I think that is decent income!
“It’s all on paper” thats what a young wealthy entrepreneur once told me. I never quite understood what he meant until i got deep into business.
Run the business for a while, run the numbers, learn the costs associated with running the business, then tell me if it’s good money or not.
Only after you know what the operational costs are will you know if you’re making “good” money.
…Or you can feel like it’s good money but until you run the numbers you won’t know exactly how good the money is. If that makes any sense.
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It makes perfect sense. I have always worked for someone else. If I could match or exceed my current rate of pay while working for myself I would be thrilled.
A few thoughts:
1 If the household income where you want to work is low on average (under 30K) those people likely won’t have much “disposable” cash. You may also want to consider being paid at the completion of services, and avoid billing people. Or else you may end up chasing payments.
2 Monthly works ok for me, but the only residential doing it are very wealthy people, and they are only having certain windows done, not the whole house. I offer it to everyone in hopes of catching extra cash. The majority only want 1,2, or 4 cleans a year. Two cleans are the most common.
3 I can’t tell you what income level to be happy with, but you really should think hard on what will make you happy. When you are employed by someone else, they pay your benefits, part of your taxes, and screw ups you might make, and for the most part, keep you employed 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. No one but you is paying for everything, when you are self employed. So if you get hurt, break something, get a flat tire, wear out tools, or whatever, you are gonna have to pony up that cash. For most, at least doubling your gross income is a bare minimum, to keep you in the same lifestyle you had before. And that all depends on the expenses you end up incurring in your business.
4 Instead of flat pricing houses, I would really give a “X dollars for Y amount of windows, exterior only” and make screens, storms and anything you find extra time consuming and extra charge.
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You can make a decent living from do it.
Thanks everyone for your thoughts and opinions. It really has helped me think about things a little more before taking the leap.
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So with your flyers did you do them the day of or did you put them out a couple weeks in advance to let everyone know that you were doing houses in the neighborhood? I got a house coming up next spring and would love to hit all the homes around the area all at once.
Never more than week ahead… Otherwise they all forget. Most times id walk those couple blocks that morning before starting that first job and pass em out. Calls started before i finished. I never missed a chance, if there was a neighbor taking his garbage out, id stop and give em the same pitch, hey im next door, today only blah blah. It works more often than not.
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Two weeks would be a lot of time to forget. What time do you start door knocking if you don’t mind me asking. I was thinking 9 o’clock to start
Good way to practice the pitch
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If i was just dropping flyers, id do it at 630-7. Theyd see em before leaving for work and flag me down at the neighbors to add em to my list. Actually knocking and ringing bells , yeah 830-9 is better, most peeps aint in the mood for that stuff early.
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Thanks for the help Mike. What approach would you give someone who has a full time day job and is wanting to try this part time in the evening or on the weekend.
Pound that pavement no matter what time. People are generally in a better mood coming home from work in evening than grumpy ftw morning attitudes. That still doesnt mean they want to be bothered, so i always keep it simple.
And the husbands are home, deflects the whole " let me ask him" excuse.
But most customers are totally cool with working eve or weekends, especially if youre up front about it being a side thing for you.
That makes sense. Where’s the best spot to place a flyer, between the main door and glass door?
Depends on the houses youre working with. If everyone uses their garage around you, they park in garage and go inside thru garage. Unless theres a guest, they hardly ever even open that front door so your flyer will just sit n rot. I try n slide in the door seal on a side door, rubberband to the fence post closer to the garage. Slap em in the face with it, no one wants to go retrieve "junk "mail from the lawn . They want it right there in the laziest fashion. Its not legal to open mailboxes, but its totally fine to slide it behind the flag or something similar.
Good ideas Mike. I’ll try the rubber band and fence method. Most of the people park along the streets so I wonder if it is illegal to put flyers under the wiper blades. I’ll check with the city.
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Not in my neck of the woods. The mail box is totally off limits.
Check with your postmaster before doing anything with a mailbox.
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In FL u can’t touch the flag of a mailbox and u can’t open it and I’m pretty sure that’s actually a federal law.
The only thing u can do is put a piece of paper/flierr in the little metal piece that is on the lid of the mailbox.
I love small houses! Great income.
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first off, find out what the median house price is in your area and only flier homes at that point or higher (the median here is 265k and we try to not flyer homes under 300k, we almost never got a response for homes under 300k)
second, small homes are the least profitable because you have all the same set up and tear down and talk time of any house but it’s spread over fewer windows thus you have to do more homes a day which means you clean less glass each day.
third, small homes are the most profitable in one sense, we recently raise our price on the first twenty panes so the $500 house went to $520 but the $100 house went to $120 on the $500 house thats a 4% raise but on the $100 house it’s a 20% raise, we did this to help counter that set up and tear down time. but what i find interesting is that we could tell the person with the 4000 sq ft house “that will be $500” and can see there is a little sticker shock but we tell the 1500 square foot house “that will be $140” they often act like “that’s it?”
I get the same response…Lol
