Hi All,

I hope everyone is having a fine weekend and a big happy Easter to everyone out there in window washing land.

We’ve been busy over here putting the finishing touches on a hosting service we’ll be providing to window cleaners and other service businesses, so stay tuned for that.

And 3 Bears Window Cleaning Directory is going to go through some major restructuring over the next few weeks with a new name, a new look, and enhanced functionality for the search engines. We’ll keep you posted on this as well.

I’ve learned a lot about search engine optimization over the last few years in addition to buying the necessary software to achieve high rankings, so I’m going to pull out all the stops when it comes to getting window cleaners who are listed on the directory ranked high so that they can be found when prospects in their town are looking for window cleaners. So now is the time to create a listing for yourself if you haven’t already at 3 Bears Window Cleaning Directory.

Ok….I recently was sent an email asking about costs to get started in the window cleaning business. This is actually a hard question to answer because it really depends on how a person’s financial situation is, but hopefully you’ll benefit from the answer.

Steve,

I received everything and have read the manual twice since I received it.  Nice job.  I have looked at a lot of businesses over the years and owned 3 different ones and I must admit you seem to be dead on when it comes to the window cleaning business.  My career has been spent in sales and marketing roles so i really enjoyed all the tribal knowledge on the marketing side.

I do have one question as I look at planning my entrance to this business.  Assuming I follow your process to the letter and I will, what do you think would be a good solid amount of working capital to start out with?  Just for the record I would not be taking out any salary of any kind.  Just covering all expenses and supporting the marketing campaigns your recommend.  Can you give me a good estimate?  I am playing around with some numbers but I figured you might be able to give me some ballpark figure so I might use it as a benchmark.

Best regards,

John

My Response:

Hi John,

I appreciate your comments most definitely.

The capital question is a good one, but it’s a tough one to answer because I don’t know how deep your pocketbook is.  :o )  There are so many ways to get started with some methods (like postcards for example) costing a bit more vs other methods (flyers) that are less expensive.  So I always recommend that for folks who are starting on a shoe string budget, you really can’t go wrong with flyer distribution. They’re inexpensive to print and they provide a quick return.  It’s almost immediate.  What I would do this saturday is hire a couple of neighborhood kids, pay ‘em 20 bucks each, drive ‘em to a good subdivision filled with your target prospects, and let ‘em distribute for you.  A great investment.

Even after I had postcard campaigns going on autopilot though, I still continued to distribute flyers every saturday at 9am.  No more than 4 hours later, on average 1000 flyers was distributed. So if you do that consistently with 4000 going out each month for the first 6 months (and even beyond), it’ll build you a really nice customer base.

If you didn’t want to do any flyer distributions though and you had a few more bucks on hand, I wholeheartedly believe that postcards is the way to go. I do want to say that you should have (time and money permitting) as many marketing methods in place as you can. But with this said, postcard mailings really pack a punch.  If you set it up properly (info. in chapter 7) and are willing to be consistent with it, the rewards from postcards are excellent.

In terms of marketing, for $110 (not counting window cleaning supplies), you could be out the door with 1000 flyers (including printing and 3 people to distribute @ $20 each)  Postcards are a tad more expensive, but I’ve seen some good pricing at gotprint.com and psprint.com.  The last time I checked, gotprint has 5000 postcards for around 100 bucks and psprint has ‘em for $106 after the 25% discount they have going ’til april30th. Regardless where you buy ‘em, buying 5000 postcards at a clip will save you some good money.

The other costs involved are for things like signs, t-shirts, polo shirt, bus. cards, letterhead, etc. So if you decide to get it all up front, it might run another $250 to $300 max.  Personally i would get the bare minimium needed to create a solid impression to prospects and pay for the rest from job profits.  Just a thought though.

I hope this helps a little bit.  If you have any additional questions, please let me know. Thanks again for your comments for sure.  Have a great day.

Regards,

Steve
256-546-2446

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