Chris Koerner explains how to launch a home-service business: call friends and family directly, offer discounted first jobs to get testimonials, then ask customers for referrals. Word-of-mouth scaled one Australian window-washing company to $8M.
Started a gutter cleaning business on the side in late February. What's the best ways to find jobs and grow in the early stages? So this is a long standing question of any startup owner, right? How do I get my first jobs in the early stages? And I think there's an overarching principle here that people are unwilling to acknowledge, and that is pride. Pride. Ego is at the core of everything we do or don't do, whether we're willing to admit that or not. So if I'm getting asked a question like this about starting a gutter cleaning business, pressure washing, home detailing, lawn mowing, whatever it is, these are all things that our friends and family get done on a regular basis, which means that our customers should not be hard to find. The hard part is putting our pride aside to go ask them. To go ask them, hey, can you pay me to do this job for you? But there's an easy and a hard way of asking people this awkward stuff. Stuff. I'm the king of anti awkward. I hate awkward. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. But there's a way to do this, right? And so if I were this guy with a gutter cleaning company, I would get my friends and family on the phone one by one. I would not text them and say, hey, I just started this new business. I'm just testing right now. I just want to see if I'm any good. I want to clean gutters. I think this could be something I could scale, but I need some testimonials. Would you allow me to clean your gutters at half off, 20% off, 30% off, whatever. And just get those first few jobs and then once you have the jobs, they're going to love it. This seems like a very kind of binary outcome type business. They can't even see inside the gutters. So as far as they know, you did a great job, then just ask for referrals. And I tweeted about this a while ago, but there's a guy I spoke to in Australia that started what is now an $8 million window washing company and he only started with his friends and family. That's it. And it just snowballed from there. Word of mouth. Because every person knows three to 400 other people. And if they're willing to give referrals to 1% of those 3 to 400 other people, then every one of your 20 friends can refer 60 friends can refer 180 friends, so on and so forth, right? So the long winded answer to your question is put your pride aside first, because I'm betting you're not here to. You're not here to clarify, but I'm betting that you haven't truly exhausted your circle, friends and family. So do that first. And then ask for referrals. Shamelessly ask for referrals. If you did a good job, why wouldn't you?
