Hey All,

This email came in the the other day from a fellow window cleaner, and it contains a mighty cool marketing idea to implement in your window cleaning business as soon as possible. Enjoy!

Regards,

Steve

Steve,

A friend of mine and I were brainstorming this last week end and I think we have found a way that we will NEVER want to stop flyering!

How many flyers would a person want to put out if they were averaging $30.00 per hour just for putting them out? I talked with a handful of business owners (some I do their windows, some I don’t) and offered to distribute their flyers for them at a rate of $5.00 per hundred. 6 of them said yes immediately!

They said that they could not hire someone at minimum wage to put them out at that rate, which is true. I have door hanger bags that I use for my flyers, and it is not much trouble at all to put a few more in the bag along with mine. I get the bags for about $60.00 for 5000 of them. I think this is a great way to keep a little revenue coming in to pay for my own campaign as well as pay for my time doing it. I thought you might want to pass this idea along to the rest of the gang.Have a great day.

Regards,

Kelly Matteson
Window Pros

My Reply:

Hi Kelly,

Good morning.  I think that’s a great idea for sure.  A great way to save some serious flyer distribution costs or maybe even break even with no costs out of pocket. Love it. There’s nothing quite like marketing for free.    Very cool.  What I would do to carry it a step further is to hire as many people as you can that allows for you to break even which will allow you to get out some tremendous numbers. In other words, I wouldn’t look at distributing flyers for other business owners as a way to make money. I would take whatever money you receive from them and invest it into however many people you can until you reach breakeven. Bottom line…zero out of pocket costs that generate jobs and profits for you. Can’t beat that.

Ex: If you’ve done the math and have 6 fellow service business owners who are interested in using you for distributing their flyers along with your own, and you can get 3, 4, or 5 people pumping ‘em out for you at a breakeven point, then that’s what I’d do most definitely.  You’ll be way ahead of the game for sure.  Obviously time is money as we all know, so in addition to the marketing costs, I’m always looking at any way possible to avoid having to spend the time hoofing it through neighborhoods myself. 

Anyway….just a thought.  And thanks so much for the idea and your email. I’ll post this on the blog so that other window cleaners can see it and possibly benefit from it.  Thanks again.        

If any window cleaner is part of an organization like bni.com or some other networking group in their area, I would think it would be very easy to come up with a few small businesses willing to pay a few bucks to get their flyer distributed.  Everyone is looking for low cost advertising.  Especially in this economic climate.  

Take care for now and have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

Good day Steve,

I am building a budget for the business. I would value your opinion and experience. In the beginning as a one man band, I am estimating $100 per month for supplies and $500 per month for advertising. I expect to follow your strategy of hitting an area on Saturdays or nights to minimize mailing costs and blanketing everything with a piece of glass. How’s that for a gung ho attitude. Both of these amounts assume that I have your reccomended advanced supply list from ABC, incuding the setups in 1/4" increments. I also am assuming a well stocked supply of postcards, business cards and flyers that would already be on hand.

Doug

My Reply:

Hi Doug,

Good morning and it’s good to hear from you.

Actually I think $100 a month for supplies is too much.  I mean after your initial purchase, there really is no supplies that are needed on an ongoing basis. Towels get rewashed/dried, the glisten lasts a long, long time, etc.  The only supplies you’ll need is probably new blades for your scraper in about 4 to 5 months.  And if you hire someone else, then you’ll have to buy ‘em another bucket on a belt, another scraper, etc.  But that’s really about it.  So again, there’s no ongoing supply expense.

$500 a month advertising is perfect.  But don’t limit this to just yellow page advertising or community newsletter advertising.  Take a proactive approach and spend the bulk of this $500 on hiring a couple of guys/gals to distribute flyers for you regularly.  Purchasing flyers is inexpensive as you know, so you’ll be able to literally get out thousands of flyers for a good amount of money.  This’ll generate immediate calls since you’re taking your message directly to the homeowner. 

I love the gung ho attitude.  )  That’s the way to do it.  During your first active 90 days in the business, really hit it hard.  It’ll provide you a real healthy customer base that you’ll benefit from throughout your entire business.

I’m not sure what your financial position is now, but keep in mind that the ABC Basic package is more than enough to get anyone started.  I’d rather see someone put their money into flyers and go with the ABC Basic package, and then reinvest into more squeegees (for additional sizes) and towels with the profits made from doing jobs generated from the flyer distributions.  But if you have the finances now for the ABC Advanced package, great.  It has everything you need.   

And having yourself 1000 business cards on hand would be great.  We can talk more about postcards later when you’re ready to apply ‘em.  But I’d go back through chapter 7 to read about how I distributed postcards.  Postcards work great, but for the best bang for your buck, it’s important to hit prospects over the head multiple times with postcards just like with flyers.  Postcards though are a tad more expensive, so it might be a bit tough to do both postcards and flyers and meet that $500 monthly goal. I personally would crank it up with flyers and then branch out into postcards after a few months once the profits are coming in regularly.  Just a thought.  But initially the goal is to go after as many numbers as possible for the lowest amount of money.  And flyers allow you to do that. 

I hope this helps. Have a great day today and I’ll talk to you soon.

Regards,

Steve

Doug’s Reply:

Steve 

I have been reading your success tips. You are a huge help for a new  small business starter. You get me thinking and focus me on the goal and help me avoid getting wrapped up in the process. The process is a  means to an end and I see it sometimes as quick sand. You need to get  through it but if you spend all your resources on tweeking the process  you will sink. You help me    with your stategies and tips. I read and  reread them.

I will keep you posted on my progress. I will give it  everything I got…..period. No shortcuts or excuses. When I get going  it’s like playing poker on tv  i am all in.  I am working ok my start  date which is coming slower than I hoped but It is tied to a family  move. Excuse my spelling and grammar. I am typing on a small handheld.  Thanks for listening. I believe you understand.

Doug

My Reply:

Hi Doug,

Good morning.  And I’m glad you like the tips.  Right…the process can sometimes drag people down if they let it.  Sure…some time initially needs to be spent on the process, but I’ve seen people spend way too much time on the "process" and "getting ready".  It’s kind of like "ready, aim", "ready, aim", "ready, aim", but there’s no "fire" in there.  So they end up on this hamster wheel going round and round.  This could be for a number of reasons with "fear" being probably the biggest.  I think that’s the number 1 reason why people will hold back and not go petal to the metal and gung ho in their business. 

Other folks just want to make sure the time is right.  Well…there is no perfect time.  No such thing.  Still other folks want to become a master window cleaner before they do their first house for a customer.  To these individuals I say that it’s necessary to allow for some learning on the job.  Because as you do house after house after house for your customers, there will be adjustments that you’ll make along the way.  So "Just Do It" as the nike commercial says. 

Anyway….if you do the initial work and go through the process (getting your supplies in order, practicing on a few homes, etc.), you’re ready go.  Just hit it at that point and understand that you’ll be fine tuning your own technique that suits you and your business.  You’ll make a few mistakes, but we all did.  This is all part of the learning on the job process we all have to go through.  Learn from ‘em and move on.  Just keep on moving.  I can’t stress that enough. 

Don’t be one of these window cleaners who stays home waiting for the phone to ring from a yellow page advertisement.  Always be proactive in your approach.  If you do, and you do it consistently, you’ll create a snowball that couldn’t stop if you wanted it to.  And there is no better feeling my friend than looking at your schedule seeing that your next few weeks on your schedule are filled with jobs.  That’s one mighty fine position to be in.  )

Take care for now and please keep me posted.  Have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

Steve,

I am in the process of having your marketing materials modified by the source that did yours , with my own contact info. Here’s where I have hit my stumbling block. I’ve never done a direct mailing, I didn’t know if you had any idea of what is the best way of selecting your target addresses to mail to? Income? Property value? I’m trying to figure out what’d be best. I was looking to mail to each potential client 6 times a year minimum so at least every other month. I know massive action is the best way to go, so I’d like to try and get out at least 50,000 postcards or more if I can afford it.

Luke

My Reply:

Hi Luke,

Good morning. Barbara is a great person to pick for doing design and edits, so she’ll treat you good and make sure you’re happy with everything she’s done.

The first thing that I would recommend that you do is go back into chapter 7 again and reread the method of mailing that I did.  Because I didn’t do any specific mailings to homeowners based on income, property value, or any other criteria.  I kept it real simple by doing "carrier route" mailings.  When you mail to a carrier route, you’re mailing to each home in the route.  So the postcard would be addressed to "Postal Patron", not to the individual homeowner.

The key is to do some initial research by driving into various subdivisions and deciding whether they are your ideal prospects. But it’s really easy to decide that though.  As soon as you enter the subdivision, you should have a pretty good idea whether it’s your target market or not.  Then using either a local direct mail house or dick tudor (the person who did all my mailings…info. in manual), you give the mail house a street number, street name, and zip.  From there they can determine what route number the home is in.  So that particular home and all the surrounding homes in the route will receive a postcard.

I had the advantage of being able to walk into dick’s business and see an actual map on the wall of all of the carrier routes in my area.  So I could see for example that "haile plantation" was in route 67.  So I would instruct Dick to mail postcards to route 67 since I knew haile plantation consisted of homes that were in my ideal target market.

Once you’ve done your initial research and you pretty much know what routes are good routes, then it’s just a matter of routinely mailing to those routes.  A couple words of advice though: First, try and mix into your mailings some flyer distributions.  In addition to all the postcard mailings I did, I also distributed flyers every single saturday to various routes.  So the homes were getting hit from all angles.  Pay a couple of kids to do this for you and they’ll be able to pump ‘em out quickly. 

And the second bit of advice would be to not make the mistake of pumping out 50,000 postcards to 50,000 different homes.  You need to take advantage of the repetition factor, so it’s important to space those postcards out and hit homes repeatedly. 

You do mention about "if I can afford it", but the thing to do is to mail to just two to 3 routes at first.  This might be maybe 1500 to 2000 postcards initially (depending on how many homes are in each route).  You’ll get calls from this mailing which will turn into jobs which will provide you the dollars to reinvest. 

Now keep in mind that the first mailing gives you the lowest response.  So those 2 to 3 routes need to be mailed to again about 3 weeks later.  See how this works? So I wouldn’t look at it as 50,000 postcards at once.  I would buy 5000 postcards at a time, mail to a few routes, reinvest some profits back into buying another 5000, and then continue on. 

As a side note, a window cleaner recently mentioned a great printing source to me.  They offer a quality postcard (14pt thickness and UV coating), but their pricing is the best I’ve seen.  It’s http://www.gotprint.com  I was about to say it’s $105 for 5000 postcards.  That’s what it was the last time I checked.  But I just checked today and they have the pricing listed at $99.55 for 5000 postcards, color front/black back.  Unbelievable pricing. There’s not really any price break by buying more cards like 10,000, so I’d simply buy 5000 postcards at a time. 

If you have any questions on this, let me know.  It may even be better with a phone call. 256-546-2446.  But check out Chapter 7 again first though.  The next step is just deciding who to use for the mailing process.  You certainly don’t want to have to buy postal permits and do all this mailing stuff yourself.  So look for a local direct mail house to work with or contact Dick.  Again, his info. is in the manual. Take care and have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

Hey All,

A few days ago I received an email from a window cleaner asking me for some thoughts on how to drum up business right now to cover his typically slow january/february (he’s in a colder climate). I figured that all window cleaners might benefit from my reply to him, so it’s posted below.

I hope your year is going super so far. We’ll soon be coming up on the busy, busy, busy season. Yippee!! Please let me know if I can assist.  256-546-2446. Take care.

Steve

Hi Aaron,

Steve