Just wanted to share with you guys, after i do our last storefront tomorrow we will have broken, for the first time, $20,000 in a month. by how much you ask? $1
our second milestone is that before the next month starts nearly every hour of the month is full, i have about 7 hours left to fill but they are empty because they didn’t work for the last several customers who booked so they all booked in August. August is already 1/4-1/3 full.
Way to go man! Keep up the great work!
Jeez man. And a comment I read by you earlier said you started off with $50 of home depot supplies. That’s what up man. Awesome.
3.5 years from $50-20000
That is inspiring as hell man. So glad I found these forums. If there is any advice you would give to someone like me just starting out what would it be? I live in a medium sized city, approx 40k people, outside of a pretty major city (about a 30 minute drive). Going off of a google search, there are a few other window cleaning guys in the general area and a handful of pressure washer companies.
Next steps I’m going to take (I already bought what I need to get started): get business cards & yard signs, make a facebook page for my business, get decals made for my vehicle, get a few polos with my company name on it. And obviously continue coming here to read and learn.
I have ran a very small ebay business since high school (just buying stuff locally and selling on ebay for a profit) have over 400 sales. & I actually started door to door selling candy bars and making 50 cents a bar when I was in jr. high lol.
Congratulations!! This forum is awesome! Love to hear the success stories it makes me want to work harder!
Awesome success Ben! I know you and your partner have worked for it!
all good stuff, when i started i put out 4000 flyers/door hangers.
don’t be a jack of all trades, don’t offer window cleaning, and yard maintenance, and dog walking and fence painting etc… focus on being really good at your core service and add services that complement it such as screen repair (we did $200 in screen repair yesterday in an hour) or gutter cleaning in the off season.
don’t waste your time putting flyers on homes that can’t afford you, our business shifted for the better once i decided to never put a flyer on a house worth less than $300,000 again (worth $350,000 now)
when you get jobs, do a freaking good job and be professional but also personable/likeable. i can’t tell you how many customers we’ve gotten who used to use another guy who did a good job but they didn’t like his vibe.
after you’re done put a postcard on all the homes around the one you just finished that let people know you cleaned their neighbors windows. we do this from home using www.realmailers.com but do it yourself when you’re starting out. (only do this after you clean in a neighborhood you want more work in, you will get homes in neighborhoods you DON’T want more work in, don’t waste the cards there.
a few days to a week later text those people who you are SURE were happy with you and ask them for a review on google, facebook, yelp, nextdoor. give them the links. we have heard A LOT this year “how did you hear about us?” “we found you online and you had so many great reviews!” - we made over $2500 from one positive thread about us on nextdoor.
call your past customers, call them at 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, (after 2 years you’re as likely to get them to hire you as somone who’s never used you before) - i send reminder postcards in those intervals, today i addressed cards to people we cleaned for in Jan '18 Jul '17 Jan '17 and Jul '16 - some have suggested to send a postcard to EVERYONE you’ve worked for every 3 months, i might do that once we hire and we need to crank up demand, i’m keeping things mostly on the D L since we’re so booked out. - your rate per hour will be higher on repeat cleans since you konw the house, know the layout, the windows aren’t as dirty etc. we often make $60 per man hour on a first clean and $80 per hour (at the same price) 6 or 12 months later.
Thank you. I’m just starting out with a facebook page right now. I’ll make a google website within time. Any good free apps or spreadsheets to keep track of all your customers or do you just use a note book for everything?
i use google sheets and calendar
Nice!
So from your comments I see you do storefront and residential. Are you focusing equally on each or more on one than the other?
i don’t really seek then out anymore, we have about 50 and they kinda trickle in to us now, i just got a voicemail yesterday from the local petco looking for a bid for quarterly
Just want to back up the comment you made about establishing a relationship with the client by being friendly and helpful. I’ve picked up several jobs from clients who just found the workers from other businesses to be staid and unfriendly. If you can be awesome at your job AND friendly and chatty with the client, it almost guarantees that a) they’ll have you back again and b) they’ll tell their friends and neighbors about you.
