TrashCanBossPro Blog — Routes by Trash Day

Dense Subdivisions vs Spread-Out Customers: Route Density for Bin Cleaners

Two bin cleaning companies can each have 200 customers and very different businesses. One has them packed into a dozen subdivisions and cleans thirty cans before lunch. The other has them scattered across a county and spends half the day driving. Customer count gets the attention. Route density pays the bills.

What Density Means for a Trailer

When a city is split between rigs, as in Two Trailers, One City: Splitting Bin Cleaning Routes Between Rigs, each trailer's day is a mix of cleaning time and drive time. The cleaning time per can is roughly fixed. Wash, sanitize, set back, photo. What changes from route to route is the drive between stops.

In a dense subdivision, the next stop might be three houses down. The tech can almost walk the hose over. In a spread-out area, the next stop might be eight minutes away. Multiply that by twenty stops and the difference is most of a workday.

The Dense Subdivision Day

A route through a dense subdivision on its trash day is the best day in the business. All the cans were emptied that morning, they are all at the curb, and the trailer barely moves between them. A few things make these days even better:

• Keep all the stops in the subdivision together in the route order, even if auto-route split them
• Start right after the trash truck clears the neighborhood
• Send the night-before reminder so nobody wheels their cans in early
• Use the customer app's live stop count so neighbors see the trailer working down the street

That last point has a side effect: neighbors see the trailer. Dense routes market themselves.

The Spread-Out Customer

Spread-out customers are not bad customers. They are often loyal and happy to pay. The problem is the drive. A customer twenty minutes from your nearest route costs you forty minutes round trip for one stop.

There are a few ways to make them work:

• Group them by trash day. Rural and edge-of-town customers may share a trash day with each other. Put them all on one route day and run a loop.
• Steer them to a longer plan. A monthly plan (28 days) means one trip a month instead of four.
• Price for the drive. Many bin cleaners charge a little more outside their core area. A customer paying $35 a month for two cans in town might pay more out in the county. Set your own prices; just make sure the drive is covered.
• Use them as seeds. One customer on a rural road can become five if you ask for referrals.

See Density on the Map

The Waiting List map shows every cleaning that came due as a pin. Turn it into a density check by looking at a full week. Where are the pins packed? Where are they alone? A neighborhood with ten pins inside a few blocks is a route. Three pins spread over five miles is a drive.

The Scheduled List shows each day's stops by trailer. Compare a dense day and a spread-out day with the same number of stops. The finish time tells you everything. Crew GPS on the office map during the day shows the same thing in motion: one trailer moving a few houses at a time, the other crossing town.

Choosing Where to Grow

When you spend money on marketing, door hangers or yard signs, spend it where you already have density. Adding a customer to a street you already clean costs almost nothing in drive time. Adding a customer ten miles from anyone else adds a whole new drive.

This is the core of growing a profitable route. A neighborhood on the edge of being worth it, with four or five customers, is the best place to push for more. Once it has ten, it carries its own weight. Growing a Neighborhood Until the Bin Cleaning Route Pays covers how to get there.

When to Say No

Sometimes the right answer to a far-away sign-up is a polite no, or a waiting list until you have enough neighbors to make the trip worth it. That is easier to say when you can see the map and know exactly how far out of the way the address sits. A sign-up that comes in through the website form lands in Form Responses before it becomes a client, giving you a moment to check the address against your routes before you say yes.

The Short Version

Cleaning time is fixed, drive time is not. Dense subdivisions on their trash day are your most profitable hours. Group spread-out customers by trash day, steer them toward longer plans and price for the drive, and spend your growth effort where you already have neighbors. For more routing tools, head back to the TrashCanBossPro bin cleaning route software page.