Yeah, It’s tough out there in a lot of areas, Steve. You pretty much have to diversify when you are in a rural area: commercial, residential, work for real estate property managers, janitorial
With regards to Epic, maybe you don’t have to up and move across country but maybe you need to focus on another area within your town. Sometimes you have to reassess your notion of who the “rich” people are. Case in point: I was experiencing this sort of frustration when I was first starting out in the window cleaning business. I was targeting a golf course community. The houses were big 5,000-8,000 sq feet and in a gated community. I think the average home sold for around $400,000 - $500,000 or something like that.
I would get frustrated because I would get responses like, “$400, that’s outrageous my housecleaner cleans the insides for $40!”
Later on, I decided to drop the saturation mail technique and go for a highly targeted mailing to homes worth $1 million and up. The resistance to my price disappeared with these customers. The kinds of questions they were interested in wasn’t how cheap I could do the job, but how much insurance I carried and what kind of references I had.
Wealth is relative. When I first started, I thought doctors were wealthy. Seems like the really wealthy people that I work for now (who make up maybe 20% of the people I work for) are almost exclusively in finance - hedge fund managers or something. Truthfully, I don’t even ask what people do for a living anymore because a lot of the affluent people are pretty private. I do know that a few of them have houses in multiple locations. A client I cleaned windows for recently has houses in Massachusetts, Connecticut and California. I notice that a few of the checks indicate that they are from trust funds. Maybe the people don’t even work, they have inherited money. I don’t really care about all that. I don’t care how much money they have or how many houses they have. I just am an observer. I have noticed that the wealth gap seems to be increasing. The middle class just doesn’t have the disposable income that they used to. I don’t take it personally. I don’t get any more satisfaction working for someone with 1 house or 10 houses. I just have to follow the money, though.
I am more careful with the very wealthy people, though. As far as privacy. I have cleaned windows for some pretty amazing looking places and almost kick myself for not taking a picture of the house for my website. But I really don’t want to ruin my opportunity by even asking to because a lot of the monied folks are very privacy oriented. They have people after them all the time, wanting a piece of the action. I think they like that I never try to upsell them. If they want me to clean their windows, I don’t try to get them to whiten their gutters as well. I give them a card which lists all my services and that’s as far as I go.
There’s definitely different markets out there and what works for one market won’t work for another market. Offering 10% off window cleaning for every person they refer to you may work well in a golf course planned community but will turn off the wealthier people who view it as distasteful to be rewarded by joining your sales team. Just my observations. You have to pay attention to the people you are working with in your community. What works for a high octane salesperson in Palm Beach could really backfire in Sag Harbor.
