73. How to Start a $45K/Month Window Cleaning Business - Gold Medalist's Guide

0:00From doing work for Oprah and well-known business executives to winning the window cleaning world cup, it's safe to say that on the spot window cleaning is like the Olympic gold medalist of the industry. We come up so often as the professional window cleaners to hire. Even other professional window cleaners tell us about how customers are asking about our company through them. Yeah, so like this month, we have$55 ,000 on the books. The margins you might have at one level aren't going to be the margins you have when you try to expand. Really focusing on that recurring residential service helps our business grow.

0:36It's stabilized us through the hard times. I wish I had known that early on. So, as long as people are talking about you in a favorable way, wherever that platform is, capitalize on it. I'm your host, Alex Freeman, and today we're decoding the lucrative world of window cleaning. I'm joined by Jeremiah Hickey to learn how he built his half a million dollar business while working a full-time job. Jeremiah, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me. Let's start with your story. When did you start on-the-spot window cleaning and what attracted you to this industry? Well, I'm an old schooler, so I've been around for a little bit.

1:09I'm 46 right now. My lifetime, I've been around the cleaning industry. My parents had a side hustle, really small janitorial type hustle. So I did that kind of stuff when I was a teenager. But then I got a regular job, got married. My wife's father-in-law is and was a window cleaner. So as I was in the job that I was at, a couple of years into it, there was just no more room for me to go anywhere. The boss even told me there's no room for advancement. And so my wife was like, you know what? Why don't you try window cleaning? It's always worked for her dad. So I took a couple of weeks off from my regular job, went out, started hustling up work where I could.

1:42And in two weeks, I had gotten enough work to keep me going in the industry. And so I turned in my notice, said, hey, I'm going to give you a couple of months left at this job. I'm going to start my window cleaning business. And so that was in the fall of 1998. Wow. So you had some kind of family knowledge to fall back on in terms of getting off the ground. but what are some of those skills or pieces of knowledge that someone might need to get started and then grow a profitable window cleaning company? Yeah, I wouldn't say that my history in the janitorial sector had any real influence. I didn't run a company.

2:14It was just really small jobs that I inherited from my parents and they weren't really profitable. It was just enough to make a little bit. When I really focused on starting the window cleaning side of things, my wife was a tax preparer and she was like, just make sure you prepare for the taxes. So knowing that in advance, understand how the taxes work, especially for a self-employed person, is critical. So we saved like 20 % of our gross that first year. And we always save for taxes, which was a big deal. I recommend that for any startup company. Really understand that. As far as the work itself, the basic tools and things, I learned that from my father-in-law.

2:46He had a successful business at the time. So I was able to kind of gain some information from him, the simple tools. But also just as I started, I had to understand the difference between the money you earn versus the money that is available for profits or for growth. It's really easy to get kind of caught in the trap of like, oh, I'm earning X amount of dollars an hour and it feels like so much. But when you're running a business, it turns out to be a lot less than what you think. Yeah, kind of leaning into that. One of the things you mentioned, you know, planning for taxes, which is an important thing that a lot of entrepreneurs don't realize when they get started.

3:17What other planning went into pre-first day of the business? Yeah. So before that, it was just, like I said, I had tried to buy out the time. So I needed to get that two weeks off. And really the plan was to just go out and sell door-to-door at storefronts and just find where the work was. So once I went out and got the jobs, I'd do the job and I'd go to the next one. And that was the plan just to see where it would take us. And focusing on that direct marketing that way kept us going through the whole first year. Now, what were the startup costs? Is this a business that somebody can start with no money or what's kind of the minimum budget that they should plan to have available to them when they get the window cleaning company started?

3:59I look at it from a couple of different perspectives. If you have some resources already and you're looking to kind of go into this as a real business, I would say you probably need a good$5 ,000 to start a professional company. And that's if you already have a vehicle. If you have no money at all, you could literally borrow a squeegee and a scrubber and some towels and soap, and you can go out there and start making money with literally no money to your name as long as you had those supplies. When I started, I probably in today's value, I did about$200 just to get the supplies up front. That got me off the ground.

4:31And then I reinvested throughout the year, whatever extra supplies and materials I needed. Probably spent about$1 ,000 that first year on basic supplies and equipment. How did you end up coming up with the name? on-the-spot window cleaning. How did you come up with that name? And then what are some things that people should consider when deciding on a business name? Yeah. You know, trust your mother-in-law. That's what I got to say about that one. No. Smart advice in many areas of life. Right. We were starting the business. So my family's company had a name that we didn't want to use. And so she went out and she went to the library, you know, back in the days when people went to the library and she looked at all the phone books, all these things are old school stuff.

5:09So 1998, remember, but she was looking at all the phone books in different cities for cleaning companies. And she found that name on the spot. My mother-in-law found that name and along with other ones. But as we were kicking the names around, that's the one that we liked. We stuck with it and we went with it on the spot window cleaning. How does the name impact the future success of the business? Well, nowadays you really, in my opinion, and it's proved true. If you want Google rankings, the name is really important. So if you want people to find you for window cleaning, window cleaning has to be in the name.

5:40If you want to focus on a specific city, that can help as well. The other side of it is what kind of market are you going into? Do you want to sound corporate or do you want to sound local? We really focus on the local. So we actually have a corporate name and we used to carry that name on the Spot Cleaning Services Inc. That was always what we branded with because we thought it was more important to kind of look higher and more polished than the local feel. But as we grew the business, we realized it was the local feel that actually sold more things. So we rebranded and focused on that local flavor and kept the name a little bit more simple.

6:10That's really interesting. You know, I don't want to necessarily call that a mistake necessarily, but just a pivot with knowledge. But what might you characterize as a mistake you made early on in the business? And what did you learn from it? A big mistake. And I think a lot of window cleaners I know kind of fall into this trap where you have kind of preconceived ideas of what's going to earn you money. So you have different avenues that you follow. The mistake that I made was I did not capitalize on the opportunities for recurring residential window cleaning services. For recurring work, it was almost always commercial.

6:42And then residential was when it comes, it comes. I didn't even realize that was a real mistake until the pandemic. And a lot of our recurring commercial stopped. They closed down or they were having hard times. We still had some that were going on, but to get that recurring work, I just really started pitching it to our residential customers. And since we pivoted then, that side of our market has grown incredibly. So really focusing on that recurring residential service helps our business grow. It's stabilized us through the hard times. I wish I had known that early on. Kind of staying in that same vein, tell me about a big failure as a business owner.

7:17How did you recover from it and what did you learn from it? So I had a really bad ladder fall about a decade ago. It could have killed me. I ended up with a concussion and some stitches in my head. And we didn't respect safety the way we should have. It was my fault that I fell off the ladder. And so when we thought about growing and promoting that safety, we learned from that mistake, that biggest failure right there. And so we are like 99 % ladder free, which is highly unusual for the window cleaning industry. But we've really focused on for exterior services, focused on what's called water fed pole or purified water technology.

7:50so we can do all of our cleaning with our feet on the ground, especially on the exterior. And then even on the interior, we train all of our techs to use extension poles with the standard equipment, squeegees and scrubbers, and even detailing, things like that. So we really focus on the safety. And that was something I had to learn the hard way, but I wish I had not had to have had that failure. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's a very real and scary lesson to learn. If someone came to you and said, you know, I want to get into the window cleaning industry, but no prior experience. They've never worked as a window cleaner.

8:20What is the number one piece of advice that you would give them? Yeah, educate yourself. There's so many ways to do it these days. There's YouTube, there's business podcasts like this one, there's books, and also just talking to other window cleaners, other people in business or in the service industry in general. Educate yourself, learn the mistakes, learn the successes, and try to implement those early on because that's where I would start before I did anything else. Now, shifting towards a little bit of the day-to-day operation of the company. What strategies or systems are you using to keep yourself and the business organized?

8:53And then sort of the follow-up there is how did you develop or implement those strategies? Yeah, I really like the advancement in softwares. And software is really how we systemize and focus our efforts on the administrative side and everything else. One in particular is our sales system. We use ResponseBid, the software ResponseBid as our sales system. So it used to be that I would just know how to do the sales. I would go out to the jobs. I would look at them all and calculate what I needed to do. But with Responsibit, I had to do all of that like a third-party person and figure out the inputs that I needed to put in.

9:28And then after I did that, the algorithm in Responsibit generates a profitable bid every time something comes through. So that software in particular really helps us focus on our sales strategy. Then it also has follow-ups to not only capture new customers, but also to go back and get those returning, recurring residential clients in particular. What's the biggest challenge facing you as a business owner today? And what steps are you taking to overcome it? For us, the biggest challenge is the current expansion that we're doing. Just a few years ago, as I was getting older, we really focused on growing the business.

10:02Before that, I would have a guy or two working alongside me and that was about it. So that expansion is difficult. There's a lot of transitions. Again, there's a lot of things I don't know. And there's a lot of things I don't know that I don't know. And that's difficult. So training to get people to do things that I'm doing now becomes critical. One of the other things that's really been complicated throughout the history of our business is just staying motivated. Sometimes things can just get mundane or they get, you know, you're just tired of doing the same thing over and over again. And it's hard to kind of focus on what you need to do next to keep the business growing or keep it moving forward.

10:34And so that motivation, I think a lot of entrepreneurs face that even early on, but staying motivated is really key. Now, taking you from today, going back to the beginning one last time here, what's the most difficult part of opening a new window cleaning business and how did you overcome that? I think for anybody, the most difficult part is just attracting the customers. If you know the basics of window cleaning, for some, the skills are a little harder to come by, but if you can get the basics down, it really comes to attracting customers. What I did in the beginning is I went door to door at the storefronts.

11:04I'd go in, I'd say, hey, you know, you want your windows clean X amount of dollars or whatever. But from that point, a lot of times I would be in a store and then customers inside the store would hear me and go, oh, you do window cleaning. And then they get my contact information. So that's how I attracted customers to begin with, was just that public presence in person wherever I could be. And I used those opportunities to capitalize on that initial growth. So this is going to bring us to a section of the show that we call our Fan Blitz questions. These come from our YouTube community. Listeners, you can go to youtube.com slash upflip, join the community and post questions to future podcast guests.

11:40Jeremiah, we've got five questions. We're going to try and do them in about a minute. Are you ready? Okay. All right. First, would you do business with yourself if you were a customer? No, I'm a classic do-it-yourselfer, but my wife would hire us and she's more of our target customer. Fantastic. If you could have anyone in this world endorse your business, who would it be and why? From a marketing perspective, I would do Martha Stewart just because I think the branding advancement using her name would be great. What or who would you like to have as a mascot for your brand? My golden retriever, Sadie, because she's the best.

12:11Oh, that sounds fantastic. Can you tell us about your most bizarre business encounter? Okay. So I was cleaning windows at this house and they had all these detailed schematics of military equipment. I mentioned it to the customer like, oh, that's interesting. And he went on to tell me and then finally he's like, well, you know, I used to be a spy. And I was like, okay, this guy's either delusional or crazy. And then I went into his garage and he had a classic Ford GT40 in his garage. And I thought, I don't know, is this guy like the retired James Bond or what? Amazing. And finally, if there was a movie made about your journey, what would the title be?

12:40Window Wars and the Squeegee Strikes Back. Oh, I'm there opening weekend for that movie. That's going to do it for our Fan Blitz questions. Listeners, let us know what you think of this episode by reviewing it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you are listening now. Jeremiah, just a few more questions from me here. Talk to me about supplies and equipment. What are you using in your business and why slash what advice can you offer for choosing the best both products and suppliers for those products? Yeah. So the window cleaning industry has two styles of cleaning. We call it traditional or trad work, which is your squeegee and your scrubber.

13:19And then we call it water fed, which is the purified water technology with extension poles. For those extension poles, that's really been key for our company, that water fed technology. So we focus on really high-end carbon fiber poles. We like the company Simpole, S-I-M-P-O-L-E, as well as Gardener. Those are very good poles to go by. As far as going to different distributors, there's a big difference between what you can buy at your local hardware store and the professional line. So I would find a distributor. We go to Detroit Sponge. They've always treated us well. They are always there when we need them and they have the supplies we need.

13:52So any of the traditional stuff or adapters that we need for the different water fed poles, I like going through them. But just knowing that the main established companies like Unger, Tori, those companies have good quality professional products that you can only find through the suppliers. So when you know that, it's better to make the investment in the professional lines as opposed to just buying what you can at the hardware store. So you mentioned when you were first kind of finding those first few customers for your business, you were going door to door and kind of being present publicly as much as you can and having those conversations with potential first customers.

14:27Is that still the advice you would give for someone to find their first few customers for their company? Or what strategies might you recommend for someone opening a company today? It all depends on what you're coming in with. If you're coming in with no money, yeah, just get out in front of people. Get out there, shake hands, say hi, let people know that you're out there. If you've got some money to start with, like if I was going to start in a different area, I would put money into some ads up front. I'd do Google ads, Facebook ads. I'd educate myself more, especially for a new person. Make sure that you're not just throwing money away, but that would get your name out there before you could have the chance to get your website to get SEO and all that kind of thing.

15:02So the initial ads would be how I would start to get those first few customers. Are those Google ads, Facebook ads, are those your primary method of finding customers today? Or how are most of your customers coming to the company today? No, actually, we've done very little paid advertisement over the years. We have done Google ads in the past just briefly, and it had some success. But our main focus has been branding. So we really focus on the things that have the longevity. So our online presence is super key. We rank really high for our main areas that we work in for window cleaning. The Google three pack, you know, we rank up there with the reviews.

15:37Our website has great organic listing when you search different areas that we service. Places like the Nextdoor app, we don't advertise there, but you got to have that presence there. You got to have some sort of listing there. And then people talk about you. We get a lot of referrals through Nextdoor. So it's really that branding that we've done over the years. to help us get that branding established. We've really focused on capitalizing on using media before there were social media and even currently. So we try to get free publicity. You mentioned up front that I've won the World Cup of Window Cleaning.

16:08I do speed competitions. I've been all over the country and over to England as well to do them. And then I get news outlets to cover the story. And that's really brought in a lot of interest to our company and it helps to establish us as the local professionals that people know about, even if they don't use us. Can you talk a little bit about the, I guess, thinking in broader terms about kind of branding and what might be categorized as an expense? Like what kind of sweat equity is going into building up that branding and hustling for news stories to kind of build up the brand in that way? Yeah.

16:41So as far as the events go, you know, you just got to be aware of them. So we capitalize on those things, but you can come up with any kind of events or ways to get the media's attention. Nowadays, self-promoting is also a viable option. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. But what we do to really capitalize, not just to get the initial interest is the follow up. So like I said, when we pivoted and really focused on getting the returning residential customers, we realized that we had to always be front of mind of those customers. So I'm going to go back to our software response a bit. You can build into it, whatever kind of email or text campaign after the initial service that you want.

17:14So we remarket to those people on a regular basis that we don't have to think about. And then they come back. So as it is, you know, we have like three quarters of our year is pre-booked because we are constantly reaching out and trying to get people on automatically recurring services. So after that initial interest, we really focus on email campaigns and things like that, that are dripped out and automated. So we don't have to think about it. You mentioned social media briefly. You mentioned Nextdoor. Obviously, a website is important because that's really how you rank on Google. What are the important aspects of an online presence for a window cleaning business in 2023?

17:47Like, should somebody really invest time in TikTok? Like, where should they be? I've seen a lot of window cleaners on TikTok and I know that that gets a lot of attention. I just don't know that it targets the customer base of a local area. I haven't seen the numbers on that, so I couldn't tell you I'm not on TikTok, but I guess I'm a little behind the times. I am on Instagram and Facebook, but for us, the website, absolutely super key. Make sure it's SEO friendly, optimized and all that stuff. The Google reviews, that's the next thing because those two things combined, once people will start looking for you or even if they initially want to find somebody in your area, Those Google reviews, hands down, help us out so much.

18:23And then the other apps, Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, wherever people can verify that you're a good professional company and that other people like you, that's where your effort should be. So as long as people are talking about you in a favorable way, wherever that platform is, capitalize on it. Can you talk me through the whole customer process and experience from requesting a quote through to finishing the job? Give us the key steps and how you as a company are managing that process. Yeah. So for a long time, you know, sales takes up a lot of time, especially if you're doing one job, one sale at a time.

18:58So with our processes now, it's all systemized. If a customer gets funneled to our website, there's a link there for an instant quote. Then go on there. They can fill out a few questions about their property and it'll generate a quote right there. That goes from our software from Responsive. If they call us, it goes to our virtual receptionist. We use Jill's office and they also know how to use responsive bids. So they can ask the same questions. They have access to our account to generate those bids and that goes out. So a customer does that initial contact either through our website or through a phone call.

19:27They get a bid within minutes. And then once they select one of our packages, we offer very specific packages that are well spelled out. And so it's easy for our techs and our customers to understand. Then we go out, we notify the customer, we get them on the schedule, make sure everything's set up front. We get to the job, introduce ourselves, explain to the customer what each team member is doing. Most of our teams go out in teams of two. So one person is usually doing the inside, one person is doing the outside. And then we explain that up front. We make sure that at the end, we ask them if everything went well, if there's anything we can do to help out.

20:02And we just focus on that customer interaction. So besides doing that quality job, this is one of the best practices we really try to implement. So our customer experience is top-notch is that we want our techs to be confident, to talk to the customer, to be able to build that trust and rapport with the customer. Even if they identify a problem that isn't window cleaning related and they can offer a solution that builds so much rapport. So our customers, they have a lot of pride in our company. I have a lot of feedback that says, you know, your team was so helpful. And so focusing on helping the customer while they're there in any way we can is a great part of our customer experience.

20:35And then once the jobs get done, we get paid. Then our drip campaign follows up. We ask for the Google reviews. It also has a Facebook and Nextdoor link as well. So to get those reviews going. And then later on it asks, you know, would you like a recurring maintenance service? We offer, even for residential, we do summer every other week, summer monthly. And we really focus on those. And then sometimes it's farther out, but either way they get reminders. They get a monthly reminder, quarterly reminder, six months and annual. And then that always keeps the customer coming back. Now, you mentioned the team members there and kind of the importance of what they're doing on site, how they're interacting with the customer as being central to providing an excellent customer service experience.

21:14Is that something that you're hiring for or training for or a mix of both? For both, our core values, the basic one is bring joy, bring joy to the customer, make them happy that we're there. And we do that through four basic training processes. One, be safe from experience. I know customers don't like it when you fall off ladders at their house. So be safe, be safe about yourself, properties, be safe about the other people that are there, whatever can be there as far as safety is concerned. As far as being the next level, we want to always be professional. So we train for being professional. However we present ourselves, we are the experts.

21:47We are the people that look the part. We don't look like the guy that came off the street with a bucket and say, hey, can I clean your windows, which is how I started. But now we focus on that professionalism. So we train for that. In the meantime, we train for efficiency. So even if our new guys, they aren't experts, they're getting trained for efficiency. They're accompanied by somebody that has the experience to make sure everything goes smooth so that they learn those processes. And that really is how we present ourselves and get that customer service experience that they want. Now, I want to dive into some of the numbers of the business a little bit further.