Sorry for the slow response, it has been crazy! I really appreciate you taking the time to post this. It was encouraging.
Law of attraction brother. 
And have faith in yourself and your work.
If you fudged up and underbid a job, oh well, treat it like any other job. You never know who you are working for.
I almost quit when I decided to go on my own.
First two months was a grand total of 5 jobs equalling about $604
Third month really changed for me and closed the month at $3676
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Wow Dan, that is quite a jump! I am excited, and nervous, about going on my own but I think I will do it very soon.
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Wisdom
My advice starting out is:
Target repeat business - lower hourly rate, but residual income is essential when youâre new
Concentrate more on marketing than equipment - get the jobs BEFORE you spend big on gear
Aim to work âOn the glassâ no more than 40 hours a week - but set aside at least 2 hours a day for marketing
If you have 1 job, always talk to the people in the houses/businesses either side. Try to build work in small areas
Use EVERY free online resource you can find - twitter/FB/Google+ etc etc and update all of them regularly (Lookup Hootsuite)
Make sure your website is focused on the services you provide - put services to the forefront & âabout usâ type info in the background.
Donât be afraid to charge a little higher - remember there is a lot more hours in running a business than just the hours spent on the glass,⌠make sure youâre not doing all your admin & marketing hours for free!
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whatever ideas you have on marketing make sure you do AT LEAST 3fold the effort of whatever you had in your mind as a very good effort. And then some .e,g, if you were going to buy/ deliver 3000 flyers make sure you order 9k but still dole them out in the time you envisaged doing 3k .i guarantee you that 9k will hit the mark but 3 k wont ⌠As you are getting down to the last 500 and the results are starting to get good - order another 3kâ a 12k total hit will bushwack your service area well
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Iâll share my honest experience because a window cleaning friend once helped me get started and itâs what got us to where we are at today, 1 1/2 years later. We are located in the DFW area.
My friend that coached me at the beginning is at $8,000 per month and he works by himself, doesnât want to deal with employees and has been doing window cleaning for years and is soon retiring. That works great for him and his advice is what empowered my wife and I to get to where we are at today but we had to take it to higher levels to make it sustainable because I have a lot of health issues (nuerofibromatosis type 2, to long to describe here so google if you donât know what that is) and knew I wouldnât have the ability to do the work long term. Right now my doctors have requested I stop working in the field but we are at a place where I can spend full time in the office so it works out great.
The advice my friend gave me was to not get too fancy and technical with it at the beginning and to simply get out there with a squeegy and knock on doors and work. He does really good with store front routes and the residential he gets through that as well so thatâs exactly what we modeled. He also mentioned the need to go above and beyond with every customer because the window cleaning market is saturated with people who donât show up on time, are not consistent and cuss to much.
Yes we have gotten jobs from Fish Window Cleaning because the store owner couldnât handle their employees cussing while washing windows. It takes very little effort to simply show up in clean attire, be professional, smile and do a good job. The exciting thing is, since the window cleaning market is swamped with fly by night guys that wonât ever show up again or wonât be consistent, it takes very little to stand out in your town.
I quit my job in March of 2015. My wife and I went to Lowes and bought the consumer basics (yeah the cheapo squeegee) and spent about $110 and put it in the trunk of our 2001 Lexus car. Itâs all we had and we had no money to invest. We started driving through town and stopped at every single store. (we didnât have a minimum at first but save yourself and get a $15 minimum). It was brutal and store owners treated us like crap often. Door to door sales with other small business owners is the most brutal sales you can do because they are the most ego driven segment of business owners. So expect some belittling experiences at first until you build your confidence.
Iâll post our income per month for the first 5 months.
March - $1,319
April - $2,183
May - $2,517
June - $4,608
July - $5,242
Most of this time we were building off of door to door sales and the few residentials that trickled in from craigslist. This was not for the faint of heart. This took hitting a lot of stores including doing the work. I did have my wife to help on the work part but we always worked together so itâs not like one of us did sales and one of us worked.
In July is the first we finally bought a Ford Ranger with 200k miles and that is still our main truck today for window cleaning.
This year we added maid service, very basic pressure washing, screen repair and now in August of this year we bought our first carpet cleaning trailer and truck to go with it. (screen repair is VERY profitable and picks up a lot of money that is often left laying there to be had)
After the first five months of business we slowly built up to do almost $6-7000 by December. From there we kind of pittled because we were stretched to thin until September of this year.
We now have 7 employees. 2 work very minimal part time. 3 of us are full time and 1 that is putting in around 30 hours a week with the 5th one who will be taking over operations completely coming on board the 17th of this month. We are still working at it very hard until we reach a threshhold where we can slow down and enjoy the ride a bit more but here are the numbers from September to today.
September - $8,781
October - $12,076
November is already at dollars under $11,000 scheduled for the month (as of the 9th) and on track to do $16,000.
This is 1 year and 8 months into it.
All this and we are still bringing in a 4k salary a month on our own and now i am full time in the office and my wife helps in the field yet but is transitioning out of that over the next 3 months.
Yes I shared some personal numbers here but I donât care. This isnât a bunch of B.S. to make me look good, this is to motivate you that you can do it! Just start with the basics and get out there and be seen with a squeegee working! Clean cut, professional, friendly and CONSISTENT.
Some of our best leads for commercial and residential come from people that see us washing Starbucks windows. We get so much from that you would almost be able to clean their windows for free and count it marketing for the jobs youâll get from that.
Iâm going to stick my neck out here and share our door to door numbers for commercial. TRACK THESE METRICS FOR YOURSELF! Put goals down on paper and revisit them daily! Itâs the only way. Itâs brutal so you need to remind yourself daily where you are going and WHY.
Hereâs what weâve experienced with door to door sales.
Individual days may vary but for us over time this has been a consistent average on the low side.
3% closing ratio. (BUT YOU HAVE TO FOLLOWUP!!!) without followup you are killing your best potentials.
Our average commercial customer is $50 per month value figuring on the very low side (realisticly itâs at $68)
2% of your stores you visit will be interested in a quote for their house if you are making sure they know you do residential and we have been able to pull an 80% closing ratio by always going out to their place to quote and never give a price without meeting the customer first or selling them on why you are the best.
Hereâs what that looks like if you are working by yourself and you go out there one month. Understand it takes a bit to get self confidence and belief in yourself so donât beat yourself up at first.
This is going off a $50 per month average for commercial
60 stores per day that you knock on for 10 days out of the month.
$900 in commercial sales. 75% minimum of that should be residual work. so you are building the next month off a $675 base.
If you did 60 stores for 10 days thats 600 stores you contacted.
2% lead rate for residential quotes gets you 12 people who request quotes and if you close at least half of those you will get $1620 in residential work based on a $270 average. If youâre residential is not running that on average your cheating yourself. Yes we have lots of jobs that are a little less. We have a $150 minimum for residentials but we have lots of jobs higher so it averages out.
That gets you $2520 on your first month.
Put these numbers on a spreadsheet, make a goal board and TRACK your progress. Itâs what empowered us to get out there and work. Yes walking into 40 stores to get one customer is very demotivating but not when you look at the bigger picture. Also if you follow up good, your ratio should be almost double that. Look at the noâs as a positive because you are one no closer to a YES! Yes Keith Kalfus got a bunch of stores in one day but he also dropped them all later. DONâT UNDER BID.
The Customer Factor does AMAZING at providing this data for you once you have some history when it comes to the customer averages for residential and commercial and we also use Spotio for our commercial door to door sales which provides the closing ratio statistics for commercial accounts.
So a few disclaimers, yes you wonât make these numbers if you are under bidding and doing work too cheap. You donât have to be the most expensive but definitely donât be the cheapest. Our customers know we are not the cheapest. We tell them that!
Also your winter numbers will not look like ours if you live up north. We are fortunate to have a solid season all year round with December being the highest for us last year and rain being the only thing that hinders us whether it lands in Feb. or March.
Most people hate store fronts. It just takes patience and sticking to your price. Our guy averages $60-70 an hour with commercial depending on the route with drive time. Weâve found it to be a very solid entry into residential leads as well. Yes thereâll quickly come a time where we crank up our commercial minimum but we will still have some guys doing the store fronts.
To me, it all was a blur until I saw it on spreadsheets and saw how the numbers work it was just a matter of working the numbers. Thatâs the only reason I am willing to share some of those numbers with you in hopes you are motivated to make it work.
Not everybody needs or wants to run a million dollar business. My friend that got me started is happy working by himself making $8,000 a month after years of experience and that works awesome for him. But if you want to grow, these numbers work.
Sorry I know that got long but best of luck! You CAN do it!
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what a great post! thank you.
Thank you for taking the time to write up this post! a lot of good advice that I will use.
Thank you, that was good advice and much appreciated!
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good post. I am pondering this. How do you meet payroll for 7 employees with the given sales numbers? is this net profit or total sales?
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I should have been a little clearer on that.
Me and my wife both are working right now taking in 1 salary. I have a partner that I brought on board in August and he takes home a salary. We are the three that have been working the most and taking home the most pay. My wife will be transitioning completely out of it over the next summer.
2 are very limited part time that pick up weekends and a few odd jobs
We have a maid that works when there is work (mostly as a helper with window cleaning) and sheâs been getting about 30 hours a week. The other full timer that is coming onboard the 17th was working part time like 2 days a week max because he worked at careflite too. So up till now the three of us main ones have been doing the majority of the work so it made everything come out right.
Now once the full timer comes on board on the 17th we cannot slack below $16k a month. Thatâs him doing 8k a month and the rest of the work being split between the rest of us and the rest of us will focus more on massively hitting sales and business development stuff.
16k covers everything well but we canât dip below that.
We donât have a lot of debt. Both our trucks are solid trucks but we got them with around 200k miles. so our operating expense is well under 15% for everything. Software, trucks, insurance, supplies etc.
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Wow Great post Thank You for putting that all down for us.
Great post, gives me lits if hope just starting out.
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Thereâs a saying: âChasing revenue, not profits.â That can be an easy mistake for many businesses to make.
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@TJGibson8 sometimes I think many of us forget why we are in business during growth mode⌠to make MONEY
Simply great post!
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I think the primary focus in the first 1-5 years really needs to be growth. After that you can use what youâve learned and focus on certain services, certain geographical areas, certain customers, etc.
In years 5-10 you can âtrim the fatâ off the huge steak youâve cut.
A calendar year is really a bad way to gauge your business. Think about it, a calendar year is an absolutely arbitrary measure of time.
Itâs important to remember that you should START with the end in mind. Do you want to be self-employed, have a business that runs itself, be semi-involved in the business, have your children run the business, and so on. If you constantly are aimed at that end, you will do fine.
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Two excellent posts with measureables.
Just wanted to thank everyone that posted on this thread. You all have been and are a great help, and I hope I have been able to return some of that help to others. First year I was recovering from my time at the cube farm so just really enjoyed being my own boss and didnât work as hard as I thought I would but still brought in 34k. From there I grew about 30% the next year, and this year I hope to grow another 45% from last. It has been a blast and I still enjoy cleaning windows, and short of retirement there is nothing to me like owning my own business. Thanks again!
Also, this was a great thread so wanted to bump it.
Congrats. Youâre getting into that zone where you can start to think âbiggerâ.
Ask your CPA about the benifits of incorporating and making the s-corp election.
Think about the stuff youâve been wanting to do for your business, but havenât had the capital for. For example, maybe purchasing a dedicated work vehicle, adding a lucrative service like pressure washing, etc., and consider whether it may make sense to borrow money to take that next step.
Depending on your location, mix of services, and the time you have to commit, a full time solo operator can pull down $75k-$125k. Thatâs only working 40ish hours a week for 9 months.
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