Aside from Dallas Cowboys Football, Mexico National Team Soccer & PPV Boxing I don’t watch much television, but yesterday I ended up watching a couple of episodes of The Profit on MSNBC.
If you have not seen or heard about the show, it’s about a investor/business expert who works with business owners who are struggling or are going through a hard time and helps them be more profitable.
I watched 3 episodes & noted a few things that where interesting to me:
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All of them either have or had a good product/service that consumers wanted. You would think those who are not successful have a crappy product or provide lousy service huh? Not the case, lots of them have great products and fail. Also on the contrary, I will go out & say someone with a ok product & decent service using good/great business tactic could be more successful/ (make more money) then someone with a great product/ outstanding service applying bad business tactics or in some cases going into business blindly.
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Two of them where actually extremely successful for years but are struggling now.
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Pricing/quoting was a problem for pretty much all of them but two of them had it bad. One of them was basically working for free or losing money half the damn time because he was not quoting properly.
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Scaling or just trying to grow a single business creates lots of problems if not done properly.The main problem being hiring & or training personnel properly.
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Business is not as complicated as it is made out to be. What I mean by this is, 70% of the things this business expert did we could all implement and many times the business owners where doing so in the past but stopped somewhere down the line.
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Money alone won’t solve your problems. Yes the guy is a investor & he basically offers them a good chunk of money for 30-50 % of the business but it’s not about the money. If the same businesses where to get a loan or even strike the lotto for 100 grand or whatever, they would take that money & put it into the business & they would still be struggling, it would basically only prolong how long it will take them to go under. You have to make changes.
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Change, I mentioned this above. Many fail because they refuse to change & adjust the current times & market.
The word that came up constantly is process, there must be a established process to do everything & you must not deviate from this process. The process must be reevaluated from time to time to adjust to the market but other then that you must stick to it.
Having a good process to follow will basically take care of all the problems I have mentioned. All employees must adhere to the process, the reason lots of the businesses where failing is because the product or service is not of the same quality it was in the past & in some cases the quality deferred from location to location or from crew to crew.
I am currently at the early stages of my window cleaning business owner career & I am new to window cleaning in general. Some of you would probably call me a bucket bob lol but I don’t care. I am still learning & getting better & I am eager to do so. I spend all the time I can on here reading & on searching on the internet. I am researching products & thinking of different ways I could become more effective.
This is my first official week working by myself & I am learning how to quote & market my business. I was previously working for someone who would do quotes over the phone but was not good at it, the last house I did was a 4500 sq foot house & he charged them 125, the owner gave me a $50 tip. I was getting paid 50% commission, the bad quoting & him being very very inconsistent on paying me led me to going off on my own.
So basically you can say I am still figuring out what my process is.
I am currently working on my website & will go full fledged into business next week so I don’t really have a quoting process but plan on following the blueprint this great site has provided us with.
As far as window cleaning itself, here it goes.
I currently don’t have a wfp but plan on getting one very soon. When doing interior & exterior I always like to do the the exterior first so I don’t go inside the home unless I can’t remove the screens from the outside.
I have been thinking about changing this because I’m in Texas & after cleaning windows outside for a hour or two you look rough & are pretty sweaty when you go inside the home. I always keep extra shirts in my truck & change into a fresh one before each job & deodorant on deck lol.
The reason I like doing the outside first is because it’s usually by far the dirtiest so it’s easier to tell if you missed a spot on the side you are working on if you start with the exterior first or at least that’s my opinion.
Ok so basically:
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Go around & remove the screens. I have 2 different brushes I carry & brush the cobwebs and dirt off that I can with a soft brush & then the tracks sills & any cobwebs hanging around the window. My old employer basically told me to not do the tracks unless the customer complained & if they do, go ahead & do them. Well prertty much all cusomers expected the tracks to be done & I am a bit meticulous so I would work on them even if they didn’t say anything so I would not have to go back. BTW I used a harder brush on the tracks & non glass parts of the window.
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When the windows are really dirty I go around & spray them down with a water hose & a gutter cleaning pressure attachment I have.
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I always like to do the 2nd story windows first, I feel like they are the hardest so if I knock them out first it feels like the rest of the job will go quicker.
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When cleaning the actual glass I always use a soft sponge soaked in the solution to start off, If they’re not that dirty I just focus on the corners because that’s where dirty accumulates the most. If dirty I hit all the window. Then mop. Then I run a surgical towel on the top edge. Then squeegee. I check for spots I missed with the mop & sponge & hit them with steel wool.After i do a detail, I use a towel to go over the spots I used steel wool & then another towel & run it along the edges.
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I do that with every window or something similar with french panes, sliders, doors & etc.
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Afterwards I mop the screens & brush them to remove what I could not when I just dry brushed them
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I don’t carry my solution bucket inside, I carry a smaller bucket with towels a spray bottle & other supplies I use. I also clean my mop & empty out my hip bucket. I spray the areas I see spots on & use a soft sponge. After that I use the mop, adding more solution with the spray bottle as needed. Squeegee afterwards & then look for spots with steel wool & detail afterwards.
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When it’s all done, I go back in put the screens back on.
What would you guys change or suggest?
What’s your process, or changes that you have made to become faster.