crew hours and the product list. Keeping them together means the crew knows what was promised, and at the end you can compare the estimate with the hours the job really took. That comparison is what makes your next estimate more accurate.