Storefront HELP

Paying 1/3 is great on 20k a month or whatever your goal is. However the hidden problem I can guarantee you will come across - Keeping an employee at the 1/3 rate. With your prices being so low you may need two employees to keep up with 20k a month. Have you figured out how much you’ll be paying them per hour? It’s hard enough to keep an employee at $15hr. let alone much less.

If you don’t plan on having an employee do it, then maxing out at 15k a month and doing it yourself is realistic. But I wouldn’t want to be stuck doing my own route because I bid it too low to pay someone a good wage. Just be careful with this $1 per window.

btw - I like your brochure and the idea of giving it to them.

i get what your saying, but i think about it like this; 15-20k per month is paying out one guy 5-7k per month to do the work. I have my route guy train new guys, speeding up the route work while keeping wadges down. I let my route guys have the option to do resi on weekends to make up $ if route work needs more guys, thus lowering wagdes a bit. Little more overhead, but route work is easy to train, I just trained a guy in a week and hes going out tomorrow solo with me not worring about his quality of work. If $1 doesnt cuty it, ill re market at $2. marketing is cheap, and if my eggs are in any basket…they are in the EDDM basket

Hey Dave I’m curious, how do you go about getting the first big store/restaurant in the area before you go out doing the flyer thing to all the small stores?

Why are you not worrying about the quality of his work? How do you know he is doing the work?

There is considerable time spent traveling between each job, getting in and out of your car, changing water and
towels, taking breaks and pausing before you start. It adds up…especially for a new employee.

Alot of it is being persistent with bids. On days i do commercial work, i try and drop 100 bids/estimates.

My first big account was party city- it might be called something else in other states- used to be paper warehouse here in mn. I dropped a bid with the manager and had a good talk with him, then a week later the gm called me. She had just recieved a promotion to the position within the last 6 months and had been going over the stores locations window leaning and relized it was a mess. somne locations were getting done on a monthly basis, some quarterly, some not at all.

I explained to her that i could make her life alot easier. in dealing with just one company, her stores would know what day of the week we would be there, how frequently (monthly), and what we would be doing every time( exterior 1 month, interior/exterior then next… and so on), but best of all, her accounting people would not have to deal with 21 different companies invoices, just one from us at the end of each month. The convience of the whole thing was the dealbreaker for her. It did take about 2-3 months of phone calls and e mails(as corporate jobs usually do) but we ended up landing all 21 stores on a monthly basis.

I now use this formula for all my big or corporate account estimates. The best thing to do is get your foot in the door. Get in good with the store manager, whos authority ends at that store, but get in good with them. Restaurant managers tend to think they are gods gift to the world(they are my least favorite to deal with), so make them feel like they are as important as they want to feel. When i get infront of a manager, gm, or dm, i try to preach the convienence of going with our company. But dont tell the manager that you plan on going over his/her head to get to the gm/dm. Establish a good realtionship with the person you have to get through first, then go on to explain that you can help out their boss by giving estimates at all their locations, they the manager of your first store looks like the hero, they are happy, and you are getting a check for a few grand every month.

PM me if you need more info… hope this helped

Jobs are seperated by areas which in turn are broken down into routes. drive time is max of 10 min between jobs, getting out of your car and getting set up should take way less then 5 min, water is new at the beginning of the day with soap and is used till the end of the day, same with rubbers. breaks for smoking or whatever else takes place in the car. Seems like your discribing the 300lb wc who does this grocery store next to a bunch of strip mall jobs we do

Sounds like you know what you’re doing. My appologies if my post was taken the wrong way. You are going to have a hard time getting 20k a month doing route, with one guy. Those are $800 to $900 days. Even with my bidding which is more than double the $1 per pane, a $600 day is a hard one to finish. At $1 per window, I’d be lucky to manage 7k a month with one guy. You’re going to need two, possibly three guys to produce the 20k a month at $1 per pane.

This is just my opinion and I’ve been wrong many times in the past. Keep us updated on your progress.

Your right, but if I pay them all 1/3 of what they do, its all the same formula… My idea is building enough routework so I can focus on resi, then down the road just book jobs and do sales on big accounts.

Snow removal is another thing I’m focusing on, already have 4k a month between 2 contracts about 10 min away from eachother. And another 9 resi jobs at 140 a month from nov to april. Snow removal looks big, and should be an add on for anyone in a state that gets snow

Are they using their own vehicles or company vehicles?

How large is your route at this point? You must have a lot of work to keep them that close.

Nice, very nice.

We do about 2k a month in commercial as of right now

congrats bro, how much do you pocket from that?

When I first started on my own, I was told I could make $100,000,000 but have $99,999,999.99 in expenses. So really doesn’t matter how much you make its how much of that you put in your pocket.

just saying…

How long has it taken you to grow to that point?

i see 2/3 if not more of all my route work, depending on what i do myself

about 5 months

Curious

their own

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Just digging through old threads. Finding some interesting ones.

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