No its not a joke. I’m dead serious. If you want to be pushing a squeegee when your 80 (If you live that long) then read no further. If your goal is to grow your business and hire on so you can stop pushing a squeegee and focus on growing your business and be able to retire early then keep reading.
Your not going to get rich pushing a squeegee. The way you are going to get rich is to grow your business. Yes there is room for technique but keep in mind that when your business grows your going to be hiring newbies who don’t know anything about window cleaning and how long will they be working for you? Long enough to get highly skilled at pushing a squeegee? I doubt it. Yah maybe one or two guys but most employees work for you for only a couple of years and move on. The point is your business model will do better centered around workers who have been quickly trained with basic techniques who developed some proficiency. This will allow you to more quickly adjust to the ups and downs of the market (hire on quickly during up times and not be so afraid to lay off and lose those well trained guys) and to deal with loss of employees due to quiting and firing. It will allow you to not hesitate to fire those bad apples and allow you to quickly grow a better fitting team.
Always having the latest and greatest squeegee or gadget also fits into this topic. Let’s face it, plenty of large companies have been grown, and thousands of customer have been satisfied with brass Squeegees. Yes there is room for upgrading equipment but constantly adding and trying out new things will bog you down and take your attention away from making money. What really counts is not what kind of squeegee you have but how you use it and your determination and focus to get the job done.
The main point is that it’s ultimately not the technique and different equipment that your using that is going to make the biggest difference in your success but rather your ability to grow, market, sell, and manage your company. The biggest factor in your success is your entrepreneurial skills.
Keep your brass squeegee and straight pull method and focus on developing your entrepreneurial skills and your growth strategy! The fancy techniques and fancy equipment will seldom be usedwhen you put down your squeegee and others are doing the work. Yes there are exceptions but the exceptions will happen naturally. You don’t have to focus on them.
Funny you posted this now. I tried my new exelerator this morning (minus angle adapter) and put it back in the truck after a few minutes. @JaredAI is loaning me an adapter so the jury is still out, but straight pulls are quick and easy. I’m starting to appreciate simplicity.
Several years ago I took some pretty good hits and decided to scale back. I have been running solo for the last several years. There are some benefits to it but in the long run the benefits of having employees far out weigh the challenges. I am ready to start growing this year and hire back on. My goal is to be working behind the scenes next year. I have a game plan and am motivated to work my plan.
That said my focus has been on growing my company. So these are the things I think about. The biggest challenge for good window cleaners in growing their business is often their own window cleaning skills and understanding that if they try to build a business model that surrounds their level of skill they will have more difficulty in growing it. They might still grow it but not as quickly.
Often times guys who have never cleaned window s before but have entrepreneurial experience have a much easier time growing a window cleaning business. For some of us it’s hard to let go of what we have beat into ourselves for so many years.
I did the same thing the other day. I have the fliq and didn’t like it. I pulled it out thinking it might help me in a job. I brought it along with my wagtail. I thought I would have some fun and save some time on the job at the same time. I tried both on the job. I even took the liquidator channel off the handle and put it in an Ettore with the fliq attached and tried it that way.
After about 15 minuets into the job I put everything back on the truck and slammed out the job with my Sorbo channel and Ninja handle. This is my point. Even if you figure out the perfect combination of tools the next guy is going to hate it. Your employees will all have different preferences. It’s best to build your business model around simple tools and procedures not around what you like best. What best suits you isn’t always what suits most people. Best to keep it simple so everyone can easily adapt to it quickly and you can spend your time focused on how to grow your business. Not on the perfect squeegee and technique. Let your employees figure that out for you.
I wish you the best in hiring again! Thats where im at too and have had a really good guy helping me last few weeks.
True. Hmm. Actually, after giving my guy some guidelines, I left him to work on his own the other day and then did spot check at the end. He did really well.
Additionally, that’s really how we learned is by just by repetition. No other substitute.
… And my question about tools like that is : how much time is really saved? I know my wfp saves lots of time…usually, but with hand tools I’m not so sure the difference is significant. With less detailing, is it hours saved every day? or just 10-15 minutes. One of my main rules of thumb is “go slow” and do whatever is the easiest on the body.
For me it’s not so much the window skills but wanting employees to have the people skills I have. Not selling skills necessarily, just being able to engage customers so the customer is always comfortable with our “intrusive trade”. I have a hard time letting go of wanting to be the only one that interacts with customers.
I think it’s all aspects of the business. The better we are able to create systems that revolve around the average Joe as an employee the more successful our companies will be. Whether that means creating a great training process or creating a system that makes up for the lack of skills the employee has. For example in your case the choices might be for one a training on customer service or creating customer touch points that make up the difference. So for example create a job process that your employee has to go through with each job that might include things like:
1.greet the customer and introduce the cleaning process
Price the job and present it to the customer and give them options and add ons
Announce yourself each time when entering the home
Do a walk through with the customer at the completion of the job
Etc.
This is just an example. Even if the employee is not skilled at dealing with the customer it won’t show as much if there is a process that helps the customer feel well taken care of. You could start by having them handle one of those aspects for you while your on the job together. Have him do another part each week until he is finally the one handling the customer with you on the job. By the end of the training process he should be comfortable with handling the customer.
Even though I’m newer on the scene and proly won’t hire for a few more years, trying to make everything as simple as possible has been my goal. I used to train a lot of people and helped a lot with making training materials for one of my previous jobs. By its nature we had a lot of turnaround so the training system was really geared towards training someone completely new very quickly. It was all very systematic.
What you’re saying reminds me a lot of E-myth, which i think is a must-read.
