Ah…the 1st "P" that can really effect your window cleaning profts. The 2nd "P" is procrastination. I’ll talk about that in another newsletter. 

I remember the very first window job I had. It took me just over 12 hours and I made $144.00. Wow!

Looking back though…I don’t think it was perfectionism as much as it was just a newbie trying to figure out how to clean a window. Everything took forever. From the squeegee stroke itself, to scraping, to toweling, to putting screens back, etc.

It takes time to master the techniques needed that’ll give the customer the best job.

As newbies, some of the things we bumble and stumble around wasting time doing are:

• scraping
• screen removal and cleaning
• doing our squeegee stroke-too much pressure onthe handle, too little pressure, or the squeegee on 2nd stroke isn’t tilted properly
• constantly looking for towels
• initial removal of equipment when first arriving at job

I always tell folks to not give any thought to their hourly pay or how long it might take ‘em to do a home if they’re early in their window washing career due to the above points of which any or all of them can slow ‘em down.

So again…assuming you’re new, spending too much time due to the above isn’t being a perfectionist. It’s simply a newbie trying to learn the ropes.

The "Mr. Perfectionist" I’m talking about is usually the window cleaner who has their squeegee stroke learned and mastered, but yet it’s just taking way too long to complete jobs.

I’m the first one to admit that I have perfectionist tendencies. Even after a few dozen jobs, and even after I felt super comfortable with my window cleaning techniques, I still didn’t trust it enough, so so I spent all kinds of unneeded time on touch-up. 

After cleaning each window, I would bend down and look at it from every possible angle to see if I got every single spot off and there were no streaks.

I would then do the exact same thing when I was inside the house. So I’d end up spending all kinds of time in touch-up. Sometimes as much as 45 minutes, an hour, and even an hour and a half just in touch-up work alone.

It was like some kind of comedy show. I’d be inside, outside, back inside, outside again. I’m sure I was making the homeowner dizzy.

I think to a certain degree, it’s necessary to take these kind of extreme steps or excess time at the beginning of our business as mentioned earlier. You want to make absolutely sure that the job is perfect.

But after you have your scraping, squeegeeing, and toweling techniques down to a science, you have to trust ‘em, and move on. No more spending oodles and boodles of time on touch-up.

We need to take 5 to 7 minutes to clean a window (inside/outside), move on to the next window, and not look back.

I spoke to a guy yesterday who said that sometimes he can spend as much as 15 or 20 minutes per window. This kind of time per window can totally put a damper on our profits.

He’s fairly new into the biz so I’m sure over time that 15/20 minutes will shrink. But he mentioned that some windows he does are just loaded with lots of dead bugs, hair, etc on the inside tracks. In that case, all that needs to be done
is to bring a small canister vacuum to the job. One quick swipe with the vacuum hose followed up by a wet surgical towel track rubdown, and it’s done. It’s not necessary to go to extremes and clean the tracks like you might detail a car.

Some people reading this article may misinterpret what I’m saying when I talk about how to eliminate the need to be a perfectionist. They may think that I’m advocating doing a sloppy window cleaning job.

No.

Fast doesn’t equate to sloppy…as long as you know your window cleaning technique and have confidence in it. 

And keep in mind that there is a fine line between doing a quality job and being an absolute perfectionist. Both types of service will please the customer, but the latter will affect your business, hurt your profits, etc.

A question to also ask yourself is this:

How often will a customer mimic our perfectionist tendencies? In other words, how often will a customer look at each window from multiple angles, and scrutinize the window? Few, if any, customers will do this. 

So if they don’t, why should we?

I think this was the turning point for me when I finally hit upon that realization. I was spending a bunch of time in touch-up, but yet at the end of the job when it came time to collect my check, the customer wrote it, said I did a great job, and that was it. No scrutinizing each window.

A few months later, they would call me to clean their windows again, so I knew they were satisfied with the job I did previously. And the same routine happened AFTER I stopped my touch-up. So it really just boiled down to the fact that I had to trust my window cleaning techniques and leave it at that.  

Anyway…

I get calls all the time from new folks just getting into the business. The most common question I get is how this job or that job took so long to do.

The first thing I say is to just give it time. It really does take time to master the window cleaning technique. Then we talk about different ways to speed up each job. More often than not, we’ll talk again a few months later and laugh about how fast he/she is now vs their lack of speed at the beginning of their biz.

I guess the jist of this article is that if you’re new to the window cleaning biz, and it’s taking you a bit of time to complete each job, don’t worry about it.  

I urge all new window cleaners to slow down and take their time in developing a quality window cleaning technique that they know works and does a great job. 

It’s ok making $20 to $25 per hour for the first few dozen jobs. Nothing wrong with that at all.

On the other hand, if you’re 2 to 3 months into the biz, then you should have the confidence in your squeegee stroke where you can now lose any and all perfectionist tendencies that you might have because you’ll know your window cleaning technique works and there’s no need to spend countless chunks of time reviewing and going over windows which you just cleaned.

As always, if I can be of service, please give me a ring a ling ling. 

To a profitable week,

Steve