Facing Down the Challenges in Your Window Washing Business!

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I firmly believe that the window washing enterprise has a tremendous quantity of positive aspects over other corporations.

I've been in a quantity of businesses as various of you probably have, and when generating the comparisons in between window washing and some
of the other lame corporations out there, you have to admit that window washing comes up smelling like roses.

BUT...us window washers will still face challenges.

And I'm not talking about the challenge of cleaning a window. Anybody can get a window clean with a little elbow grease and the correct tools.

No, I'm referring to the capability to clean windows and industry your business at the very same time. This is the ultimate juggling act.

If you cease marketing your company for any length of time, it's only a matter of time before calls from interested prospects dry up, and consequently, so does your calender.

I saw it take place extremely lately with a guy who had a fine 3 weeks of window cleaning jobs lined up. He used every single advertising and marketing
method outlined in my manual How to Start Your Own Residential Window Washing Business enterprise. He lined up all kinds of jobs. But then he decided to focus his attention only to window cleaning, not to advertising and marketing. Oops.

To make a lengthy story short, soon after that 3 week spurt of home business, he woke up 1 day to uncover no shoppers on his calender, so he essentially had to start over. Now of course, he'll have those clients to come back to again and once again on a repeat basis, but I'm talking about proper now having gaps on the schedule which actually shouldn't be there.

And it's harder and much more time consuming to start over then it is to just keep the gravy train rolling.

Let me explain with a couple of stories.

--Master motivator Zig Zigler talked about "beginning over" in 1 of his speeches I heard recently. He used the analogy of 1 of those old fashioned Wells you might possibly be familiar with.

These sorts of Wells have big 'ole handles you have to have to crank in order to draw water from the Well.

When initial wanting water, you have to genuinely pump rapidly and furious. But as soon as you have a constant stream of water coming out, then it just takes a little pressure on the pump deal with to maintain it going. The hard function was already done at the beginning. BUT...don't cease. Simply because the water will go all the way to the
bottom if you do, and you'd have to get started all over once again with significant pumping action.

--The many people who I've helped get into the window washing home business have heard me speak about when I was in the Insurance business enterprise. 1 of the items I employed to do at the beginning of my insurance career was essentially shut down my marketing efforts for the duration of Thanksgiving week and not crank it up once again until immediately after the last college football bowl game was played at the beginning of January.

I just sat about for six or seven weeks or so obtaining fat on all the Holiday goodies, and alhough it was fantastic just kicking back
on my small mini-vacation, come the beginning of January, I had to start off all over once more producing interest, creating phone calls,
following up, setting appointments, etc.

Which indicates that I didn't see the fruits of January's labor until March or so as far as having a full calender of appointments once more and banking commissions.

I mention the above couple of stories just to illustrate a point, and that is basically that we cannot back off or let up. Given that if we do, we could come across ourselves with some undesirable vacancies on our schedule. And this is specially accurate if you are fairly new to the window cleaning biz.

But that's the challenge. Like the individual above who had three weeks of window washing jobs. How in the planet do you wash windows and
still marketplace your biz?

The short answer to this is that we will need to discover to prioritize and incorporate effective time management principles.

I know, I know. Fairly elementary stuff here, but it truly is vital to master them.

1 of my most profitable students is a guy that plans his entire day around a two hour marketing and advertising window where he'll distribute flyers, coordinate a postcard campaign, speak to other service
corporations, talk to realtors, speak to property managers, talk to builders, go to commercial storefronts, or any quantity of other factors on the marketing and advertising agenda.

Time doesn't permit every thing above to be done within that two hour time frame obviously, but he'll choose one, maybe two strategies he wants to use that day, and then do 'em.

The 2 hours could be at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, or it might possibly be one hour in the morning and 1 hour in the afternoon. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that he'll take ACTION and expose his advertising message for 2 hours every day to prospects.

Mike truly understands that we have no small business without shoppers, so he sits down at night and jots down the next day's marketing and advertising goals on a "to do" list. This is as fundamental as it gets, but hey...it works.

And this is confirmed when he calls and we talk about the fact that prospects are calling (a number of times as we're talking, we'll be interrupted a couple of times by his phone ringing) and his calender is filled up with window washing jobs.

By doing this, and committing to it on paper, the challenge of locating prospects is null and void. Like my 'ole sales manager utilized to say, "if you talk to enough people today, you have got to make sales".

In my case, I utilised to take one whole day and part of another to do what Mike does every day.

I commonly preferred to do my window washing estimating on Friday, and Friday morning was when my company breakfast was held exactly where small business owners got together and supported every other with leads and referrals.

Considering that I figured I was already dressed up in nice enterprise clothes (polo shirt/dockers) instead of my window washing work clothes,
I figured I could possibly as properly make that my most important advertising day, so I mapped out a schedule on Thursday night of who to see and talk to
on Friday in addition to the estimates I was scheduled to do.

That does not mean I didn't do any marketing during the week. Postcards were a massive component of my biz, so if I was ready for a mailing, there was consistently time for the duration of the week to place a five minute phone call to my direct mail residence and tell Dick to send
out a mailing to zone such and such.

And Saturday morning was fairly significantly reserved for me to go out with two to four neighborhood children and blanket subdivisions with flyers.

As an example of what you could do, if you are scheduling a job, schedule it at 10 or 11 and then head out at 9:00 to:

--introduce your self to five realtors and give them your enterprise card.
--immediately drop off 25 flyers to commercial storefronts. In/out/subsequent.
--pay a visit to three other service organizations to see if they would be interested in getting together to promote every single of your businesses. (I know of one guy who formed his own leads kind of organization since there were none in his town)

And then the next day, jot down other items you can do, or repeat the above. At the end of the week, you will not only feel like you accomplished some thing, but a great deal more importantly, you'll be producing tremendous awareness for your provider, which of course, leads to far more phone calls, extra small business, and additional moolah in your pocket!

The above is not difficult, and when looked at everyday, they're just little items, but it's the small issues you do just about every single day
that will figure out your ultimate success, not the one huge thing that we could do every single two or three weeks.

Now the fantastic news is that over time, we can all drastically decrease our advertising and marketing "to do" lists.

The initially two years of my organization was hustle, bustle, hustle bustle. Just about every form of advertising and marketing that could be utilised was employed. Right after about two years although, guess what? The pump was primed
hard enough throughout the early stages, I then just had to apply a tiny bit of continuous advertising (it never can cease totally), kick back, get the phone calls, fill up the calender, and
coordinate my window washing crews. All the enjoyable stuff.

Just bear in mind that this is a marathon, not a sprint. An initial burst of enormous action is great because it generates immediate dollars and gets you entrenched into the biz, but mark-
eting requirements to be sustained over time if you are searching for lengthy term good results.

Authorities have mentioned that as soon as we do something for 21 days, it becomes a habit. I do not know about the 21 days portion, but I do know if we do something lengthy sufficient, it'll basically become second nature to us.

So...there are a number of difficult pieces to the window washing business enterprise. Prioritize the implementation of those pieces by creating your self a simple "to do" list (Hint-place marketing and advertising at the best), incorporate time management into creating that list function, and repeat on a typical basis.

Lather

Rinse

Repeat

If you do that, then the snowball of window washing shoppers that I refer to in my manual will gather up speed. And when that begins to happen, you may possibly as well get out of the way mainly because there ain't nothing you can do to stop it. :o)

To your window washing success,

Steve

256-546-2446