Expanding Your Window Cleaning Business…and Some Questions.
Hi All,
I hope you are having a fine day today.
I haven’t posted to the blog in a few days due to a few other tasks needing to be done. For example, over the years I’ve realized that window cleaners really need some good low cost webhosting for their websites, so I finally decided to put together a hosting package specifically for window cleaners and other service business owners. Stay tuned as more news is coming soon.
Anyway…I recently received an email from a window cleaner with some questions. I thought it would be good to post here.
Steve,
It’s been a while since we’ve actually spoken, this is Peter. I’ve been in college and doing window cleaning in the summers, I purchased your package about two years ago. Needless to say business has been great, and I’ve built up quite a customer bank over the last two summers.
This summer I am planning on bringing on help because of the workload, and am looking generally to expand a bit, so a few questions. I’m looking for general ideas about the following, there may be nothing to say, but you may have heard that “this works” or “this doesn’t” Thanks for your time. . . .
1. What is the most important thing to look for in hiring someone new?
2. Is there a preferred age for employees?
3. What is the best way to train someone new? (speaking of which, I want to have them read through your book before they start, something to do to get excited untill summer officially hits)
4. Provide a car /use their own
5. concentrate on current area again with mailers/flyers etc. or expand?
My Response:
Hi Peter,
How are you? Long time, no talk. 
)
It’s good to hear that your business is doing great. Very cool.
–The most important thing to look for in an employee in my mind is appearance. If you’re working the residential market, your customers really need to feel comfortable with who is in their home. So whenever I hired someone, I always looked at their appearance first.
–There is no preferred age for a quality employee. I had men and women of all ages work for me. You’ll run into a dud young person just like there will be the occasional dud older person. ) I did find that college students made good employees for the most part because they liked the flexibility of the work and I didn’t need to commit to using them for 40 hours per week. So it was nice for both them and me. Older folks are nice though too. They’re definitely more stable, but they also might have more demands (need more money and work hours) since they usually have more responsibilities to fullfil.
–I always put a new person through a 90 day probationary period. They worked side by side with me or a crew leader. Don’t let any new person run loose or go to jobs by themself until they’ve at least gone through this 90 day period. Sure you can have ‘em read my manual (only chapter 5 because if they read more than this, they might get ideas to start their own window cleaning business) for window cleaning techniques. But I personally would just train ‘em for a couple of hours. Hands on training one on one. Cleaning windows is easy, so it shouldn’t be that hard to train someone one on one.
–I wouldn’t provide them a vehicle. Let them use their own from job to job. But I would cover some of their expenses depending on the work they did for me. If they did a real quality job or did a job in a speedy fashion, I paid them extra. You can call it a bonus, a car allowance, etc. etc., but whatever it’s called, it was over and above their hourly pay.
–I’m not sure if I can answer your last question w/o knowing how hard you’ve marketed to the current area already. Have you spent some good quality time marketing to your current area? I mean really, really hit the area up multiple times? If so, then definitely expand outward for sure. Tried and true Flyers work very well. I got an email from a window cleaner recently saying he went out for 3 1/2 hours with his 2 sisters and mother and generated $1700 in estimates in that time from just under 1000 flyers distributed. So I always advocate using flyers in your business. I did this every single saturday and it generated excellent activity.
With that said though, at some point you’ll want to integrate some postcard mailings into your marketing efforts too. You can read more about this in my manual.
Hope the above helps. Take care for now and keep in touch. Have a great night.
Regards,
Steve
