Pressure Washing Is An AMAZING Business

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Uh huh. 3, 2, 1. Aaron went from working 18 hours a day, making $30,000 a year, to running a company that generates $800,000 a month in revenue. Let's break down how he did it and how we can steal his homework. But before we get into it, let's be honest. I don't think it's reasonable for you to think you can make 800k a month in power washing. This is going to vary wildly by your education, your success levels, your background, the amount of money you have, the market. So what we're going to get into today is what is reasonable, what can we actually expect in a business like this? Let's break it down. So tell me, why power washing of all things?

So I looked at a ton of businesses, all in the boring business space, about two dozen. And what I was looking for, I had a checklist. And I think anyone who's interested in buying a business needs to have a checklist of what they're looking for. So I wanted something that was recession resistant, so had either withstood the test of time or had the ability to withstand the test of time. I wanted something that had a massive total addressable market, residential and commercial customers. So we're about half and half. I wanted something that was fragmented, so a lot of kind of smaller players, because in my experience, I found that the more fragmented the industry, the easier it is to disrupt. I wanted something that had high margins because who buys a business and doesn't want high margins? There were two things that were really interesting to me about this model particularly was it had a difference in product offering. You know, you hear a lot of business owners talk about a moat. So we have proprietary technology, proprietary equipment, we can power wash five stories from the ground and we can do a 3,000 square foot house in 25 minutes. It's wild. And then the other thing that was really interesting to me about power washing specifically was there's no national player, there's no leader in the power washing industry. And so I saw an opportunity to build that.

So when you talk about fragmentation, that basically means essentially that you don't have three to five players owning the entire market. You have a lot of little guys who maybe are not as hard to compete with.

Right. And they are, you know, have a good business, they like to knock doors, maybe they have a pressure washer that they bought. But we're just operating on kind of a larger scale and can do much bigger jobs and really kind of like operate outside of that.

What do you mean by high margins? Like we know small businesses typically run somewhere between 15 and 30% margins.

Yep.

What do you consider high margins?

So I wanted something that was above 20%. 25% would be ideal. And the founders of this business operate between a 30 to 40% margin.

Amazing. Which basically means you get to make more mistakes because you have a little bit more cash cushion.

Right. And a lot of the people who start a business for the first time are going to make mistakes, and I want them to be able to cash flow while still making those mistakes.

Oh, yeah, me too. Hollywood, Beautiful, shiny career to boring businesses. What the hell happened?

Yeah, so I was working in Hollywood. I wanted to be a talent agent. Did that for years. Was working with academy Award winning actors and academy award nominated actors.

How much were you making at the time?

I was making $30,000 a year.

So you had no money and then a friend came to you.

Yep. And he goes, hey, like, I work for this carpet cleaning business and you should get into it. And I was like, carpet cleaning? He goes, no, no, no, trust me. Like, we're growing locations nationwide and I need your help growing and scaling this business.

So you start small. And the idea is take a small, boring business, an everyday business, see if that works, and then let's scale it up.

Correct.

And then you got hooked on the dirty business.

I got hooked. I went from Hollywood to carpet cleaning and got hooked on it. We grew that. Then I went to drywall repair and grew the biggest drywall repair company. And then I was like, wait a minute, I can do this on my own. I could find a business that I believe in and I could grow it and I could buy it and I could build teams. And I went to my wife, I said, I want to find a business and to acquire. I don't know which business yet. I'm going to raise capital. I don't have the capital yet. What are your thoughts?

Okay, before we get to the capital raising.

Yeah.

I want to talk about the business model because it's so good. So we're going to tell you how to raise capital, how to do the next part. But first, let's talk about why you even thought you could raise somebody else's money to buy this business. Because it's not so obvious. I want to show you guys on a whiteboard, huge whiteboard. I want to show you guys. We're going to break it down like crazy. Oh, wait a second. The whiteboard is that big because the business model is not that complicated. One of my favorite things, you wanted to start this in a weekend 101 level version. How would you do it? How much would it cost to let's say do a 3,000 square foot house pressure wash?

It? 350 to $500, let's just say.

How long would it take you if you were using a non commercial grade power washer Home Depot?

Three to four hours probably.

How many could you do in a day?

Two.

Okay, we do two in a day. Maybe you could throw on some driveways for additional revenue. Maybe you're just doing driveways and you're charging them 100 bucks. Let's talk about labor. Well, in this case, labor's you mother.

You're going to be the one giving it. Absolutely.

Oh, you chemicals. How much would that cost?

And what would we do maybe $16 for a gallon of Clorox breaking the bank?

Probably a power washing. You could probably even rent a really early version from like Home Depot for a couple hundred bucks.

You could. One will cost you maybe three or four hundred dollars. If you go starting.

You could rent some. Obviously the scales all the way up to big huge commercial pressure washers. But right here you've got a business where if you get, I don't know, let's. I'm no mathematician here, but if you get two to five different clients, you're breaking even. You're doing some hard work though to do it. No dirty business, no boring business is without hard work up front. If you're going to scale it this way. Any other costs we're not thinking of right here?

Maybe a website and some business cards.

Swag. Got a little logo right here. Maybe you're running over to one of those trade supply stores, putting on a jumpsuit. It's not even your own logo. We keep it really cheap. Let's call this something like 25 bucks. Let's call this 25 bucks. Bada boom, bada bing. You got a cleaning business, but this isn't actually what you did.

This is not what I did.

Let's break this down. Fascinating part about you is you fast tracked your way into this existing business by finding an owner who had been in business for 34 years. And then you structured a really unique deal with them.

I did.

To be able to do what you do today. Can you explain that deal?

So I was looking for a business that was simple, easy to replicate, could work in any single market. And so I approached a 34 year old power washing business. So I took their business, I did a rebrand, created this logo and now we have 187 locations nationwide.

So wait a second, how many clients do you guys have now?

Thousands.

That must be really hard to manage. It is like you can't use a spreadsheet.

Absolutely not.

So you use a CRM? Yes, I use a CRM too, actually, it's HubSpot, so thank you for sponsoring this video. HubSpot basically takes all of your clients and turns them into one centralized location, which becomes the brain of your business. You keep a list of all of these bad boys so that you can make sure to follow up on them and actually convert. This is super important. You can have all of the leads in the world, but if you can't track them, follow up with them properly in order to close them, you probably are not going to get revenue. The only way you get more customers is by tracking and treating those that you have really, really well. Link below for you to get more information from HubSpot. They got a little something special for you guys. The only way that you are going to achieve your goals is to decrease your time to action. So hit them up today. And so how did you find this business in particular? Like, how many doors did you have to knock on before you found somebody that would sell you their business?

So I did a deep dive on about two dozen businesses because of what I was doing before in the industry I was in. I was able to let everyone in that industry know what I was looking for. They were all referral.

How did you raise money when you. That's not in your background. You weren't super rich? No trust fund baby over here?

Definitely not.

What was your process and what could people learn from your process so they might be able to go raise capital if they need it.

I was speaking a completely different language. I didn't know what a class A share was, a class B share, class C. I didn't know what any of these, like a unit count, Like, I didn't know any of that stuff. But I was able to lean on mentors that I've known who have done this before. And that's why I can't stress finding the mentors that can do this. And I asked them, hey, this is kind of what I'm thinking. This is what I think I should structure this deal as. What are your thoughts? And then I took evaluation and I took it to investors and I said, this is the percent of the business I'm selling. Do you want in or out?

Yeah.

And then I invested my own money as well.

And how many investors did you have to go to in order to get the total amount rates?

We have five Total investors, including me and the founders of the business.

Yeah, I think that's an underrated thing these days. People think, well, I got to go have a ton of different people with small checks. And the real way to do it is go to and find, you know, five or ten, ten maybe max of the richest people, you know, who already want the thing that you are selling, which is they're looking to invest in things that, for instance, cash flow.

Right.

And this is where people on the Internet are going to go. Must be nice if you know a bunch of rich people. And what's wonderful is that this is so rare that people do it. There's this like there's a curse of lack of competency in this world.

Right.

So I think when people find people that are willing to do the work, competent and relentless in their ability to execute.

Right.

It turns out pocketbooks open. We actually have a little one pager here on how to raise funds. If you guys want it, you can click the link. So how long did it take you from the moment you decided to buy a boring business in your mind to actually buying the business?

So it was about six months and it was about three and a half months for me to actually find the business and do the diligence. And then it was about three and a half months later when we finally structured the deal closed.

That's crazy. You're fast. Probably not going to be that fast for everybody, but again, we like to show the full spectrum. So you can see aspirational and really hard charging to normal, which is probably 12 to 18 months.

Right.

I like it. So what do you say to people who say that you can't make any money in boring businesses or power washing?

I would say you're crazy. Our founding location, when I acquired it in 2022 that year did over $2.2 million.

This does look a little bit bigger than what you could buy at Home Depot. So instead of starting the business from scratch, Aaron actually bought into this business, which means the numbers look a little bit different. You guys want to see what the 202 level version is? And if you think this is impressive, just wait until I show you guys how to scale the business like you did. Let's break down some costs in this 202 level version first. We got the same cost. It costs 350 to 500 bucks. Do a 3,000 square foot house.

Yeah.

Right now. How much time does it take you with all this?

25 to 30 minutes.

So we're way down from the three to four hours to 25 to 30 minutes. Now let's talk about the number of jobs you can do for per day.

Four to five.

Okay, so we have a job. We have double the number of jobs per day. Now let's talk about how much it costs to actually do that. How much does this truck cost?

We finance it. It's $2,000, roughly per month.

And then you've got your cost of chemicals, which if it was 16 bucks before, let's say for Clorox, I guess this is like 1/5 because you have such a larger.

Yeah, I mean, it's 5% of the job, roughly.

Okay. So you get a lot lower costs because you're buying its scale. Kind of like Costco. All the same costs, overhead, like websites and labor. What else are we not thinking about? Insurance for driving a truck like this.

Could be six or seven hundred dollars a month per truck.

And then do you have to have licenses or certifications to drive this?

No, this is not a cdl.

Also, on top of that, you don't need a license to power wash somebody's house.

No, no. Most states do not require any kind of licensing.

Are there some that do? Yeah. Depends on what kind of job.

It depends on whether it's a government job and what kind of insurance you need. But we can just up the insurance for these jobs.

So the fascinating part, I think, with all these businesses is you can start a boring business cheaply and get your return on capital or the amount of money that you invest. You can get it back to you quickly, and then you can get scale. Scale costs more up front. But there's a lot more upside.

Right.

So let's talk about a commercial job really quick.

Sure.

So if you get 350 bucks to 500 bucks to do one house, how much could you get to do a commercial job?

I mean, we've done $20,000. Parking lot garages. We've got recurring contracts with different fast food restaurants. We do annual contracts. I mean, that's really where we're. Where our focus is.

So basically, the idea is, instead of a residential house, which you could put on recurring, too.

Yes, you could. It depends on the market, but yes, absolutely.

You could say, hey, your house gets dirty a lot. We want to come back here about twice a year. If we put you on a plan for coming back twice a year, how about we take 10 or 20% off the cost?

Correct. And we do that. Yep.

And then you get your credit card ahead of time, which also means that you don't have to chase them down for payment.

Yep. Exactly, exactly.

But if you do that on the commercial side, it gets really interesting.

It gets really interesting. And our average commercial job size is close to $6,000.

So you pretty quickly scale up from the couple thousand dollars you could get in a few days doing residential all by yourself to a bigger business. But sometimes I believe in these little gateway businesses where you start tiny. You make sure that you're committed to it. You don't bet the house is. You don't bankrupt yourself, and then you figure out if you have what it takes to run one of these bad boys. You actually bought this bad boy. Which, you know, people don't just hand out their businesses to others, I don't think.

No, they definitely do not.

And you needed some cash to do it, which you didn't have because you only had $30,000 salary originally, and then kind of scaled your way up. Let's break this down. If you like this video, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button. People want to know how to get revenue in, how to get customers, customers and grow their businesses if they're going to start this or they're going to scale it. So how about we learn from somebody who scaled hundreds of businesses and somebody else who scaled hundreds of businesses. Let's just brainstorm the best ideas that have worked for you. So I'll go first and then you go. So let's start small. If I was going to start this, I would do pre orders like a crazy person, which means you're basically going through your Rolodex of everybody who lives in your area and saying, hey, I started this new thing. Can I come and clean your house for a discount? You could even do it at a little bit of a loss to get things rolling. So that would be step one for me. What else do you think?

So what I would do is I'd get a list of 100 potential referral partners. So painters who don't want a power washer, window cleaners who don't want a power wash, or any kind of other referral partners that are tangentially connected. That's what I would do. And then I'd reach out to them and tell them, hey, love to make relationships go that way.

Door knocking, not the funnest thing to do. But let's say you live in a neighborhood right now, which is your target market. You're going to figure out, want to figure out what kind of client you want to have. But if I was you, I might go to some of the richer neighborhoods, while you probably won't Get a ton of people to sign up. You might get more than you think.

I would go to businesses that have dirty buildings. Businesses have a dirty building. They like their business, they like their building. It's a very easy sell. Your building is dirty. So it would cost this much to clean it. Can we clean it for you? We can be here tomorrow maybe.

The last thing that I would add is go old school. Facebook, neighborhood groups, Facebook marketing, neighborly.

Yep. Next door, all those kind of apps.

You can watch this video on Spencer. He built his whole business off of one Facebook post. I got a crazy idea.

Yeah.

Should I try to start one of these live? Tell us in the comments if you think we should do it. See if it's reasonable. Let's talk about some insider tips. First tip is the 100 list.

Like this 100 list of referral partners, 100 list of commercial customers and 100 list of residential customers.

Love that. So three different 100 lists. And how do they fill those?

They either seek them out themselves, they can use data scraping tools, or we recommend they sit down and do it so they can figure out who their target is. It'll be more meaningful to like write their email address in and their phone number and say, this Guy has an $8 million painting business. This is a target. Because they're going to work that for however long. I mean that's the goal. And then we can up. We upload it into the CRM and there's like drip campaigns and stuff like that. But it's really sometimes just going to the property management company and saying, how do I get on your vendor list?

It's so cool. The second tip is the six steps for their sales process. Like this.

For anyone who's thinking about starting a business and wants to de risk it, it's like how many jobs can we sell before we actually open? And so that's a, that's a tip that we have our franchisees do. Like it's, they're required like from 9am till 5pm every day. Them or on their team or an operating partner, whatever, is out doing business development for an entire month before they can even go to training.

I love that.

And so they sell jobs and have like we have franchisees come with jobs like on the calendar. And we help them hire two technicians before they go to training. One is a general manager in training who leads the truck and then one is a junior technician that works underneath them and they come with them to train.

The third tip is, is this one. Relationships.

I've learned that relationships are Everything. Our mission statement at Rolling Suds is this is a relationship. So I believe that not only business, but just life in general and happiness is built on having enriching relationships. And so what we try to do is we go out and develop relationships within our community, trying to add value to any single person that we meet, regardless of whether or not they're going to be able to produce or, you know, impact our P and L. And that's worked out really well for us. We get a lot of referrals through that. We're very involved in our community. And the three Rs of rolling suds are relationships, reputation, and reliability. So we really take that to heart.

For Tech Stack like this. Like, what is the tech that you think anybody who has a power washing business that wants to scale up to a million bucks needs?

Automation. Automation in terms of the customer experience. So from the time that they request information, the call center script, to the time that they pay for the invoice and ongoing, all of that is built in and automated. And so I did that so that we can have everyone focus on the things that matter, which is driving growth versus like texting and saying, I'm on my way or my technician's on my way. Like, it just happens automatically.

Like, what are some of your favorite techs used? Like, for instance, we use a lot of Service Titan or Jobber for workflow management of some of our small businesses.

So I've used Jobber before, I've used Service Minder, I've used Workiz. And it looks like we're going to be moving over to Service Titan. It's just the best. I mean, like, I don't want to be an ad for Service Titan, but like, what we're trying to do, I mean, we have 187 locations nationwide. Like, we need a system that doesn't break.

So talk to me about this truck. What do we got in here?

We have 1,000 gallons of liquid. We have 1,000ft of hose, two machines, cold water machine. That's 10 gallons per minute on this side. And then we have another cold water machine on the other side. And so our equipment allows us to Power Wash 4, five stories from the ground without having to get up on ladders. Anything above four or five stories, we can either rent a lift or we have a drone company that we're partnered with and we can hook these hoses up to the drones.

Stop it.

Yeah, dead serious.

You hook a drone up and the drone flies.

The drone flies up and starts to clean the building for you. And we can, we can send, we have eight drones across the country and we can send those out to any of our locations.

That seems pretty extra of you.

It's incredibly extra of us. That's the point.

Great market.

And we can park this truck here and do this entire building, this huge building, without having to move this truck. That's part of the reason why we have such overkill on the amount of hoses. This truck and this equipment allows us to do, you know, kind of a 3,000 square foot house in about 25, 30 minutes. There's a tremendous amount of value. And you can't buy this equipment from anyone other than us. We have a lock on the manufacturer. We build these trucks ourselves. And it gives us kind of a competitive edge and moat, if you will, to cross.

Here's the takeaway. When it comes to the trades. So many times there are operational inefficiencies because of this one sentence, which is, that's always the way we've done it in this business and any business you're going to do in the trades. The beautiful part is to use that mind of yours to come up with something that uses this word that has a lot of vowels called proprietary. And when you have something that is proprietary, that means you get what's called multiple expansion and increase in your valuation as a small business because you have a moat around your business. The other thing that's interesting about this is when you're not a power washer or professional pressure washer, you don't know where to put this stuff. You didn't know that, but you partnered with somebody and said, what are the things that annoy you about this business that don't work very well? And then how could we make this more efficient if we took technology plus a little time and strategy and made it even easier and simpler to do the job? That's the takeaway. So don't just do what everybody else has always done. All right, let's talk about the pros and cons of this business. Let's start with the pros. First of all, you don't need a bunch of cash to started if you do it the easy way. Second is recurring revenue. You can actually get these people on subscriptions. You guys know that's my love language. Third, this business is not that complicated. Besides the fact that it is really a lot more forearm strength than I thought it was going to be, the business is a pretty straightforward business model. The next is you can do a lot of add ons. So I love the idea of having a Bunch of neighbors right next to each other. I love the idea of pressure washing big apartment buildings and driveways. The next pro that I see in this business is this is a business that allows you to have a pretty hefty margin if you do it right. The next pro in this business is maybe the idea that if you get the right labor pool and you incentivize them to stay with you, you could keep labor for longer. There's a lot more pros, but we hit that in the video. So let's talk about the interesting part. All the reasons why this business is really hard. Let's start with the first obvious part. The business is seasonal. And if you're in a market like Pennsylvania or New York, nobody's power washing in the winter. So you got to think about that. Second is labor is really hard to find. You got to find labor and you got to keep them in a full pipeline. Next is gas for a thing like this is not cheap. And chemical prices go up and down. I wrote down a bunch more maintenance and tires on trucks like this. Maintenance for all of the equipment. That could really cut you out some cash if you have a big fancy one. Environmental regulations. What can you do with the soap? How do you dispose of it one way or the other? Also billing hassles, people paying late, making sure that you have that. There's lots of things that can go wrong in this business, for sure. Insurance, if you're tradespeople. But here's the thing. Every business has difficulties. Those are some of the ones in this business. Every business is a carefully mitigated series of disasters held together by grit and your hard work. That's exactly what this business is too. Now, this guy did an incredible job with a lot of hard work and luck. But I want to be honest about the fact that these things are hard to do. You know what? It's kind of like what my grandma says business. It ain't for posses.