@Luke
Hey everyone! I’ve got a quick question for ya! I’m a small window cleaning and pressure washing business. I’m looking to get into my business head on, full time and quit my regular day job! As for all of you, being business owners and entrepreneurs, do you suggest focusing 100% and doing all the work yourself and maybe having 1 or 2 helpers? Or do you suggest letting the business grow, hire lots of employees and having more vehicles and crews on the road? I’m questioning this because some say you can be more successful and more profitable doing things yourself and not having to pay people to do it, while others say to just grow big and have more vehicles on the road with crews working all over…
Hello there! What are your goals exactly for the next 12 months? Are there certain things you want to accomplish, certain places you want to go or just things in life you want to enjoy?
There are pros and cons to doing it yourself vs becoming a big company. It depends on your level of action and how far you want to scale, You can’t generate real wealth with being a small guy especially if you take little to no action (most companies fit this category). You have to take massive amounts of action or way more than you normally would do. If you want to trade time for money, KNOW YOUR VALUE AND WORTH. Make sure you get a ton of money for your time, do not settle for anything less. You only have 168 hours a week just like everyone else. But will eventually want to become so huge, that your current problems will be nothing and you can pay for all of them.
If you want to establish a linear income or trade time for money, you will have more money but you will only have a single line of cashflow. Granted you will have numerous clients that contribute to that cashflow and you will own your job versus working for a company. However, if you break every bone in your body tomorrow on the job and you are in the hospital, you will most if not all your business if nobody is installed in place of your absence. Also your potential is only as great as time that you can put in, you can only do so much alone or with few people under you. However, you will oversee all the work yourself so you will only have yourself to blame if something goes wrong, so there isn’t much management involved.
If you want to establish a passive income or trade zero time for any amount of money, you will have multiple cashflows so if something does happen to you and you have lots of people helping, money will still be coming in. This will require tons of scaling, tons of management and its more want to deal with, because most are not built for greatness. Most people are good, but very few are great.
You probably don’t want to be rich yet, but just wealthy. The simple way to figure out if you are wealthy is this. If you were just to stop working period, could you survive on what is in your bank account without going back to work? Obviously if you have to do the work yourself, you are not wealthy. You can be rich and not wealthy working alone. But you can also be living decent (not rich but eventually will be) and wealthy with the right help. If money is coming into your account without you having to lift a finger and if the money coming in (assets) are greater than your expenses (liabilities), then you are wealthy.
What is based on observation. You cannot ever hope or become more successful doing everything yourself versus having the right help and letting the business run itself. General rule, if you have to do the work yourself or with few others, you are not a business you are just self employed. The minute you can walk away and have the operations automated, you are a business. Yes, there are lot of self made millionaires who did it alone, but the multi millionaires or billionaires always have good help. Look at Jeff Bezos, he has the same 168 hours a week just like everyone else, and lets just say he has 100000 employees. We will say they work 60 hours a week on average, this means Amazon is outputting 6 million hours of work PER WEEK which is more than we will ever do in our lifetime and its done in a week. This is also probably why he will be a trillionaire in the next ten years as well.
Now, if I were to outline goals for you, I would want to do this 1 on 1 with you, however I can summarize how this should be done. Do all these things to ensure you stay busy, if you do one of these things, do another and bounce back and forth between all these. Start acquiring customers through your power base (friends, family, neighbors, former co-workers, former bosses, even people who may have bullied you in school.) If you cant sell to people you know already, who can you sell to? Go get referrals from your current customers, send out direct mailers, go door to door, go visit storefronts, call, email, text, mail a letter to customers or interested parties. Start promoting your social media image (if you don’t know how, LEARN), start branding your business brand along with your personal brand, organize your runs too. Start training people for 3-6 months and have them start duplicating everything I am telling you. At this point, this should keep you busy for the next 5 years but you may start getting good at it like I did in the first year. However, after 5 years, you should be able to slowly step away from your day to day duties and start enjoy life.
Summary, work for 5 years, then enjoy the rest of your life.
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@Jacob thank you very much, that was crystal clear and very helpful! I see myself growing big in 5 years and managing teams! I will take all of your advice and make it worth all my time and investment! Thank you for taking the time to write all that up, every single word was great to read! Oh and your summary pretty much says it all! What I really want is 5 years from now to be dealing with all the behind the scenes kind of things and let the work be done by my teams!
Thanks a ton!
This is a tough one. I think it depends a lot on how you operate your business and honestly your personal life too. We honestly want to grow our company. I dont think there is anything wrong with keeping it small either. It’s a tough question. I’d start with 1 employee and see how you like managing it.
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Thanks @Luke! That is definitely how I plan to start! I’m not getting off the truck or planning to kick back anytime soon! My idea is to grow slowly but surely while working hard and hiring the help I need to get the job done…one man at a time! When the time comes and if I see that I like managing a crew, I will hire more as time goes on and build my business and crew nice and slow! If I can afford it and I see that things are working well, eventually I’ll see where it takes me and decide weather I still want to keep doing the work or just manage and have people do it! Thank you very much for the tip and support!
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There is nothing wrong staying small when you start out, however if you know you are capable of much more, push for it. Worst that can happen is you stay small.
But staying small for too long leads to the road of obsecurity and the last thing you want is not to be known. You want everyone to know you and be talking about you, that’s why I am more for becoming big. Even if they aren’t talking about you all the time or if they don’t know you yet, you are everywhere in advertising and marketing where you are at least in the back of their mind.
Your success also depends on how relevant and known you are.
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Couldn’t agree more! Which is why I’m going to continue as I have been and promote more and more and get viewed and recognized everywhere I go and push to be known in hopes to eventually get big! Every year I’ve been expanding but not enough yet because I haven’t been putting so much time on self promotion due to having a full time job and unfortunately having a bit of fear of insecurity because I have a family to feed, but I’m pushing to get away from that fear and insecurity and go in 100% by next spring and make it big!!
I want to expand next year, I am familiar with Pressure Washing. But as far as using it for awnings and concrete work, what would be the best set up? How many gpm does one need for commercial work? Any help would be nice. Thank you all
@Cashman honestly, there isn’t really a specific setup or gpm that is necessary. It goes more with the type of job you are working and the nozzles used. You can have the most powerful unit, but if you use a 25 degree nozzle, it’ll never use the complete amount of pressure that the machine is intended for. I would recommend having the most common nozzles such as the soap nozzle (barely any pressure and normally pours in about 1:20 of your solution mixed into your water) then you need the 40, 25, 15, 0 degree nozzles.
I am currently running a 3100psi 2.4gpm unit and it serves for all my jobs and seems to be perfect! 
Thank you for the info. That means alot. I wouldnt of thought so many storefronts want their awnings cleaned
Normally I use it more for residential and not commercial but if you’re able to land store fronts go for it! Here in Quebec there aren’t many store fronts with awnings
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Hey Jacob- I’m curious how big your operation is? You seem to have a lot of insight.
Hey Charles! I understand where you are coming from. Let me be clear. Its definitely an ambition of mine to be the best I can. Having been labeled with Asperger’s Syndome, I worked my collective butt off to defeat that label every day. Part of my drive comes from my 14 years in the martial arts as a 3rd degree black belt in Shaolin Kempo Karate.
However with everything else, I am somewhat ashamed to admit this…but I am a novice at everything. I set goals for myself daily. Things don’t seem impossible anymore because to me it just means someone hasn’t done it yet. I just started out 14 maybe 15 months ago in this business. The techniques and concepts of window cleaning still feel foreign to me at times but I’m learning to allow the tools to move the way they need to. I enjoy learning and teaching on this forum. However most of my insight comes from a sales training program mentorship and learned a bunch in the past 8-9 months. So I can’t say the information is all my own but who has information that really is? The way I execute and animate my teaching to bring my point across is unique, just like anyone else. Also, I have a very unhealthy interest in reading people, and getting my way while still being ethical as I can. However, sometimes you have to just stop reading people and take them at their word. If you always look for things, you may miss bigger details. Instead, allow things to happen (don’t force them to happen) and you may find what you originally set out to search for.
I also read about 4-5 business books last year and listened to about 20 different audio books as well. I cannot stress this is super important but not as much as following the techniques and concepts in those books and actually applying them. Part of my business used to have 10 monthly storefronts and we had maybe 1-2 houses to do a month. This was the first 6 months of my business and I was wondering why things were moving slowly. I found out that sales is this invisible skill that drives industries and that in order to get what we want, this is something to be mastered. Interacting with people has always been fun for me. We have a few corporate accounts now with almost 50 storefronts (most are mom and pop shops) about 80% are monthly. I get about 4-5 house calls a week for consultations with the advertising we pump out. I have no sales people, a few of my best friends help with cleaning as does my girlfriend from time to time. Sometimes I have to solo houses.
The money I get to fund this operation, comes partly from my night job at a human services agency. I get paid to sleep 3 out of 4 nights a week, then do a medication pass and put the individuals on their day program vans after feeding them and dressing them. I stay up 1 night a week to make sure our individuals don’t fall over or have to be changed. I leave around 9 am, which is when I start my day. I figured I’m getting paid to do something I already do for free, and its a real easy job when I wake up. Also I’m in an overtime rich environment, so I actually help out at other houses in our organization as well during the off season of window cleaning (when I only do stores). However, I would like to leave in a few years. I worked plenty of minimum wage jobs and more than I care to count in the last 18 years. Being thirty now Charles, the only regret I have in life is I cannot buy my time back. But I would like to eventually enjoy what time I do have left to chase this reality of mine full time, and master martial arts (I have another 6 years before I can even be considered for a master rank, its a 20 year minimum in our system).
This was probably more than you wanted to know but I always present myself as a straight forward and honest individual. I hope you were not disappointed in anything I said, or made you think I was some guru of vast amounts of wisdom to dispense. I would like to teach one day on great big stages and help lots of people out. After all, there’s more than enough windows for everyone to clean. If I can figure out how to help people clean more of the world’s wonderful windows, then it would actually be a great service that is being done. It would be actually unethical, immoral and a disservice to not teach because I want to help solve problems, not cause them.
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A true inspiration! God bless you @Jacob🙏
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Thank you. I hope everyone else feels the same because this forum has so many great people on it. I know not everyone will have the same views or agree with me on things, but I will continue standing with what I am doing. If anyone told me over a year ago I would be learning sales and window cleaning, that would have been met with a funny look from me.
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Just keep doing what you’re doing bud! That’s all that matters! 
We have been in business for 29 years. At one point in the early 2000’s we had 6 trucks and 12 men doing everything from high rise to redidential. When the recession hit in 2008 we came out of it with a much smaller operation(2 trucks and 4 men). Currently we are down to me and my brother. Growing is great but it’s a tight labor market now and most aren’t looking to get into our industry. If you find some decent help and they have half a brain they will end up starting their own business. Just my 2 cents. Good luck and stay safe.
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Thank you for that! Very useful and helpful information! Wishing you and your loved ones a happy holiday season!
Along with the 0* nozzle, I highly recommend a turbo nozzle. It basically gives a spinning 0* spray. Works great!
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