Yes, it is very doable. I lived in a small town in Pennsylvania and had the same trouble where I had to travel far to jobs. I also had another full time job that I had to be back at by 4pm and work till midnight. I did 70 clients with a mixture of commercial and residential; mostly homes though. I charged for my work and sought mostly expensive homes so thats what helped. I could of did more but having the other job put a small damper on me with scheduling big jobs during the week. Saturdays I usually went out to do big jobs.
Make small goals and keep these goals in a 3 ring binder. If you have no money for marketing/flyers at least go out and talk to builders or knock on doors and hard sell your services. Bring a photo album and show that your a professional. Anything is possible when you set your mind to it. Focus and Consistency are the key words here. Maybe you can shovel snow or plow during the ‘off season’. Do gutter cleaning in the fall season. Pressure washing is another good business you can add. Don’t give up!
I think you should hang Christmas lights in your off season. That can make some pretty good money. You might also think about snow removal as well. Maybe even house cleaning, janitorial type stuff.
Among my clientle, I have one customer with fifty-one stores. They average $60.00 apiece. They are done on a monthly rotation but I get to hit them early if corperate folks are coming to town, for an average of fourteen times a fiscal year rather than twelve. I can do five to ten of these a day, depending on proximity to each other, by myself. I use a “second”, and do ten to eighteen a day, when they have company coming. This assures all of their stores are looking their best for the visit.
So…one customer sale at $43,000 (annual gross)? or fifty one at less than a grand apiece? I think I will opt to call it one to boost the numbers on my customer average price : )
[B]THEGLASSMACHINE[/B]
[I]“because glass looks it’s best when you can’t see it”[/I]
Here in the UK 99% of window cleaning is done on a monthly regular cycle. As runken said smaller amounts can add up to much larger amounts over a year, and the work can be a lot easier as its all maintenance after the first clean. Untill a little while ago I had over 450 customers a month all regular contracts all of which could be maintained by one person at a push.
From what I can see most of the contracts over in the US are once a year one offs. Does any one do, or considered doing regular monthly work in the US?
If you can educate the customers it can be lucrative.
I make flyers that say something like “we’ve been cleaning in your area” blah blah, and hand them out when I’m done with a job. If you’re in the right neighborhood you’ll get those people who want to have the best looking house, and don’t want to be out-done by the “johnson’s”. Know what I mean? Its a quick way to turn one job into 5
I don’t think this applies to much to the UK market. I may be wrong, but definitely wasn’t the way when I was there. Wrong pitch for this sort of market I’d say.
Don’t make a total number of customers your goal. If you do this you’ll be racking up customers just to get numbers. You want high paying, qualified, easy to work with customers.
Which makes more sense, 6 customers that pay $50/hr or 3 customers that pay $100 hr? Same pay, half the time, half the customers.
Use great salesmanship to sell your superior service. Someone told me when I first started that it was really important to be able to turn down low paying jobs even when your not super busy. I’m really glad I listened to them!
