Archive for June, 2007

Advertising to Gated Communities…

Here’s an email asking about advertising options for gated communities:

Good morning Steve

My Response:

Hi Jerry:

Good morning.

Two advertisements would be ideal for the kind of neighborhoods you’re describing. 

#1.  Go into the neighborhood and tell the guy at the entrance you need to talk to someone in the office.  You want to talk to them about the community newsletter.  When visiting the office, ask them specifically if they have any kind of community newsletter that you could advertise in.  This is a great way (and usually inexpensive) for you to have a nice targeted audience. I usually put display ads into the newsletter along with a testimonial from a person living in the development.  It really worked well.  You can see a copy of the ad I used in the manual.

#2.  Postcards.  This type of advertisement works great whether it’s a gated community or not.  The key to making this work though is consistent mailings.  You need to hit ‘em over the head multiple times.  If you go through Chapter 7, you’ll read about how I set up my postcard campaigns by using "carrier routes". Basically this type of mailing involves mailing a postcard to each home in a particular route. So there are no mailing lists to buy or any of that.  Your rural areas are broken down into routes.  So route 67 might contain 809 homes for example.  The postcard would be addressed to "Attn Postal Patron" and it would go to each of the 809 homes.  Again…it generated a great response and kept the phone ringing on a regular basis.

Hope this helps.  Please keep me posted.  Take care for now.

Regards,

Steve 

Insurance Questions…

An email I received recently asking some further info. on insurance:

Steve,

My Response:

Hi Dale:

Good morning.

I would not go to places like state farm, allstate, nationwide, or any of the captive insurance agencies like that.  They generally have only one main company to underwrite insurance policies.  You need a commercial agent who is licensed with multiple companies.  This allows them to farm it out to the different companies and get you the best rate and terms. 

As far as net quote, overall I’ve heard from many folks who have had positive experiences with them.  You were simply connected to an agent who was a dud.  It happens.  Not every single insurance agent is as helpful as we want ‘em to be.  I should know. I used to be in the insurance business.  )

The bottom line though is that you need to continue to call  "commercial" insurance agents locally.  Just let your fingers do the walking in the yellow pages and make some calls.  Get multiple quotes.  Some companies may want you in business for 2 to 3 years before they’ll write you a policy.  Other companies may require a minimum amount of 1M.  You just need to make the calls until you find the right agent who writes insurance with the right company who will provide you the best policy.  I know for a fact that it’s out there.  But it’ll take more calls then just State Farm and Net Quote.

So question 1 is answered above.  I would definitely go local.  Simply pick up the phone, look through commercial insurance agents, and make the calls.

General liability is for liability issues.  So let’s say that you were to leave your window washing solution outside while cleaning someone’s windows.  If a neighborhood kid tripped over it or slipped in it and broke his leg, your liability policy would pay his medical claim.

Bonding on the other hand is in case you or your employees/subs were to steal or damage any homeowner items.  My policy covered me and up to 5 employees for up to $5000 per incident. 

I do want to make a disclaimer here.  Although I was in the insurance biz and I’m pretty familiar with insurance policies, my focus wasn’t commercial policies.  I was more into life/health/auto/home.  So the above understanding of policy coverages is what I got from my insurance agent who explained it to me.  So I would recommend sitting down with an agent and getting a full explanation of what’s covered and what’s not.

Take care for now.  Have a great weekend.

Regards,

Steve

Scheduling and hiring…

An email I recently received:

Hi Steve!!

Troy

My response:

Hi Troy:

Thanks for your email and welcome aboard.  If you take action on the materials on their way to you, I can assure you that you’ll have a successful business.  And don’t forget that I’m just a phone call or email away.

Now on to your questions…

I don’t think your schedule will interfere at all.  The thing about the window cleaning business is that we’re not talking about an emergency type service like maybe a broken refrigerator or air conditioner.  We’re talking window cleaning.  So you can fit the customers around your schedule.  I had a backlog of jobs from 5 to 8 weeks out, so people will wait for you.  The key of course is to make them believe that you are the best man for the job.  And that happens during the estimate process.  You’ll see how it all comes together when you receive your materials.

I do recommend starting it solo and then slowly over time bringing people on board to help.  I hired my first helper 6 months after starting.  Just learn the business yourself from the inside/out, and then branch out.  I talk more about this in the bonus section in my manual.

I would caution you not to bring your friend on board right now.  This may be news you don’t necessarily want to hear, but there are some things you need to be careful of.  The first of course is to make sure you have enough jobs on your schedule.  It’s much easier supporting one person with jobs then it is supporting two people.  I’m talking primarily if someone is brand new to this business.  So I just wouldn’t put the pressure on you having to make sure you have enough jobs for both of you. 

Another potential problem is how do you pay him?  A percentage?  A flat amount per hour?  Both forms of payment can present their own individual problems.  I’m referring to the financial arrangement for partnerships which sounds like what you want to do.  If this other guy was looking at the same opportunity, I doubt he wants to be an employee, right?  If I were you, what I would do if you want to hire someone right away is focus on hiring a couple of kids that can massively distribute hundreds of flyers quickly.  I did this every saturday morning and the phone rang like crazy.  My only investment was $15 to $20 per kid. 

Making an investment in "help" is a good thing, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea to invest in the "team" approach fresh out of the starting gate.  Put 100% of the profits in your pocket and then grow over time. 

I hope this helps.  Take care for now.

Regards,

Steve 

Not making the hourly income you should?

First of all…happy belated father’s day to all the fathers out there. 

Before getting into an email I received, I thought I’d share this cool video with you.

To continue on, I received an email where the sender is asking some questions about his hourly pay and how it’s not where it should be. My response is below his question. 

Hi Steve

Regards
Dave

My response:

Hi David:

Good morning to you.  I took yesterday off so a little bit of a delay in getting back with you.

As a side note, I did secure the domain for you that you get as part of the free website bonus of The Customer Factor. So whenever you’re ready with the text, just pop it on over.  And we can always put a "Page Under Construction" sign on the testimonials webpage if you don’t have your testimonials ready.  So no probs.

As far as your hourly situation…

What you are experiencing is what every single one of us experience when we first get started.  I hear this a lot from folks just getting into the biz.  It does take time to develop confidence where you can burn through houses quickly. In addition to this though, your pricing in the early stages of your biz does need to be fine tuned until you hit on the magic number where 80 to 90% of the prospects are saying "Yes…clean my windows".

Let’s talk specifics.  Many new window cleaners get hung up on the scraping part.  It should take you no more than 5 to 7 seconds max to scrape the outside glass.  It’s real quick.  You don’t need to line up your scraper and go row by row.  It doesn’t need to be as methodical as that. 

Another thing that plays into being slow is perfectionism.  This is what I’m going to talk about this week on the blog or in an email.  I’m a perfectionist and many folks are also perfectionists when first starting.  The tendency is to get each window absolutely "perfect".  So usually what ends up happening is that you’ll clean the window and then you look at it from different angles to make sure it’s perfect and there are no marks or blemishes. I used to bend down and do all sorts of crazy things just to see if any spots were there.  I’d do the same thing when I was inside (looking for outside spots) and more often than not, there would be some which would cause me to go back outside and spend another 1/2 hour or more getting the marks off.

The above is simply cured by mastering and believing in your squeegee stroke.  So starting out, you will make less than the average window cleaner.  It takes a bit of time to get the squeegee stroke down pat so you can move on to the next window and not spend time going over the window you just did. 

So after a few dozens jobs, you should have total confidence in your squeegee stroke and you will have developed your own way of doing things that fit you.  When you’ve reached that stage, you will then be whizzing through houses and making $45 to $50 per hour or more.  You’ll know exactly what needs to be done and you’ll be able to do it fast.  In the beginning we all stumble and bumble our way around because it’s all new to us.  Make sense?  I will say though that after the first handful of jobs, you will notice your speed picking up.  So it’s not like you won’t see any improvement until you’ve done a "few dozen" jobs as mentioned above.

And yes…it is important to look at pricing also just to make sure we need to be where we need to be.  This could certainly have a part in us making less than we want to. 

On the job you did, I would have charged $5 for the windows.  All the other pricing is fine, although because it’s such a low estimate, I would have gone $2 on each screen.  Or at least do some kind of bump up.  If using $5 for windows and staying with $1 per screen, I come up with $105.  That adds another $13 to the job.  Then I probably would have bumped it to at least $119.  So that adds another $14 to the job.  The bump up though really depends on the prospect and how you think she’ll react to it.  I’ve also bumped up jobs that were in the low one hundreds to $129 and $139.  Again, it’s up to your "feel" for the prospect.

My own personal attitude was that it just wasn’t worth driving anywhere for a job less than $100.  So if the true estimate fell below a hundred, a bump up was automatically necessary.

A word of caution though…when you’re just getting started, you really want any and all jobs you can get, so I would be careful with going too crazy with bump ups.  At the same time though, you certainly don’t want to be cheapo because keep in mind there is an excellent chance you’ll be doing the customers again and again (assuming you do a great job the first time).  So if you were too cheap at first, when you come around the 2nd time, it’s kind of demotivating doing a job that you know you’ll make only $25 an hour or so.  But I firmly believe that the $15.33 per hour you did would turn into at least $30 an hour if it was 3 months from now.  Because you would be much smoother from beginning to end. 

And based on my calculations, a house like this should also take you no more than 3 to 3 1/3 hours for one man.  But again though, taking 6 hours at the beginning of your biz is the norm.  I wouldn’t worry about it in the least.  If you do feel that there’s something missing, you should refer back to the chapter in the manual where I talk about window washing techniques.  Those techniques combined with my pricing in chapter 8 did provide payouts of $45 to $50 (sometimes more) an hour for my business.  So if you can master them, you’ll reach that stage also.  Anyway…refer back to the manual as needed to help fine tune your techniques.       

The above are some things to think about, but the main thing is to just allow yourself a few dozen jobs to get into the groove and develop your own level of confidence.  After you’ve put these few dozen jobs under your belt, you will be making a consistent $45 to $50 per hour.  There is absolutely no doubt about it.  So to respond to your last question: You’re doing nothing wrong at all.  Yes, you may want to tweak your "per window price" by a dollar, but other than that, just keep on working at it and develop the confidence in your scraping, squeegee stroke, towelling, etc. and it’ll all come together nicely.  And this confidence will allow you to move on to the next window without wasting time on a window you already cleaned. 

Hope the above helps. 

Regards,

Steve

David’s 2nd email to me on same subject.

Hi Steve

My Response:

Hi Dave:

Right…getting every little spot is only natural. We’ve all been there.  )  And I would recommend that you continue to get every spot.  Here’s the thing to keep in mind though:  You can do an excellent job (and get every spot) without being a perfectionist.

It took me awhile to realize this.  It all stems from the confidence in your window cleaning technique.  When you trust it 100%, you’ll know the chances of any spots or streaks left behind are slim to none.  Therefore you can move around the house at a much faster clip.  But this confidence only comes with time and a few dozen jobs under your belt.  It’s easy to teach someone how to clean windows.  But as mentioned in my earlier email, being fast just comes from experience.  In a few months we’ll look back at this $15.33 per hour that you made and have a good laugh.

I did get your website doc.  for the free website offered through The Customer Factor. I’ll get on it in the next few days and send you an email when I’m done.  If you have any more questions, please let you know.  Take care for now.  Talk soon.

Regards,

Steve

Email address? Website?

A question asking about the need for an email address and website on marketing materials:

Hi Steve

My Response:

Hi David:

I would think long term if I were you.  In other words, the best image for your company is to not have an email address on your marketing materials like david@aol.com.  In my opinion, you need to have an email address that matches up with your domain name which of course needs to be a name that matches up with what your company does like clearviewwindowwashing.com.  It looks much better to have david@clearviewwindowwashing.com on your business card/marketing materials then an aol, comcast, hotmail, etc address. 

An option to using a junk email address is to simply leave all email addresses off marketing materials and then edit the materials when you have a website so you can use the email address(es) offered through the website.   

As a side note, I would start thinking about an online presence soon.  I’m not sure whether you are aware of it or not, but not only can your website be a great way to enhance your image, but it can bring you in free traffic through the search engines.  So if someone types in "window cleaning in <your city>", your website may display and you’ll generate additional calls/jobs.  Again…these jobs don’t cost you any direct dollars to get.  

It is a bit costly and requires some technological background (html editing, ftp, editing dns info., etc) to create your own website, but in leiu of that, The Customer Factor is an option for you to get a solid online presence for little money and no computer/website knowledge at all.  Because a free website does come with each membership.

In my opinion, the website alone is worth the cost of the program.  Especially considering that you can gain customers for free from the search engines.  As an additional note, some prospects will prefer to research you and your business from the comfort of their home.  They may not want to call for fear of being "pressured".  Only after they feel comfortable with you online (by looking at your website), will they then call you.  Not everyone is like this obviously because you will get a number of direct calls (from postcards, flyers, etc), but there are definitely some people who prefer checking out a website first.   

Hope this helps. 

Regards,

Steve

Should you have an “estimate day”?

An email asking about estimating:

Steve, I have a couple questions.
 
1. You mention you have an "estimate day." For someone who is not established and working mainly off referrals, such as yourself, if I told a prospect that I wouldn’t be there for 3 or 4 days to give an estimate, wouldn’t they find someone else who would come right out to estimate? Seems like it.
 
2. Why the 2-stroke, and not the S-stroke?
 
-Tracy

My Reply:

Hi Tracy:
 
Good morning.
 
Right…I took an entire day to do my estimating.  I found that it works better instead of trying to squeeze in estimating between jobs.  Plus my uniform was different when working vs when I did estimates.  And I always wanted to look my most professional best on estimate day (polo shirt, dockers, etc).
 
But you are right in the fact that when you are first getting started, it’s best to do them as quickly as you can.  I would line up 10, 12, 15+ estimates on fridays, but obviously for someone who is fresh out of the starting gate, they won’t have that many to do.  So each estimate can certainly be fit into a working day between jobs or after jobs.
 
As far as your comment though "wouldn’t they find someone else who would come right out to estimate".  Yes, that could happen, but I didn’t find that to be the case overall.  The trick is to semi-close them on the phone and convince them you are worth waiting for.  If they know you’re good and trustworthy, they will wait.  Trust me on that one.  I had a schedule consistently 5 to 8 weeks backed up with jobs.  You would think folks might call other window cleaners to get their jobs done sooner, right?  They didn’t.  They waited for me and my teams.  Again though…similar to what I talked about above, at the beginning, you really don’t have that reputation yet.  So for the first few months, I would recommend jumping on any and all interested prospects as soon as possible.
 
I used the 2 stroke because my specialty was residential glass.  I didn’t feel the need to learn the s stroke because I wasn’t spending my days doing large panes of commercial glass.  How large is a normal residential window?  Not too large.  So I could very quickly (5 to 7 minutes in/out) do these size windows with my good ‘ole 2 stroke technique.  My focus has been and will always be residential glass so that’s why I do what works best for residential.
 
Have a great weekend.
 
Regards,
 
Steve
256-546-2446

A Postcard Question…

Here is an email asking me a couple of postcard/flyer questions:

Hello Steve, I ordered your window washing package last year, I read it last week and think its wonderful. I live in <location deleted for privacy>, I see most of the upper class developments are gated, is it possible to run this business by mailing out postcards and staying away from the lower priced homes with flyers?

I was going to start wtih 5,000 postcards and then follow your directions on repeat mailings. I have enough money for 10 mailings. 50,000 postcards, Thank you, Dominica.

My response:

Hi Dominica:

Sounds great and thanks for your comments. You most definitely can run this business by mailing out postcards.  You generally don’t want to focus on lower priced homes anyway, regardless whether you market with flyers, postcards, door hangers, etc. 

And can I make a suggestion? I would slowly work your way into a full scale postcard campaign instead of working with the mindset "I have enough money for 10 mailings/50,000 postcards". Because you need to be able to alter and change your mailing strategy until you know the neighborhoods which give you the response that you want. 

And if done correctly, you should also be getting a regular stream of callers which will turn into jobs which will allow you to reinvest into further mailings. So there will be no need to reach into your pocket for "50,000 postcards". Simply reinvest from profits and you’ll be good to go.

So to confirm, just start out mailing to 1 to 2 carrier routes if you’re using the carrier route method of mailing
(recommended). 1 to 2 weeks later mail to a 3rd route if you want to, but I wouldn’t diversify and spread yourself out to too many different routes.  This’ll spread yourself out in too many different directions and dilute your efforts.  The key is to focus on a few routes first. Entrench your business and service into those routes/neighborhoods and then expand into other/different routes. 

I’ve always found that repeated mailings work best as you mention you’re going to do, so that’s great. But I just wouldn’t think about it in terms of "50,000 postcards". Make sense?  Ease your way into it and you’ll have much greater success overall. Anyway, just my thoughts.  If you need any assistance setting your campaigns up, please let me know.  Take care.

Regards,

Steve
256-546-2446

T Shirts and Printing companies…

An email from a window cleaner asking where I bought my t-shirts:

Hey Steve, How are you? I just wanted to ask where would be the best and cheapest place to buy customized work shirts? Do you know of any places that has no minimum requirements?
  
Thanks Steve and take care!
Mike

My Reply:

Hi Mike:
 
It’s good to hear from you.  Doing just fine, just fine.  How are you doing over there?  Raking in the profits? 
 
As far as work shirts, I found a screen printing company in the yellow pages.  They had a small minimum of only 6 shirts.  It ran $50 for 6.  The chance of you finding someone with no minimum would be hard because they do have set up time and initial expenses involved.  So most places aren’t willing to do only one or two shirts.  It’s not worth it for them.  And that makes sense.  If you look in the yellow pages though, you should be able to find a "screen printer" with a low minimum like 6 or 12.   
 
Another option is to do a search on google for "screen printers". 
 
Take care for now and have a profitable day.
 
Regards,
 
Steve

A follow up email from Mike:

Thanks for the reply Steve. Doing fine here also, thanks! Yeah, I understand the setup time you explained but most of the companies I found had a minumum of 12 shirts and in the 150 to $200 range and with being new and having other bills I was just trying to find the least expensive route for now.
 
Another question I have is, Just out of curiousity, How much do a thousand business cards usually run you with the card in your package? I took the marketing cd to a printing company today and she said 1 to 2 colors $80. To print the cards exactly like on the cd, it would be pretty expensive..in the $100′s is what she stated. She’s going to have another lady look at it tomorrow and call me with a quote. Does that sound right?
 
Thanks alot for your time Steve, It’s really appreciated!
Mike

My response:

Hi Mike:
 
The company I found with the minimum of 6 shirts was a small company run by one person.  So it does seem like the bigger companies are going to deal in higher minimums vs the one man/woman shops that don’t have quite the expenses the big boys have. 
 
That doesn’t sound right as far as the business cards go.  I would definitely recommend that you don’t get any full color printing done locally.  When I first priced my full color postcards, a local print shop wanted over $800 for 1000 cards.  I told ‘em to jump in a lake.  )  They’re just not set up in most cases to handle full color printing on a massive scale.  So they charge you an arm and leg for it.  Stick with the printing companies online who do this day in and day out.  The 3 I’ve used over the years are:
 
PSprint.com
48hourprint.com
Postcardpress.com

All have good quality products at reasonable prices.  For example, I just visited psprint and they have 500 business cards for $45 plus shipping.  5000 postcards is under $300.  There is no way a local print company can match that or even come close.  Plus psprint recently upgraded their card stock from 12pt to 14pt giving you a thicker business card or postcard.  All you have to do is place order/make payment and upload your file to them.  Some folks will have barbara edit the files and get ‘em ready for either of the 3 companies above.  Other folks take their desired file to kinkos for example, and have them make the edits.  Once the file is edited, it’s just a matter of making payment and uploading the file as I mentioned.  Easy.  And reasonably priced.  So I would run as fast as you can away from that print company that said it’ll be hundreds.  The only thing local printing companies can do at decent prices is company letterhead. 
 
Hope this helps.
 
Regards,
 
Steve