Don The Window Cleaner

Many of the people who come to this blog and who have watched my YouTube videos are interested in starting a window cleaning business. And their chief interest in in how to find jobs. They are in good company. A lot of people in all kinds of fields are doing exactly the same thing. Politicians are trying to show some leadership in this area by promising programs, ideas, or stimulus money to create jobs. But do we have to wait for them to figure it out? I don’t think so.

I started my business in 1981. Unemployment was at 10.5% and home interest rates were in the teens. I had just moved to a college town, where there are few jobs for people who were not college educated professionals. And the other jobs had brisk competition, with lots of cheap student labor to soak up those. I had a wife and infant son, and one day my wife came home with food stamps. I had been baling hay for $25 per day and giving blood plasma two days per week, and this government handout was very demoralizing. I knew I had to take desperate measures, or we would remain poor for quite a while.

At this time, I recalled meeting a man who came into the shop where I was working in 1979. He offered to clean our outside storefront window for $2 the first Tuesday of every month, and my boss could not open his wallet fast enough to pay him. I think my boss’s excitement and eagerness was in direct proportion to the exasperation he was experiencing just moments before as we had both spent about an hour trying to clean that window with Windex and paper towels, newspapers and vinegar, and lots of elbow grease. At that moment, this man was a godsend. He arrived at the highest point possible for his value proposition. Frankly, I think he could have gotten $10.

This kind of a window cleaning business model is one that offers a solution to a problem at an affordable price. Even though my boss was selling a luxury product (household spas and hot tubs) in a bad economy, he was willing to pay for results instead of using my labor, when I didn’t have much to do anyway. This became the way I did business for the first couple of years I was in it. My aim was to make that simple value proposition to shops with dirty windows as many times as I could. I didn’t even bother soliciting shops with clean windows. When I did, they just told me they had it covered, and I didn’t want to waste my time with them.

Sometimes I found people who just didn’t seem to care. I knew I was an inexpensive service, but they still would rather not get the windows cleaned. They did not see the value in it. It was worth nothing to them. They did not think it impacted their own ability to make money, so they just took a pass. It was hard to figure out in advance who was like this by their type of business. For instance, I did the windows at liquor stores, auto parts stores, dry cleaners, and other places that do not make much use of the display value of their windows. There were also shops that sold dresses and fine furnishings, which extensively use their windows for display, and were content to have inferior looking windows.  So, it remained a simple numbers game for me: offer the value to everyone who needed it.

This was working for me for awhile. I had a lot of loyal customers. I also had a lot of competitors. I had to spread out to shops that were out of my city to stay busy. And in each town I competed with a local service, so I could not recoup my travel with higher prices. But I was beginning to clean the windows for my customers’ homes. These were great jobs because I only traveled once and stayed there for hours, thus making better use of my time.  But I was also charging the same kinds of rates I did for their businesses. They expected certain pricing, and I was giving it to them.

As I gained customers outside of my existing commercial customers, I found that these new people had different expectations.  They thought I was amazingly cheap, and I was. On the upside, they enthusiastically told their friends. This locked me into these low cost expectations for many years. I liked staying busy. The low prices got me lots of phone calls, and soon other cleaning services discovered that there was a window cleaning wholesaler in town! Three cleaning services started retailing my services to their customers.

For a long time, I thought the main value I offered was low price. I know I did good work, and people appreciated it. But I also knew that I was the first window cleaner many of my residential customers ever had. They had previously NOT VALUED WINDOW CLEANING. Now they did. And they kept giving out my name and I kept getting new jobs.

Over the years I have had to reassess the value that I am really offering. Here is the new list:

1. Lower price. Yes, even though I have raised my rates in the past several years, I have not yet caught up with some other professional services.
2. Competence. Cleaning windows in a house is tricky. I see lots of ruined screens from homeowners who could not figure out how to access the window, let alone getting the screen out.
3. Reliability. People like to know that when I come, I will be in and out in a predictable amount of time. Sometimes they have appointments and NEED me to be done within a set time frame.
4. Trust.  It takes a load off their minds to know I am not rifling through their stuff, looking for wallets and purses or small valuables.
5. Friendship. This intangible grows over a long period of time. My customers have known me longer than a lot of people in their lives. They keep up with my family and the interests we share. These are the people who confide in me that I am not charging enough. They don’t send me to people who are potentially bad clients. And I hook them up with other reliable people I know who can fix their plumbing and repaint their houses.  And I don’t abuse their friendship by overcharging them.

In short, you can start offering the first 3 value propositions right away. But the last two take time, and are the most valuable to both you and your customers.

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