More than likely. Been very rainy here, as well. But it’s also just that time of year 
I just got back from vacation in Arkansas and it rained almost everyday. Found out the same happened in Las Vegas and my clients are canceling all over. C’est la vie! We have some commercial to knock out but August will be slow relative the previous 5 months. @Kyle hope those you let go come back for the fall rush, by all accounts you do right by them and are a decent fella. @GenaroGuzman isn’t vacation time for you too?
Everything’s more or less slowed down for me. I still have 2 window cleaning jobs scheduled this coming week but nothing else, haven’t gotten much calls or jobs to schedule besides my monthly route work.
Is this where it all goes down hill lol? I do have some clients who want service in fall so around October I have some work but this is way different than Spring how busy I was, what to do now?
Summer is slow. Call folks you did 3 months; 6 months; 1 year ago and see if they are ready for window cleaning. Drop off flyers or door hangers on your off days. Give quotes at store fronts until you can’t take “No thank you” anymore. Sooner or later the levy breaks and you get work again.
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This week is a little busy , we’ll be probably taking august off
Give quotes at store fronts lol good one
@Kyle i’m surprised you don’t have any every door direct mailers mentioned in your plan. From what I remember this was also a big part of your approach.
I think you are about the same size company Kyle and believe I can relate here. Currently we have six employees, three trucks and one estimate car out working every day. Plus myself and my truck(as needed). Beginning part of the year was just a madhouse we got a mud rain storm that booked us out eight weeks solid the first week after the storm. It was like nothing I’ve seen here. That pretty much continued on through the year till recently we were about four weeks out on the schedule and then about mid July things just started to slow down. Usually last part of July things slow down but we were booked out so far I started to think it wouldn’t happen this year.
I should’ve known better though because my plan going into the season was to send out 25,000 EDDM mailers each quarter but it seemed pointless since we were already so booked out and couldn’t take on any more work. Now that I hit my July slow down I’m kicking myself for not having my flyers printed and ready to go. Because right about now I would send out another 25,000 and that would put another three weeks of work at least on the books which should help get us through August. And I’ve always said market when you’re busy not when you’re slow since it takes time to come in but I didn’t listen to my own reasoning.
We also recommend taking vacations in August and that’s what a lot of us are doing so in reality will be working about half the crew that month so we should be fine but I like to stay 2 weeks booked out with a few gaps as a safe buffer.
Otherwise I’ll just bump up my Google ads and have our sales manager call any open estimates that we’ve given and go through the customer list from last year and call all of the customers that schedule the cleaning about this time. That will usually help push us through. But I really need to put a better plan in place that’s more structured which can be scalable. We get by now but I feel like to add another two or three trucks I would really have to step up my marketing game to get through the mid slow season.
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I don’t do EDDM in the end of June through First of August for several reasons:
- It’s expensive so the ROI goes down on those months
- We use the 4k for monthly EDDM and put it towards payroll
- We use that payroll and have guys hang flyers so they still have full schedules
- Flyers get just as good as response as EDDM and it is a change for a few months which I think makes the fall EDDMs a little more noticeable.
The best way to solve the summer slow down… advertise like hell when you are swamped and busy and extend that spring rush as far as possible. That has been the best solution I have found so far.
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