Defining
our service
Please read this before you hire our service.
We
are Personal Assistants. Although we aren’t cleaners, landscapers,
painters or professional organizers, we’d love to assist you with your
cleaning, landscaping, painting and organizing projects (and more, too). We rely
on our clients to be present, taking charge, answering questions, and providing
us with everything that we need to complete their tasks. Once a client isn’t
available to maintain this role, our service becomes useless. Please remember
that we are your Assistants and that we are helping you.
Many
of our long-term clients use us frequently enough to be able to delegate tasks
to an Assistant and remain more ‘hands-off’. We will welcome this dynamic as
long as you give us the ongoing tools, lists and other information required to
perform these tasks as your Assistant.
Sometimes
preparing for a task with your Assistant will require finding tools or other
supplies that you don’t have on-hand. We will gladly purchase or rent what you
need, per your instructions, to complete your tasks. Remember that we charge for
all of the time spent running errands for you and we will bill you the exact
amount for any purchases that we make when needing to use our own funding.
Anything that we purchase for your task will belong to you, so even if we
don’t use all of it (such as in cleaning products), you will be charged for
the full purchase and we will leave the remainder of the product with you.
Our
free consultations are intended to give our prospective clients a chance to meet
an Assistant and understand our service better. During this meeting, please do
not ask us to give an estimate. We do not give estimates. As your Assistants,
we expect for you to take complete control over your project. We rely on you to
plan appropriately for the project and proactively control how much time your
Assistants spend on a task. We charge by the hour, so you can easily control how
much money you spend.
Our
rates are: $40.00 / Assistant / Hour, or: A block of three hours is $100.00.
Additional time in excess of three hours is $33.33 / Assistant / hour (the three
hours must be used during the same visit, regardless of if a project has been
completed, to be eligible for the price break).
Our
Assistants are welcome to use the Whatever You Need! pickup truck for your
projects at an additional rate of $25.00 / hour, plus the exact cost of gasoline
used. Please remember to request the pickup when you call to schedule an
Assistant. Whatever You Need vehicles may not be operated by anyone other than
our Assistants at any time. Clients are welcome to request that an Assistant run
short errands or give local rides in their car at no additional cost, but for
errands or rides that exceed one hour of actual driving time, we ask that the
client reimburse the Assistant for the exact cost of fuel.
If
you request that an Assistant take a trip to the landfill for you, please be
aware of the following: Unless we can use your properly permitted vehicle, we
will need to use our pickup truck. We will bill you for the total amount of time
of our Assistants’ labor, the exact cost incurred at the landfill, and if our
vehicle was used, the fees explained above.
You
should know that a lack of preparation on your part will never create an
emergency for us. If you call us with less than 24 hours notice of the task that
you wish to be performed, and if we have the appropriate Assistants available,
you will be charged the full $40.00 / Assistant / hour, regardless of how much
time is used. This will also be true if you decide to add an additional
Assistant to an already scheduled visit within 24 hours.
When
scheduling time for an Assistant to visit, please be specific about the amount
of time that you will need them for. If you’re not sure how long a project
will take or if you can’t leave your project unfinished, be sure to let us
know. In cases where a client requests an Assistant for a specific time (i.e.
12:00pm-3:00pm), the Assistant will, most likely, not be able to stay later. If
you need an end time to be more open-ended, please let us know when you
initially schedule the Assistant.
Wouldn’t
you be mad if we simply didn’t show up? How would you feel if we called the
day before to tell you that we changed our mind and we don’t actually want to
work for you? You don’t want us to cancel on you, so please don’t cancel on
us. If you cancel within 48 hours of the start- time of your job or simply
aren’t available when you scheduled to work with an Assistant, we will still
send you a complete bill as though we actually did the work. We will expect you
to pay this bill in a timely fashion, just as you would want something from us
if we didn’t do what we agreed to do.
Please
do not pay your Assistant (except tips, of course). We will send you a bill in
the mail. We accept checks, money orders, and MasterCard / VISA over the phone.
If your bill is not paid within 30 days of it’s issue date, a late fee will be
assessed and applied to your account.
If you have any questions or would like to clarify any details, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Tips & Tricks
How to get the most out of our service:
! Expect to start early – Our Assistants usually arrive about 15 minutes prior to their scheduled start-time.