Numbers don’t lie and we are way down over last year. Today I received the 3rd call this month from a regular monthly route customer cancelling service. Two of the them were national chain restaurants, who told me corporate said cut back and the third was an upscale clothing store who told me they are going out of business. $200 a month just evaporated into thin air. On the upside we landed a big commercial job and have a lot of residential bookings coming in, but even on that side of the business, many of my regular big money customers are saying they want to “wait” this year. Is anyone else seeing the same thing happening?
that’s it Steve? 3 calls this month? (said tongue in cheek, of course)
The worst for me was '09, it was practically calls everyday of people cancelling their regular servicing, got to where I wanted to throw the phone against the wall everytime it rang, feeling like I already knew what I was going to hear when I answered it
This year has actually been better than last year which was better than '09
I do feel your pain. I sure miss the 'fake prosperityfor all" days, no one had to know a whit about marketing or practically anything else for that matter, lol.
I just looked at my bank account and one of my customers checks bounced ($320)
That is the first time that’s ever happened to me…
I called her and she says she gets paid on the 15 and will send a check then.
Its no surprise, look whose in office…
in 2008 we saw the highest revenue
2009 it dropped
2010 was better than 2009 but not as good as 2008
2011 is still up n the air - it depends on how the rest of the year plays out.
That sucks man. Have you been affected by the rains and hurricane Irene at all?
Eventually everyone will be out of work because robots will take all the jobs. no joke… thats the way the world is going. Luckily for window cleaners we wont be out of the job until buildings are retrofitted to be cleaned by machines. (not going to happen in our lifetime). [U]Stop listening to the news and pick up the phone and find new customers who can pay.[/U]
Yeah I wish I started a business then. Everyone was banking.
Yesterday I did a freebie. I have a locally owned, family restaurant I have been cleaning their windows since they opened. It is a storefront in a shopping center and all 30 panels are floor to ceiling glass. When we pulled up, he met us at the door. He said business was down and he couldn’t afford to have his windows cleaned this time. I told him NO WAY! He needed his windows to sparkle to get customers in. Being a family restaurant, he has kid prints all over his glass. I told him I completely understood slow times (didn’t we all just come out of the July-August doldrums?) and I would clean his glass this time on me. He gave me the strangest look. I guess in these times of “everybody gotta get paid,” a simple gesture from one small business to another surprised him.
I figure I now have a customer for life…or at least until they padlock his doors.
We’ve been affected by all kinds of horrible weather this year, esp. the rains. In 8 years in business, I have never seen so many weather related non-revenue days.
I’m not listening to the news, I don’t even read/watch the news very often. I’m looking at my company financial statements, tracking incoming calls, closed sales, gross revenue, net profit, and number of jobs each week, month, compared to the last 7 years. The news has nothing to do with it.
We’ve been dealing with that in so cal, the last 2 winters were off the charts and it didn’t come in a burst, in dribbed and drabbed for 5-6 months, spooking all the customers to “wait until all this rain stops”, what, in 2015?
It’s not just a feeling, over the years I have downloaded 30 years of rain amounts and tracked it, we had 20 more rain days each of the last two years vs the avg and 40 more days than the drier years that So Cal is known for and all the droughts and all that (I think the 1970’s would have been the glory days for good weather window cleaning 12 months a year, from what I can tell)
problem is, for each rain day/storm track, there’s a weatherman squawking about “storm watch” for 10 days up to it, with all the extended forecasts that haven’t helped anything in biz
plus each rain day/storm there’s the build up of clouds or unsettled weather for a day or two before and after
out here, we have seriously had whole work weeks decimated by the above and yet only .01 inches of rain materialized
what a waste
I think that has a lot to do with your down turn. In 2009 we had so many rain days the summer was non existent. I know it sucks but the fall is right around the corner, try to hit the ground running to make it back.
It seems just about everywhere there is a greater challenge to get people to pay for window cleaning or continue to pay as often. My biggest hit has been in commercial I’ve lost a lot of accounts or they’ve cut back over the last 2 years. And it continues. I get some new ones too. Residential has been pretty good again this year. Overall, we’re a little behind last year but not too much. I think it helps to not be afraid to go after some big jobs. They help fill in the cracks.
In order to retain their business try offering an outside clean only then next time an inside clean. Cuts the price they pay by about half in tough times, but still gives you some revenue as well. Might be a way to show them that you understand their situation and you are trying to help both them and you…
its very tough here. i quite often see complete window cleaning setups ,vans etc on Ebay that are quite new set-ups , new guys that could not make it work for the most part
i have been going 3 years and have only located 2 or 3 top cream jobs in all that time
I can’t speak to the commercial side since I don’t do any, but I have definitely noticed a drop off of some regular yearly residential customers the last several years. Luckily I am gaining enough new customers to offset the ones that have dwindled away.
Another thing I have noticed in the past couple years is the number of residential customers I have that are retiring and moving out of state. There have been several just this year. I have been cleaning some people’s houses yearly or more since I stared my business in 1997. It’s sad to see them go.
Just wondering have you been using the WCRA 52 week average tool? I can understand seeing a precipitous drop would make one think that the economy is tanking (which it is) but my belief is that if you have enough diversity in your jobs and continue to charge hard you can make a swift “market correction” everything goes in cycles. There are to many factors to just blame it on a bad economy and there are so many ways to combat that. I am sure you have a much better and well maintained business than I do, I’ve only been around for a year… but the statement still stands pick up the phone and find new customers who can pay. No excuses not to. I just landed my first state job from a hospital bed.
But that wasn’t because of me, my team made it happen and they generated over 2k in finished jobs in 4 days. Call it luck or whatever but either way you have to have a good team to make things like that happen.
You need to move to Kansas here and buy my business 
I dunno, I’ve noticed that the worse the economy gets, the more my phone rings because lots of homes go on the market. Peaople realize there are much cheaper options than the NJ/NYC/CT metroplex.
Problem is, that = not a lot of repeat customers.
Straight up, although nice to have the address for a future customer. People moving are mostly looking for a deal, they’re spending a lot of money already(Unless they’re company is moving them)
