Don The Window Cleaner

I guess I should have seen this one coming. You can file this under, “Adding style” to get more attention. These guys do all the same services I do, and they show about as much leg as I do, since I live in Florida and frequently wear shorts. But this would definitely earn the double take and set tongues talking. Here’s the story:

 VANCOUVER, Jan. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Men In Kilts, a window and exterior cleaning company, has announced today they’ll be opening four more franchises in three months, adding to three franchises currently in operation. Alberta and Oregon are next on the list, with B.C. and Washington already in business.

The company was founded in 2002, with the first Vancouver franchise opening its doors in 2010. Since then, the franchise model has taken off.

“We’ve been deliberate about our growth,” says CEO Tressa Wood. “We needed to test the franchise model before opening up the market. The addition of these latest franchises will make us Canada’s largest window and exterior cleaning company. Our goal is to be in every major metro in North America by 2017.” Read more…

This from Dayton Daily News:

POCATELLO, Idaho — Don Aslett may be more than a half century into his fight against dirt and clutter, but he still can’t take a stroll without bending to pick up litter from the sidewalk. more…

Here’s a guy with a passin for cleaning and has become a sort of Apostle of Clean! Check out the Museum of Clean website!

I took some time off between Christmas and new Years and came back to work yesterday. I only had a couple of jobs to do, and I had to bill them. Today I have two houses that will actually pay cash, so that’s nice. But January is always a scary month for me. By now, I have called everybody I could to fit them in before Christmas. Now, it’s like starting cold, from a standstill.

Of course, now I have some time to think. I was running myself silly for the past two months, so I didn’t think too much then. My basic strategy is to keep calling people and going to the homes when customers have moved away, just to meet the new owners.  I also go back through my calendar and see who got done last year at this time. After all, I was in business last year!

The most important thing is to get out of the house! Due to the advent of the cell phone, I am not missing calls because I am not home!

I saw a story today about a window cleaner in North Carolina who keeps a sawed off Winchester strapped to his thigh while he cleans storefront windows.  So, for this eccentric bit of showmanship, he gets some free advertising! Check it out!

Of course, some people will think he’s a nut. And as a person who cleans residential windows, I don’t need that kind of notoriety. My politics gets me into enough trouble without even having to talk about it! But if your jobs are out in the public, you are a kind of performance artist. Perhaps having some sort of shtick will cause people to come out just to see you! And that might be good for your customers’ business!

But choose carefully! Having a repertoire of 40 different bird calls that you can entertain people with might be annoying to some people.

Sorry it’s been over a year since I created a video about the window cleaning business. As I explain in this video, I have been wearing other “hats” in my life…

I couldn’t resist posting this. Hope you are all having a happy holiday season!

One good thing about an economic collapse is that it causes you to reassess decisions you have made to provide for your family and your future. Back in 1981, during that recession, I was unemployed, with no education or skillset to market, and I knew I had failed to plan. Going back to school did not seem like an option, and I lived in an area where there were no big employers of blue-collar labor, so I started a business.

My first customers were small shops where I was confident that the owners would part with 2-5 dollars per visit to keep their windows cleaned. I found enough of these jobs to eke out a living, but it all changed when I discovered the market of upscale homeowners. These people paid well for my service. And even though I only saw them once or twice per year, there were so many of them that I managed to stay busy and increase my earnings. But then it got better.

These same homeowners sometime put me off by saying that they needed to get the house power washed first. That was when I started to offer power washing to my clients. Now, instead of making $5 at a single location, I was making over $300. I also noticed that a smaller and smaller percentage of my business was small homes. And that is what brings me to the real meaning of all of this: that maintenance adds to wealth.

Here in America there is so much wealth in our economy that we have the luxury of wasting it. We buy stuff that lasts only a year or two. Or less. We replace things that are out of fashion, even though they are still perfectly serviceable. And we let things fall into disrepair. At least, that is what we do if we are not rich. Rich people know better. And when I say rich, I don’t mean that they make a lot of money. I mean that they have accumulated a lot of money and would have a hard time spending it all because they are so frugal.

I am definitely not one of those people. But I have observed a lot of them from time to time. I’ve also met people who make a lot of money, and live in big homes, but are not rich. Or their riches are so precarious that a slight dip in real estate prices can totally liquidate them.

When I was in high school, my best friend was from a rich family, although you would never know it by looking at him.  He had a car, but it was a beat up Plymouth Duster. His dad had died on a cruise ship off the coast of Newfoundland during a storm, when they couldn’t get into port and get him to a hospital. He lived with his mother, who also drove an old car and lived in a modest two-story house on a mountain. I went shopping with them a couple of times, and she knew the price of everything, and could tell when things were marked up just a few cents from the last time she’d been there. Then she would root though the boxes of Cheezits looking for the one that had been missed in the repricing. I just thought she was cheap. But nothing she had was in disrepair. She made everything last.

That is what many of my customers are like; not all, but many. They keep their houses cleaned and repaired because they value them for the long term. Others are in and out of their houses as soon as they can make a profit on them. And now some of them have lost this expensive game of musical chairs by being stuck in something they cannot really afford to maintain. But if they don’t, they will find that their houses are worth less and less in a competitive real estate market that is advantageous to buyers.

The next time you drive by a house with small trees growing out of the rain gutters, and black mold on the walls, and evidience of woodpeckers seeking out the larvae that lives in their wood, remember that this is not a likely customer. It is more likely to be a future real estate bargain for someone wiser who will begin to add value and accumulate wealth.

Before you get all fearful and think this will put us out of business, hear me out. Unless it walks around the house and takes out the screens and wipes off the sills and scrapes off the real dirt while the homeowner is watching Sports Center, we are safe. I do lots of pressure washing for people who have a rusting pressure washer in their garage. I see professional window cleaning gear in some of these garages, too. The next thing you may be thinking is, “Could I start my own business with this?” That’s hard to say. I can see this tool being in your arsenal, but it’s not the answer to everything. As a professional window cleaner, there is usually some kind of problem solving to do that can not be done with one special tool. Some windows have to be disassembled to clean, and it’s tricky. And if you live in Florida, few homeowners want to leave their air-conditioned environment to do this work.

For the purposes of my business, I would want to know how hard it is to get replacement rubber. Or if the blades can be replaced at all.

Jason and Lynn Wise, Mason City Iowa

This from the GlobeGazette.com: Jason and Lynn Wise began JasLyn Cleaning Services in May 2004 out of their home in Mason City.

Six years later the business, now located at 2025 S. Federal Ave., has grown to 17 employees and more than 200 customers from all over North Iowa.

JasLyn has grown 12 to 15 percent each year, even during the harsh economic climate of the past two years, according to Jason.

“We have been very, very fortunate,” Lynn said.

Jason said his father told him years ago that if you work hard and have a product you believe in and that others believe in, “it’s going to be successful” even in a bad economy.

At the time they started JasLyn — a combination of their first names — Jason was a finance manager at Sedars Auto Park and Lynn was a bookkeeper at The Electricians.

“I’ve always dreamed of owning my own business,” Jason said. Read more at this link.

As you are all aware, I have a warm spot for every man and woman who just wants to make it on their own.

One of my proofs that the US is under-serviced by window cleaners is the fact that a Google news search for window cleaner and window cleaning yields a majority of stories from the UK. And just in case you are bad at geography, Britain is a much smaller country. Of course, a lot of those stories are about bad things happening to window cleaners and window cleaners gone bad, but that is what makes it news.

One recurring theme is a scam run by con men who show up at people’s homes in an attempt to collect for window cleaning. If you do that here, the homeowner wants to know what on earth you are talking about, because they don’t have a window cleaner.

In this town of mine, however, there was a scammer named Aaron who went about on his bicycle and offering to clean people’s windows. He usually wanted the money up front so he could get supplies. Then he took off and wasn’t seen again. We actually crossed paths one day when I was giving an estimate. He rolled up the driveway on his bike and commenced talking a blue streak, not letting anyone get in a word edgewise. I could tell the homeowner was a bit put off by his aggressive nature and I was a convenient excuse for him to refuse the babbler.

I probably should have called the police. At the time, I was unaware of his shady business practices, but he was acting pretty suspiciously. And I had forgotten that another one of my customers had told me that a man came around asking if he could clean her windows and said he worked for me. Maybe this is why my presence made him so nervous that he could not shut up.

Most people have sense enough NOT to pay for window cleaning in advance. So don’t you make the same offer! Have the stuff you need, and get paid when you are finished.