A Little Rain Anyone?

Before posting an email I recently received, I urge you to stay tuned to this blog for some exciting news to be released this month. Not sure exactly when, but you'll be the first to read it right here.

Oh…and I recently put up a website specifically for Send Out Cards which is an outstanding hands-off referral building system. If you're not working the referrals like you should in your window washing business, I urge you to check this system out. There's also a short video on the site you can view with more videos to be introduced shortly. And I set up a free gift account if you want to see first hand how easy and fast working with Send Out Cards is. Click here for the website

Ok, I received an email about what to do when it rains. Here it is:

Hi Steve:
 
How's it going. Well, I did some estimates and I can say that I improved on my pricing. I am losing my fear of pricing, and I'm getting into the mindset that these people are calling to have their windows cleaned by a professional so I must show up and be the professional.
 
I am concerned about one thing though. What happens when it rains. I just had a customer call me to cancel because it is going to rain the day I clean their house. What do you do on rainy days. Do you do estimates? Do you clean windows? If so, how? This is something that I knew would come up but I didn't know what I'd do about it. So if you could give me your professional advice I would really appreciate it. Thanks.
 
Cordially,
 
Marvin

My Response:

Hi Marvin:

Good morning.  Good to hear from you.

Yeah…it takes a little time to get comfortable with the pricing issue.  As you mention, all it takes is you thinking that you're a professional and feeling comfortable that prospects are willing to pay a bit extra for professional service.  Not all will obviously.  But most will.

Right…rain can be tricky. In florida, we had rain most every day in the afternoon during the summer months.  To allow for rescheduling, I would stick jobs on either friday, saturday, or sunday if needed.  My general work week was monday through thursday.  On friday I did my estimating.  So it was a day I could use to schedule a job if I needed to. My next open day was saturday if I absolutely needed to stick a job there.  Last but not least (but rarely), I would do a job on sunday.

One thing to keep in mind though is that window cleaning is not an absolutely urgent need for your customers in most cases.  Sometimes it is urgent because the customer may be having a party or get together coming up soon.  But generally it's not urgent.  So if someone cancels, you can move them to another day during the week like 3 weeks from today for example.  That was my first option actually.  It really worked well.  Because what happened is customers knew how busy I was.  So rain or no rain, they rarely cancelled because if they did, they knew I wasn't going to be able to come back for a few weeks. 

But as mentioned above, if the customer absolutely needed their windows cleaned as soon as possible, then I would stick the job on friday, saturday, or sunday.  My preference though was to schedule the job during my regular week of monday through thursday whenever my next opening slot was.

Hope this helps.  Take care for now.

Regards,

Steve