Roller coaster of emotions here in Central Florida. On one hand most things are business as usual, on the other, panic/hoarder shopping is making things scarce unnecessarily. Trying to keep working while able to and jobs are available to build up a savings, but unsure of when clients are going to start cinching down on their spending and things start to dry up.
Business as usual: It’s midnight and I am typing up some bids for a few house pressure washing, window cleaning and driveway clean/re-sand/seal jobs and I have three window cleaning jobs to bid tomorrow. All is normal there. I purposefully scheduled this week off about a month ago because I just finished 4 huge driveway jobs in a brand new high-end housing development and I knew I needed a break to recover. It is giving me the time to reorganize and start calling clients individually to confirm appointments, where as I am normally reliant on my client management software (Jobber) and emails to confirm automatically scheduled recurring appointments. We are still allowed to go to work if we have it. No “non-essential” restrictions here yet.
I’d say about 90%+ of my clients are in retirement communities and so far I have not had any more than normal cancellations(4)/reschedulings(3) this month, than normal and have in fact been getting more calls for bids than usual for this time of year.
Oppositely: I went out to get some normal supplies for both my pressure washing and window cleaning jobs starting up next week and found it difficult to find HDX Outdoor and/or Clorox Outdoor bleach which is the base for my pressure washing detergent as well as finding larger bottles of Dawn Platinum, or any Dawn for that matter for my normal window cleanings. I guess there has been some panic shopping going on here almost as if a hurricane was coming, yet that’s not exactly the case. For some reason meat is now scarce in grocery stores here. But, if it really came down to it, we are still in Wild Turkey hunting season and we can hunt Boar and Rabbit year round.