Storefront pricing

Hello all.

I am just starting from 0 today. I cold called many storefront, plaza, and strip malls. I will also be working with other commercial accounts. I plan mainly on building commercial routes at this point. Most of the storefronts, restaurants, and other businesses in San Diego do not use any window cleaning companies. Majority of these types of businesses just have filthy windows.

I am looking for advice on 2 things.

  1. Help with acquiring these types of accounts.

  2. Pricing system for storefronts.

Thanks
Dylan

They way I was taught to approach a business owner/storefront was to first find the GM or owner, whoever is the one who is going to authorize the payment. (Quick Aside: I was asked by the employees at a local national chain pool store to clean the windows for $20 cash so they wouldn’t have to, but the corporate managers will not authorize external companies to do that work. They want the employees whom they are already paying to do it, but these people have no training nor proper equipment to do it the way we can. The regional GM found out and will not let the employees pay out of their pocket for me to come by anymore.)

Anyway, find out who is going to eventually pay and ask them: “Who cleans your windows? Are you happy with their work? How often do they come by?” When you get the answer to these questions, you can then adjust your answers and regardless of their answers to those questions, you are just leading them to think about the service they are currently receiving and then you convey that you can do better. (Your price may be higher, especially if they are having untrained employees using “Glass Cleaner” and paper towels, mean while leaving streaks and smears behind.) Say “I can clean these windows for you every Monday morning so that your products are always seen in the best natural light everyday. I’ll do the exterior for $1 per pane and the doors inside and out at each visit.” (You can adjust the interval based on their interest in the price and I would also adjust your price based on your region and how dirty the windows get during that interval.)

Establish a minimum price for your time. If it is a small storefront in a strip mall with a door, overhead square (above the door) and 2 top and bottom sections for a total of 6 exterior panes and the inside of the door, instead of charging $7, have a minimum of $10 or $15.

Be consistent. Be consistent. Be consistent. Develop your route and be consistent. When you are reliable, your reputation will grow and your clients will recommend you to others. It will be harder for another “Bucket Bob” to come in and low ball your client and under cut you if you consistently do a great job and keep your client happy. They will pay a little more for you to do the work consistently.

Always focus on the doors with hand prints and smudges by the handles and use a damp rag to collect any drips from the glass cleaning process left behind on the handles/push bars. This is a twofold benefit, the patron of your storefront customer is not going to want to touch a wet door handle, just think about if you were to grab something and it was unexpectedly wet, you would think “Did someone snot on their hand and then grab the handle? Is this ebola germs on my hand now? Ewww!” or whatever. But you are also making sure that there are no insects or arachnids (spiders) building anything in the handle pockets that can harm someone grabbing into a blind space.

Hustle. If you want to make good money, you gotta hustle. Hopefully you are either young or in good enough physical shape to move at a good pace. In a strip mall setting, you should be able to do a complete pane of glass in 30 sec on average. Some of these competitive speed cleaners can do a roughly 4x4 pane in 3-5 seconds. This is not a real world scenario, but your speed and efficiency directly correlates to your income. In the strip mall if you have 50 panes to do, and you do it at 1 pane per minute, you’ve made $50 per hour (or 83¢/min) with 10 minutes given to set up and pack up. But if you can do those same 50 panes in 30 minutes, with the same 10 minute set up/pack up for a total of 40 minutes, you have changed your hourly rate by 30% to $1.25/min (or $75/hr).

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Not sure if you’re a people person or not, but be ready to step outside of your comfort zone. Most people find talking to strangers uncomfortable and usually tend to avoid it. You need to be able to find common ground and develop a rapport within a minute or two. This will get your foot in the door so they feel comfortable with you. If you can’t do that the conversation will be forgotten the next day. This is huge if they have someone, and decide to keep them for the time being. If anything with their current goes south, they’ll remember you and call.

Like @GSARMedic said find out if the have a cleaner, how happy, how can you offer a better value. Not necessarily a better price. And be prepared to let the sale drop if it isn’t a good value for both of you. If you’re giving an extremely low price, they may be happy but you won’t be and your consistency will drop eventually and in turn they won’t be as happy. If it’s too high a price, you’ll be great and happy, but they will be more likely to accept bucket bobs service when he comes calling and then you’ve lost an account.

Marketing in the service industry for smaller businesses is all about people skills. You could be the best window cleaner in the world, but if you can’t sell or have someone who can selling for you, you’re out of work.

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Excellent questions! Call me direct at 928.446.8983

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Thanks for the call Gabriel!

Thank you for the great responses @GSARMedic and @Ryan-BCML. Your advice is similar to the ideas in my head lol.

I think I have the hustle, basic window cleaning experience, experience owning a legit small business, and sales experience necessary.

Looking to get to $5k/month in revenue as fast as possible on commercial and storefronts. I will be blitzing and canvassing/cold calling everyday until I reach this point.

Any advice on acquiring storefronts quickly is helpful from here.

Thanks everyone for all the help!

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So from my experience here in San Diego so far regarding storefronts:

-most storefronts do not use a current window cleaning company and their windows are absolutely filthy
-cold calling in person worked okay but there aren’t many mom and pops in my area.
-I had decent luck on my second day calling corporate accounts and getting contact info for regional/district managers.

Still no accounts acquired yet and 1.5 days of work in.

I am willing to do whatever it takes to get business revenue to at lease $5k/month immediately. I just walked away from a previous business that I owned with a franchise cleaning company so I feel I have most of the skills necessary to make this very possible.

Any extra help is much appreciated!!

Stay at it and stay focused. Keep your eyes open and market yourself. Have you considered residential work as well?

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I am getting some residential work as well. Just taking time to get things going.

With my prior biz, I purchased it when it was already producing about 4k/month in revenue and it had 10k/month when I got rid of it. Unfortunately we are really needing to get this revenue up very quickly. Just not sure what works well.

Are you Shine Bright here in San Diego or elsewhere?

No not even in Cali. But stay at it, every minute you are out there, every account you see is a new possibility. I personally wouldn’t cold call. You need to build value and trust and that’s hard to do over the phone. Go there and offer to clean one or two windows for free if need be to show them the difference.

By cold calling I was referring to knocking on doors.

You are aiming too low. Even if you only made $60 per hour on a route, 5 days per week, 8 hours per day (you lazy ass), you will pull in $2,400 per week.

$9,600 per month.

You are not even working evenings or weekends.

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There is no quick way to get it. Period. Unless you buy contracts. Pound pavement, follow up, do it over and over and over again.

Buy a business (fast income, high cost), or build a business (slow income, zero cost).

The way I did it, was to treat it like a full time job, even when I had no work at all. Get up at 7am, start canvassing by 8am, don’t go home until after 5pm. Do that Monday to Friday every week. Soon enough you will find that piece by piece, your route is building. MAINTAIN!!! Keep the routine! It will take as long as it takes, but if you can survive, you will have the route that you need in time.

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