tl;dr: I’m thinking of cutting back what i offer cause customers prolly only really care about fairly clean glass.
So i currently offer three service levels on residential, which has been a fantastic system. I’m thinking of modifying what’s in each package, though, specifically reducing it. The reason is, I want to do less of what i dislike doing, in particular because i think customers don’t even care about it.
There are two main things: track cleaning and frame cleaning.
In my highest level of service i flush the tracks with water, which is a huge pain cause i have to refill the water bottle every three windows or so. Plus, the whole process of brushing, vacuuming, flushing, and scrubbing takes so long. In the middle level i only brush and vac.
I only do frame cleaning on the highest tier (of course i wipe runoff that gets in the frame on any tier). I clean just about everything, including the underside of the windows, the tops of the sashes, the sides of the inner frame. It’s a lot, and i price it accordingly, but i also dislike doing it, to the point where I’m always like, “Darn!” when someone orders the highest level even though it will pay well.
Now, me disliking these things wouldn’t matter if i was confident customers really cared. But, many of these details the customer really never sees and I’ve been more and more realizing, hey, people just look out their windows from a distance and none really even stares out a window. People seem to be happy as long as the haze is gone and there’s no bird poop or major streaks or smudges. I say major cause honestly I’ve wanted to touch up streaks that i caught during inspection and customers didn’t even care and said no the windows look great. In fact, most people don’t even do an inspection; they just say wow the windows look so great. Maybe it’s my area, or the fact that I’m very picky, but people just don’t seem very picky. I feel like if the major dirt is gone they are happy.
So, do the tracks really even need to be white? Like, the windows are usually closed anyway and the majority gets clean from the water when doing the outside anyway. Does anyone even care about the gunk in the corners? No one ever gets close enough to their windows to look in there. And who looks at their window frames? They are looking out the window, plus, how bad are the frames anyway. Wiping them hardly makes a difference.
Honestly, i spend more time cleaning non-glass than i do glass, but I’m beginning to believe customers really only care about the glass, and even that they aren’t super picky. Maybe this is why some of you guys can do so many houses solo in a day and pull in $800 or more. Maybe I’m just doing too much, but also can’t really charge more cause it’s stuff that’s not important enough to the customer.
Whew, long post, but hopefully an interesting topic to talk about. Where do you guys stand on these issues?
