Don The Window Cleaner

Having your own small business is a blessing and a curse. It gives you a better income than working at an hourly job, and you have some flexibility.  Sometimes the curse is in the flexibility.

It’s the flexibility that can give you problems in the early stages of getting your business started. You may be struggling with getting enough work, and you start doing some other service to fill the time. If you aren’t careful, you may lose your focus and fail to do any effective marketing in any one area of your business.

Many years ago I branched out into full janitorial work, and hated every minute of it. I hope I never strip and wax another tile floor again. Fortunately, this was a brief detour, and I only wasted about a year struggling with this.

Today, I am at a point where I have a very well established business. In the next few years I will be forming some kind of exit strategy. I was thinking about setting a target of working about 20 hours a week in the future. I don’t really ever want to retire. But I would like to be taking it a bit easier.

But this past year I did something unexpected and ran for Mayor. I have been politically active for the past 10 years, and I never thought I could get elected in this college town, but the recent showing that I gave has changed my mind. I lost by 42 votes, scared the Hell out of the local power structure, and I now find myself gaining support for a future run at a city commission seat. This changes things.

I will be running next March and I expect to win it. It will be hard to do, but I believe the timing is right. It means I will be changing some things. A city commission seat is a part time position, and it doesn’t pay well, so I will  keep my business a few days per week after I am sworn in, in the event that I do win. Up until then I will  be very busy, and I have to figure out what else I will be doing with my other interests.

Another thing that has changed is that the number of people who call me and email me for advice on their window cleaning business prospects has increased. As it goes right now, I don’t have time for that. But, I would like to make time for it if it could be done profitably. So far, it’s just been a good deed. I don’t make enough money off products and advertising for it to be worthwhile. And as long as it’s just the occasional person who wants help, that is no big deal. But the volume of calls has forced me to think about going back to a paid service, at the very least to thin the herd. Otherwise, I cannot afford to talk to everyone who wants what amounts to be the same information over and over again.

So, in the near future I will be creating an email new letter. It will be an annual subscription. When questions are asked, all subscribers will get the answers. Any videos I make will be for subscribers only. I will leave up the old videos on YouTube, although I may clear out all the ones with Squeegeesbymail.com ads because I no longer own that site and I no longer sell equipment. That was not worth it even a little bit.

When I figure out a price point for the newsletter, I will announce that here.

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I am finally finished with my run for Mayor of Gainesville. I came in second out of five candidates on March 16th and that put me in a runoff with the top vote getter. On April 13th, he scraped by with 6,110 votes to my 6,068 for a 42 vote victory. It was a real heart-breaker because the voter turnout was so low: 16.75%. It was also a hard loss to take because it was such a nasty campaign. I guess that is the reason why so few people want to run for office. But I believe it is important for good people to keep trying. When we bail out of the process, we leave it to the biggest scoundrels to run our cities. And 83% of the registered voters in my city bailed out of the process altogether.

In order to stay involved, I will be putting more time into future campaigns and with helping other good people run. And that means I will not be doing as much window cleaning mentoring in the future. Yes, I will do some, but my city is a higher priority. So, I will likely do more re-blogging of interesting articles and videos. I will make relatively few of my own on this subject. But I will be around.

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone! I’m really busy right now, and I haven’t had to discount my prices at all, in spite of continuing bad economic news…

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What have you put into your business? I know that when you feel desperate and don’t know what to do to get your business off the ground, all you can think of is what you can get OUT of it. But starting a small business is not a free ride. It’s like riding a bicycle: You start riding up hill, not going very fast, working very hard, and it takes a while until you can coast!

I am not alone in believing that giving can lead to receiving. Listen to this economist talk about what his research has revealed!

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I can hardly believe it’s been about three weeks since my last post. I’ve been busy at work and at home, and away from home. We’ve been renting out the downstairs at my house, and tenants have been coming and going. Things have had to be cleaned and maintained and repaired and it’s an all around headache. This covers almost our entire house payment, so it helps us as we work on getting rid of all our debt.

Cindi and I went to EPCOT in Orlando last weekend. We took three days, so I was off Monday. It was Cindi’s birthday, and we had a great time. She was even drafted by some street performers to play a role in their skit. They got more than they bargained for because she is such a ham.

But, you all want to know how business is in this terrible recession. I gotta tell you, it is really bad for a lot of folks here in Florida. We have one of the higher unemployment rates in the nation, and there are so many for sale and for rent signs every where we look. More seem to be added to their number every week. It’s one of the reasons I am so happy we have full occupancy. The competition for renters is fierce.

Our business is on  the upswing. It’s really good right now, but this is the busy season for us. It’s started a little earlier than usual, and we had a pretty good summer. So I am fairly optimistic. My customers who have put us off for awhile are getting done. This is the phenomenon called “pent-up demand”. People who were used to getting a certain service are now going without it, and they feel deprived. So, we are now on their list.

We are also continuing to pick up new clients. Most of this is just word of mouth momentum. I have passed out few fliers lately, but people are still giving my name out. And power washing is a good advertising medium: it’s noisy! People hear the machine and want to see who their neighbor has hired. Then they ask for a quote and then a date.

What is the prognosis for the future? This is hard to say because our economy is in such bad shape and, in my opinion, the current administration seems to want to increase the level of fiscal malpractice from the last administration. Our best hope for most Americans is that in 2010 the Obama White House will be neutered by a massive replacement of the present Congress. For me, I will just keep trying to reduce my obligations to a level that can be sustained in an even worse economic situation.

I also want to forecast that there will be a lot more people like us selling our services to those who can afford them. A couple of young guys sold my wife some car detailing yesterday. They were canvassing our neighborhood and caught her at a point of pent-up demand and made a sale. I was surprised, since we are so miserly lately, but it just goes to prove that there are sales than can be made in many markets.

Speaking of my neighborhood, while I was walking my dog I came upon a yard sale at my neighbor’s house. She told me she has been unemployed for awhile because teaching jobs are hard to come by. She asked how my business was. When I told her it was great, she and her two customers stopped to ask why that was. Now they all want to get into the window cleaning business. This is just what I need.

I also get a lot of calls from people around the country who leave messages asking for a quick consultation on the phone. Some even ask if they can come and clean for me for a day or so for free, so they can learn the business. I am so busy I cannot begin to even return these calls, so please stop! One of the reasons I put all this free info on the web was to stop the calls. It seems to have backfired. And my customers would not appreciate a steady stream of out-of-town “apprentices” in their homes; not to mention that training people is work. And it’s work I will not engage in for people who are leaving.

I have more “pent-up information” to share, so I will post again soon!

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This video is a brief description of the “pipeline” Don is thinking of when he says he is still waiting for those customers who are in it. It takes several calls and emails to get people to get off the dime and get that work done!

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I didn’t realize it for a long time, but a very high percentage of my customers are Jewish. This is just a guess because I do not actually keep data like that, but when you see enough Mezzuzahs on doorposts, you begin to detect a pattern. This becomes especially obvious in the Spring, when people are preparing for Passover. Observant Jews intensify the house cleaning before this and a few other holidays. Therefore, it might be a good idea to drop off some cards at the local synagogue. I have never done this, but the local congregations have helped spread my name around without having to do that.

I also want to add here that there is something else I have noticed about my Jewish customers. In general, they are my best customers. They get done more often, are nicer to me, and are more generous. This is not to say that there are not obsessively clean, kind and generous people among other demographic groups. I work for Catholics, Presbyterians, Wiccans, Pagans, atheists, and plain vanilla heathens who are kind, reasonable people who are also not cheap skates. It’s just that the concentration of Jews in my customer files is hard to ignore. And that means it would be foolish to ignore them.

I just got an email from a customer who let me know she needs done before Rosh Hashanah, and that is two weeks away. For your perusal, here is a calendar of Jewish holidays for the year.

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A few days ago we were out with friends for a birthday outing and I saw a bead store. That’s right: beads. It was in a shopping center that is made to look like a park, and the anchor store there is a women’s fitness center. There are a lot of female-oriented retailers there (jewelers, hair stylists, tanning center, boutiques of various descriptions) as well as a dentist and a few eateries. It’s the perfect place for a craft supply business. There is lots of traffic, and it’s the kind of people who buy beads.

I marveled at this sight, because I know that it is not cheap to have a store in this center. And the utilities in this town are an absolute punishment. They had to sell a LOT of beads to pay for the rent and electricity, let alone pull a paycheck or two out of it. Then I forgot about it, until the next day, when I saw ANOTHER BEAD STORE at the shopping center just across the street! I thought that this was just crazy! How can two bead stores, located in the same part of town, survive? I thought about it, and realized that the markup on beads had to be enormous. This got me thinking about the window cleaning business. There is a very low cost of entry, and the profits are quite high. You don’t need a store or utilities. There is just your  own cost of living, and a fairly small investment in equipment.

There are only two dedicated bead stores in this town, Bead All About It and Gifts of Avalon. There are also some craft stores like Michaels, and there are the craft departments of stores like Wal-Mart and Target and others. Yet, in spite of the big stores with their cheap beads, two entrepreneurs dared to open these stores and depend on their bead sales to stay alive. I have to admire that.

In our business, we compete with full service cleaning services, do-it-yourselfers, and a high tolerance for dirt. We just need to find a couple of jobs every day to survive, but these bead stores probably have to have dozens of customers every day just to keep the doors open. How do they do it? By making beads special. Go to their web sites and read the descriptions. We can learn something from them.

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If you are going to do residential window cleaning, one of the first things you will probably realize is that you cannot make money selling it to your neighbors. Unless you live in a gated community with $400K homes, you will probably have to reach out of your modest, working class neighborhood. That’s because people like you and I, and our neighbors, are not used to calling service people to our homes until all avenues of doing it yourself are exhausted. Yes, I used to call the plumber ONLY after I was in trouble, with water spraying out of stripped connections and tools scattered all over the kitchen. It was a last resort!

The people you are looking for, that you want to be your clients, are used to calling in the pros and writing checks for the work. For someone who makes a six-figure income, it simply is not worth the trouble to try to be good at all the household chores. And if you are dealing with a two-income family, they are too tired to mess with it.

What I have described are two totally different kinds of people: the haves and the have-mores. I say that because we live in America, and that makes you a HAVE compared to the vast majority of the world. But your good fortune, your glorious accident of birth, does not keep you from being resentful toward Mrs. Have-more. Don’t lie to me! I have listened to my fellow toilers in the land of dirty work sneer at the “frivolous” expenditures of those who have more; those who drive $60,000 cars and have a golf cart in their garage. This contempt, though hidden in your heart while you are being polite, keeps you from cultivating relationships with those who could help you the most.

You see, these ill feelings are usually a one way street. My experience with people in the upper middle class and upper class has actually proven to me that they do not harbor the same bad feelings about YOU. They are looking for someone they can trust, and they are elated when they take a chance on you and you don’t let them down! (Yes, I know there are exceptions, but they usually wear it on their sleeves so you can avoid them.)

It is very important that you get over your unease about dealing with people who have more education and more money than you do. They have their own trials and their 0wn suffering that they prefer to hide. I had to call the police one time because the pricey house across the street had an obvious domestic disturbance going on. Someone was getting a good beating in there, and I would want someone to do the same if they heard that coming from MY house! I’ve shown up on doorsteps while a teenage daughter was screaming curses at her mother, and everybody had to get it together before opening the door. They go through bad times that no amount of money can take away.

Don’t look at these homes as places to “score” and hope they call back so you can nail them again. Do good work. Set them at ease. Be friendly. Make sure it was a good experience for them and ask them when they would like you to call them back. This is the beginning of a long relationship, and you don’t have long relationships with people you resent or despise. Get to know them, and let them get to know you. That is what makes them most likely to give your name to their friends. And their friends have big houses and a budget for cleaning, too. Thank God for them!

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This video tells about the holistic nature of being self-employed.  You are never really off the clock…

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