Originally posted by Juthunter28
for your tank to be cleaned. Im opening up a aquarium cleaning business for the summer and need some rough estimates on how much you would pay. Please include specs of tanks and stuff and say how much you would pay for it to be cleaned, filters changed, salt added, water changed, algae scraped, everything. Thanks, Justin
You'll probably have a difficult time getting the average person to pay for tank maintanence. Most people that keep saltwater tanks have a pretty good idea of what their doing.
To do a maintenance biz, your bread and butter are going to be business and the very wealthy. Where I live there are hundreds, if not thousands of 1 to 20 million dollar homes, I'm sure lots have tanks that need to have upkeep and those folks are not going to do it.
That being said, I would scope out resturants that have tanks and see if they need maintenance, as well as Doctors offices (seems to be a common thing in Dentist offices). Also, most fish stores are going to offer service to their customers, so your going to have to compete with the people that your potential customers bought their tank/fish from.
I would try to see if you can align yourself with a LFS and offer to be their contract service tech or take over their service accounts. Tell them if they refer you to customers, you will give them a percentage of your billable time and purchase all supplies needed for maintenace from that store.
The going rate around here, from what I understand is about 50 bucks per hour for maintenance, and your lucky to get 2 hours on a large 125+ gallon tank, so you'll need a lot of accounts and you'll have to schedule them right so you can fit in 2 or 3 per day (depending on how much money you want to make).
Not trying to discourage you, but I think your up for a challenge.