The Window Washing Business - Johnny Robinson Co-founder of Orange Window Cleaning - Unusual Profits ep 21

Hey, Michael here. You will now hear some episodes of the Michael Girdley Show that we had branded differently, called Unusual Profits or some such like that. Same show, same person, just me interviewing people and producing content that could be helpful on your journey and mine as well. So with no further ado, here's the episode. Hey, Michael here. Sponsor for today's show is actually a product that I'm a part of called DM Bridge. And what DMBridge is, uh, is a service that we built, uh, to solve the problem that Twitter's direct messaging functionality is a total mess. So we built DMBridge to help you fix that. Um, a lot of the other solutions, uh, do things like requiring you to install a whole nother inbox. We didn't want another inbox, so we created DMBridge. And what it does is it takes all of your Twitter DMs and has them appear inside of your email inbox. So you can reply to them just like it's a regular email. You see them just like it's a regular email. You can search them later like it's one of your regular emails, all just by using DMBridge. So, uh, we're currently live with the product. Uh, would love for you to sign up and become a customer, uh, and check it out. So you can find that at dmbridge.app, uh, and go on there, put in your name, uh, and be either part of the beta or join us as part of the live use of the product. And again, check it out, dmbridge.app. All right, welcome to another episode of Unusual Profits. I'm excited today, uh, here in the internet's number one podcast about unusual businesses and the people that run them called Unusual Profits. I'm your host, Michael Girdley, and I am super excited that the most requested business type that I've gotten as the person producing, promoting, and doing this podcast is around the window cleaning market. So we have somebody today who is an expert in that. Uh, it is Johnny Robinson who is joining me from Orange, California. So in Southern California, Orange County, who runs a window cleaning business, and we are going to geek out about window cleaning. And, uh, yeah, I'm super excited to talk about it. So Johnny, welcome.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk about it too and tell you guys about how the ins and outs of how window cleaning operation runs.

But yeah, great. Oh, go ahead, go ahead. You're about to say something.

Yeah, yeah. So, so I run Orange Window Cleaning and we, we're like a 90, 90% residential window cleaning business. Okay. So the only commercial we'll take are universities that we do in the summer. So we do 2 big universities every summer when the students aren't there. Can't do them while the students are there. And we do residential because, uh, against the traditional norm of people saying commercial is always better, I always say if you're doing window cleaning, residential is better.

Why?

You get paid the same day, so you don't have to wait for these ridiculous 30, 60-day terms. And our marketing engine is completely based around residential, so we don't do any outbound selling. We found outbound selling is a little tough. And it's not, it's not a great return on our time, especially early. So the way we did that was, though we built a really good marketing engine, was we translated our reputation from our customers to online. So every— when me and Sergio were starting the business, I started the business with a partner, my best friend from high school. Okay. And we would ask one simple question to every customer that we would do. And it was, "What do you do for a living?" And for those of you who don't know, Orange County, California is extremely wealthy area. So people who buy window cleaning services are typically a wealthier individual because it's not something that's needed. It's not plumbing, electric, where something goes wrong, you have to call that company out. No, you're getting your windows cleaned as a luxury because you can clean your own windows. Anybody can do it. And so we got to asking, "What do you do for a living?" And we realized, wow, people love to talk about themselves. And that created a good rapport with our customers. And then, you know, once they were talking about themselves, the whole job, whoever was doing the inside of the glass on that job, the customer would feel obligated to leave us a review. And so unbeknownst to us, we were building our reputation and slowly but surely, 4 years later, we've climbed to number 1 on Yelp, number 1 Google My Business. We don't do too much on Facebook, number 1 recommended on Nextdoor. And now we just get— we get an average booking of between $2,000 to $3,000 a day just from online leads coming in.

Great. So to make sure I understand, people call you and people— somebody from your team drives out in a truck and cleans the inside and outside of windows, or do you only do the exterior?

So it can operate both ways. So I have— I'm pretty connected in the window cleaning community. And it's funny because window cleaning works different in different geographies of the US. So for example, if you're in the Midwest, lots of people will do exterior only. That's really popular is just doing the exterior. Or Canada, I know Canada residential people will, they'll take their screens off for the company. That's unheard of in Orange County. Pretty much everybody does inside now only in California. We've tried to do exterior only because it's easier. You just, Pull up with your truck, connect the hoses, clean the windows. It takes less than an hour most of the time, and then you're on your way and you can build a pretty good route doing that. But nobody, nobody wants to clean their exterior, exterior of their windows only because the inside is still going to be dirty. Right?

Yeah. And so then just in terms of how it actually works. So if, you know, I'll pull up your website here and we can, we can look at it, but in terms of cleaning the outside, so somebody shows and shows up and then what is the process they do to actually deliver the services?

So yeah, so customer calls or goes online to book and they get a quote. They say, "Okay, I want you on Wednesday between 8:00 to 9:00 AM arrival window." So if you click to get the quote there, but 8:00 to 9:00 arrival window, we say, "Okay." We dispatch that to our technicians on our CRM and then they drive up in the truck. One technician gets out if it's a two-man, One will get out while the other one starts setting up the equipment. The technician's greeting the customer saying, "Hey, I'm Jacob. I have my partner Victor over there. We're going to clean your windows. We want to provide you a 5-star service, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I have a script. And then one guy, he explains the process to them. So he goes, "Okay, I'm going to be on the inside. I'm going to take the screens out first. We're going to have one guy cleaning the inside of the windows. One guy will clean the outside of the windows." We'll clean the screens last and then put them on last, and then we'll do a customer, a walk around to minimize callback, and then we'll be on their way. As far as the equipment goes, the guy on the outside who's not talking to the customer during the introduction is pulling out the garden hose and he's connecting up to the customer's water spigot. Once they connect up to the water spigot, that hose, that garden hose connects into what's called the deionized water tank that we rent. Every month. It's like $50, $50 a month for one tank. Got like 5 of them. So that connects to the tank, and then it's got another, another port on that tank that pushes the water out into what's called a water-fed pole. So that water that's coming from the spigot, it gets purified and deionized, takes, takes all the minerals out of the water so that it's 0 parts per million, the way it's completely pure. And then it shoots out of this, this big carbon fiber pole that we have. It can go— we have one that goes up to 70 feet. So typically each story is 10 to 12 feet. So we can reach 6 stories with that pole without even having to get on a ladder. And so that, that pole's got a brush at the end of it. And in that brush, there's 2 to 4, depending on the brush, water holes that the water's firing out of. And so what you do is you extend up the pole however high the, the windows are. So typically it's a two-story house. You extend up the carbon fiber pole, you rub all the dirt off with the brush, and then you spray it down. It dries completely spot-free, and it takes about a minute a window to clean.

And you said people do not— your, your employees, um, do not get on ladders. But looking, I have pulled up your website, you— here's somebody with a ladder.

So that's doing gutter cleaning. Yeah, he's doing gutter cleaning. So gutter cleaning, we do sometimes have to get on ladders, but like it's 1% of the time. Same thing with solar panels. So you see one technician there doing solar panel cleaning. Most of the time we have to get up on the roof to clean the solar panels, but for the actual window cleaning itself, very rarely do we get on a ladder.

So did you guys— and I noticed there's a Johnny here in this photo. Is that like younger you?

Yeah. So this is years back. So you see on the skylight right there, that's me cleaning the, cleaning the skylight glass. That was, I think, like our second year in business. And then same thing with the picture to the right of that. Johnny taking care of some wind walls in Newport Beach. That was a few years back.

So the business started with doing basically window cleaning, and then you've expanded to this other stuff. So there's cleaning of solar, and then I noticed you do Christmas lights too.

Yeah. So we do a lot of different things. We've added things on, taken things off, added them back. It's just a ton of experimentation to see what works. But initially, me and Sergio started the business with $150. Just window cleaning out of the back of my RAV4. So we literally, we didn't have any ladders, any water fed poles, like I just explained. It was just some mops and a squeegee. And so we were literally dangling out of windows to clean the second story because we couldn't fit a ladder in there and, uh, taking windows out, all types of crazy dangerous stuff to, uh, to get these jobs done when we were starting.

And so the, the inside cleaning is, looks like it's done differently. Where'd that picture go? There are I saw two gentlemen with squeegees and buckets. So are they using deionized water too, or is that just the— that's just the outside?

So no, so that, that pole that I was talking about pumps out a lot of water, so you do not want to take that inside. You'll get massive trouble. We'll have to call, you know, water damage companies to, to get that fixed. Don't want that. But the inside's cleaned with Dawn dish soap and water. So if you see in the picture they're holding the squeegees. That's after the mixture of water and Dawn has been applied to the window. So you got it, you take them off. It's called the T-bar. It's got a mop on that T-bar. So just imagine a letter T and it's got the mop covering the top of that T. And you apply that, that mixture of Dawn and water to the window, and then you're squeegeeing it off using what's called the fanning technique. So you can't see me in the video, but I'm doing it with my hand.

You— yeah.

Typically, if you were to pick up a squeegee and not know how to use it, you would just do a straight pull from left to right or right to left. With the fanning technique, you just, you can curve the squeegee back and forth into and clean the window in one stroke. That's how we train our technicians to, to clean windows efficiently. Because if you're just doing the straight pull, you're not going to be able to get jobs done that fast.

Okay, I think I totally dig it then. And so you, how many trucks are you guys running at this point? How many crews?

So we've got 4.

4 crews. And you, you and your partner, are you out of the field at this point? Or are you totally—

Yeah, I don't even, I spend maybe like 3 hours a week on the business. Okay. Yeah. So we're completely, I haven't cleaned a window in ages. Sergio more so operates the business while I'm working on another project. Okay. Yeah.

What's that?

So the whole, the way we grew and built our, our marketing engine and our sales engine, like I was talking about at the beginning, was through Yelp. Yelp crushes it for home service companies in California. So I— we started an agency helping home service businesses grow on Yelp. Oh, it's been great.

Yeah, that's great. Okay, so 4Crews. Now, if I'm a homeowner and I'm a customer, am I paying— I'm just calling you on demand when I want you and scheduling an appointment, or do I have a recurring revenue deal, or is it— how does the arrangement work?

Are you a new— are you a new customer? Are you a returning customer?

I don't know.

Okay, so I'll give you both. So new customer, We're going to complete service first before we start to add you into our, you know, our upsells or our, our maintenance or maintenance plans, what we call them.

Okay.

And it's no contract. We don't do any contracts. We found it's hard to, too much friction in the booking process. It's really competitive market when someone's calling 5 companies, you know, you have to be able to convey your, you know, your unique proposition or what makes you unique and close them quickly and be able to dish out a price really quickly. So we try to remove as much friction as possible from the booking process. So we'll book them. So let's say you go online and you say, hey Johnny, I want my windows cleaned. I've got 20 windows. I already know our pricing like the back of my hand. So I'm going to say, okay, that's going to be $299. That's inside and out. We'll clean the tracks, we'll clean the sills, clean the screens and the inside and out of the glass. You say, okay, Johnny, cool. Uh, I need it done by this Friday. I say, okay, we can fit you in Thursday between 8:00 and 9:00 AM. Boom, you're booked. Technicians go out, they complete the job. You then get a text, an automated text, once they hit finish on our CRM. That's— we have a bunch of different software integrated on the back end, and you get a text saying, hey, could you leave a review? Um, it'd be really appreciated. If you don't do that, you get a 3-step email sequence again asking for a review. Next day, you get a follow-up from our admin saying, hey, how was the service? 99% of the time is going to be good. She then asks for the review, and then you're now imported into our email sequence. So every 3 months, you're getting a reminder saying, hey, it's been X amount of time, "Since your last window cleaning appointment, would you like to get your windows cleaned? We have some room on the schedule." And then we also do that with SMS. So texting. So texting.

Yeah. So it sounds like when you guys started, am I right? When did you guys start the business?

So we started June 17th, 2017.

Okay. So was just the biggest competitive differentiator you had besides being competent that you, I mean, it sounds like all this is very digitally native stuff that you don't see in services businesses.

It's pretty rare.

I mean—

Right, exactly. I was going to say it at the beginning. We're the only company in Orange County who does completely automated online booking. You don't even have to talk to us if you don't want to. If you lived in Orange County and you wanted your windows cleaned, you can go online and book everything right there.

So fascinating. I mean, so many of these companies, like I'm trying to book something and they're like, please call our office. I'm like, oh God.

Like, let's go. Exactly.

Can I text? I don't want to spend 20 minutes on the phone.

Yeah, we get that a lot, especially, you know, people, you know, who message us on Yelp, for example. They don't want to— they don't want to call. They're messaging us on Yelp for a reason. So yeah, it just makes it easier to flat rate your pricing, make it all automated booking, and just fire off prices to customers and they'll book with you. Just make it frictionless.

So it sounds like you really start with like, okay, let's delight you once and then I'm going to drip you into selling you other stuff, recurring revenue and stuff. But it's not like, hey, I'm going to come in and try to sell you a year's worth of, of windows before I prove myself to you.

Exactly. Exactly. So we prove ourselves by providing a really good service and then put them into the sequence. And like you said, yeah, makes it easy to sell different things, cross-sell, especially Christmas lights. So you build up a really fat book of business during summer because you're constantly acquiring new customers. That's when people get their windows cleaned here. It's different in different areas of the country. For example, Seattle, they're busy. They're just getting in their busy season right now. But come October, so just this coming month, we're going to send out Christmas light blasts and we're going to have a whole book of customers we acquired in the summer to sell Christmas light services to.

Robert Leonard Super fascinating. So going through a bit more about the sales stuff. So you talk about the seasonality and you said that's— I'm also interested in both the seasonality, but then you talked about geographically, this business is really different. So let's start with the seasonality. It sounds like the Christmas light stuff is obviously seasonal. But like, what else in Southern California is kind of the, the ebbing and flowing of demand?

Yeah, that's a good question. So our busy season is April through December, and it would be April through August if we didn't have Christmas lights. So you see a massive uptick in people wanting window cleaning from April through the end of August.

Yeah.

Once September hits, we'll see our revenue drop a little bit. And then getting into October, ramp up a little bit. And it also depends on the sky, funny enough. So if you see clouds, like overcast weather, we're getting no calls. Customers are not booking. The moment it turns sunny again, phone's ringing. So it's very dependent on what the sky looks like and the weather forecast. So if it's going to rain, no bookings. And we try to mitigate that with rain guarantees. So we'll say, you know, and kind of customer education. So we'll say, like, tell them, you know, rainwater is completely pure. You know, if, if it drips on the window, it's not going to leave any spots so long as they're clean, your windows are clean. But we also offer a 7-day rain guarantee. So we clean your windows and 3 days later it rains and you think they're messed up, we'll come back out and do an outside touch-up for free. So that's kind of how we mitigate that. But still, during January through—

Only in Southern California are businesses willing to bet on the weather being beautiful. It's like, okay, let me tell you about Texas, man. Doesn't work.

Yeah. Okay.

So you're running, you're running 4 crews and some of those are 1-man crews and some of those are 2-man crews, I assume, or 2-woman types.

Yeah. So we only have 1 2-man crew. We try to stick with 1 man.

Okay. So you're, you have that crew that's a 1, a 1-person crew. How many jobs do they typically do? Are you billing 8 hours a day for them?

That's what we try to book for. So we have it down to Each technician on their own can produce between $75 and $100 an hour depending on their skill level. There is skill to this. We've had dudes that can produce $125 an hour by themselves. Like, some guys are, are nuts with cleaning windows. And 2-man crew can produce around $150 an hour, $150 to $175 depending the skill level.

Okay. And then they're W-2 employees of yours?

They were. So they were W-2 employees. We just made the switch. So we We had W-2s beginning 2019 is when we hired our first, kept W-2s until a couple months ago when we started switching to a hybrid model. So we started doing W-2 trucks and we started doing subcontractors, meaning actual, and I say subcontractors because they're actual subcontractors. In California, it's a little dicey where a lot of people will say subcontractors, but, and I'm sure it happens everywhere, everywhere, but people will say subcontractors and they'll actually be employees still, but these are actual subcontractors, own trucks, own equipment, own insurance. Uh, some even have their own employees, so we can't do two-man, but we just started running the, uh, hybrid model and we found subs to be a lot better. We don't have to pay for gas. We don't have to pay for technicians driving. You pay them their cut of the job. And if their equipment breaks, that, that's their problem. We don't have to worry about it. And so we're like, Dude, this is so much better. And so we completely made the switch over to subs.

So you, you changed your W-2 people over to subs?

Some of them. So 2 of them we switched over and we leased the trucks to them, the equipment, made them get their own insurance. So it's all legit, made them incorporate as, you know, sole props and make ads. So we keep ads from them because California is really strict on this. So we keep ads in case, you know, the IRS comes or something and they say, "Hey, you're their employees," you know, it's like, "No, look, here's an ad where they're advertising for other jobs." So kind of protect ourselves that way.

So do their trucks, do they have your logo and stuff on them then? Are they wearing your uniform when they go out?

So no, they're not. We have an agreement where it's no branding. So it can be our branding if you want, but It can't be any— your trucks can't be labeled, your shirts can't be labeled. It's basically brandless. And we were a little worried going into it about kind of diluting our brand, but it's been great. Our reviews have stayed the same, if not better. Uh, less callbacks, customers are still happy. And we've more so converted it into a, like a window cleaning broker business in a way.

Yeah. We've looked at some of those on my other podcasts.

Acquisitions Anonymous.

Yeah, about unusual businesses, or Acquisitions Anonymous about businesses for sale. And we'll see them often. There's a plumbing lead company that does exactly what you're doing, but just for plumbing. And we universally poop on that model. So I guess you can come on sometime and talk to us about some window washing businesses and why it's a good idea. So then in the end, your company right now is just your business partner and How many other W-2 people?

So we have, we have a VA and then we, we have one W-2 admin that's on maternity leave right now. So she's basically, Sergio's fulfilling that role of admin or basically business manager operator. Uh, once she comes back, she'll be put in the operator position and run the business. She knows Orange Window Cleaning like the back of her hand. So yeah, excited for that.

So what's, I mean, you have one location now in Orange County, though you're servicing a bunch of different cities. What, What's stopping you from opening another location, or you're not passionate about that?

So how we thought about it, it might be part of the roadmap for 2022, but to expand into other areas, you got to time it right. So if we wanted to say go to LA, to LA County, right? That's the neighboring county to Orange County.

Right.

We want to go to LA, we would have to time it and get everything set up this off-season. So start now, work on getting all our systems and stuff set up, for finding subs, getting our location set up on Google My Business, Yelp, et cetera. And then launch in March, April where there's an uptick in leads. But it's just something, I don't know, we switched to the sub model to more so take ourselves out of the field faster. It was like the juice wasn't worth the squeeze of building the systems and the culture and the employees and financing the trucks through our our money doing all this stuff, it just wasn't worth it. And in order to get to a point where we want to exit for a lot of money, it's going to take a lot of work. And we're like, we're just playing entrepreneurship on hard mode at this point. And so that's why we switched to the subs, and we're kind of just going to let it grow naturally every year. I mean, we've at least doubled every year. So this year we'll do around $700K, and next year we should hit a million because we've done $25,000 to $50,000 to $200,000 to $700,000. So at this rate, we should naturally get to that, that $1 million mark next year, especially with the sub model, we can scale that much faster. We don't have to, you know, finance trucks and put them on the road with brand new equipment and all this stuff.

Yeah, much lower capex. So let's say so $1 million in revenue. So what, what is your arrangement with the subs? How much of the money do they get to keep?

So it's a, it's a range, uh, with new subs that come on, they'll start at 50%.

Okay.

After a certain point of jobs, uh, like say, I think it's 16. Once they hit 16 jobs completed for us, we'll move them up to 55 and kind of incentivize them that way. And then once they hit 40, we'll move them up to 60 and that's where they're capped to incentivize them to take work from us versus another window cleaning business.

Got it.

Got it.

Got it. Okay. Well, and so that's, I guess the economics there are pretty straightforward and you and your partner are 50/50. Yep. Cool. So what other expenses do you guys have? So you have the VA, you, do you have an office? No, no office.

Yeah. I'm in my office right now. So we use this as like our podcast studio too. Uh-huh. But, uh, yeah, so we have the office, we have the VA, we have our admin when she comes back and then we have, you know, our software stack, like $500 a month. Um, and that's, that's about it. We get rid of that workers' comp, that big workers' comp payment we were cutting every month. That was a big one too. Dude, workers' comp is the worst in the window cleaning business.

Oh, why is that?

One thing I could tell you, it's workers' comp insurance guys love window cleaning businesses because they can hit you with ladder. Oh, you're getting up on a ladder? Here's 22% workers' comp. It's like, dude, I barely get on ladders. I've tried to tell them we barely get on ladders. They don't listen. They still hit me with 22% workers' comp.

So don't listen. Okay, so a couple more questions. Looking at my notes here about the sales process. You know, let's talk a little bit about the Yelp relationship. You said a lot— Yelp just owns these services businesses in Southern California. Thank God it doesn't appear to be that way in San Antonio because I hate Yelp.

That's what I get all the time, man. Everybody hates it for some reason. It's like, if it's pay to play, it's pay to play, man. I'll pay to play. You know, it works.

How much of their— how much of their gross is Yelp taking from you at this point?

So we get— I'm sorry, what was the question?

How much of your— well, okay, this, this may explain the unique and opposing view of it. I just asked the question of how much of your money is Yelp taking from you, and you were about to explain to me how much more business Yelp gives to you. So give me the other side. Give me the other side of this.

So we spend, we spend about $2,000 on Yelp. How much do you think that— a month, $2,000 on Yelp a month. But how much do you think that returns us?

Whoa, whoa, I'll ask the question. Okay. Um, let's see, you're probably not doing it unless it turns into 60 grand in business.

Is that high? That's, that's a little— 2 grand, 30x return.

20, 20 grand from Yelp.

20 grand. So 40. So we get about 20 times return on our ad spend from Yelp. So 40 grand. And that's all new business. That's not including, uh, customers that we retain. Okay. So we can— we know we have a predictable source of, of kind of advertising where If I know if I put in $1,000, I can get around 20x off Yelp. $2,000, I get around 40. So it makes it easy when we get, you know, we get another truck, let's say, and they need a full workload. Okay, boom, let's crank the ad budget to $3K or $4K. Right.

And so what— have you done any math on what the lifetime value of a customer, new customer is for you at this point?

It's about $6,000, but we're still young. We're only 4 years into it. So about $6,000 is a rough calculation. We've done. Yeah.

Is there anything you're doing on Yelp that most people who hate Yelp don't understand?

Oh yeah. It's Yelp. Most people's argument with not advertising on Yelp is they remove, they remove my reviews. It's not true. They don't, they're not removing reviews. They have, they actually have an algorithm and that we kind of figured out and it's not conveying your brand properly. So, so the good thing about Yelp and I'm, I sound like such a Yelp sales guy right now, but the good thing about Yelp is it's bottom of the funnel advertising, meaning So if someone goes, they have 99 million people a month going to Yelp to buy things, right? 99 million, that's a lot of people. So you go to Yelp to buy. So if someone's searching window cleaning, it's just like Google AdWords. If you're searching window cleaners near me, most likely you want your windows cleaned, right?

Yeah.

So that's the great thing about it. Now, if you convey your brand properly, you get rid of the other argument, which is, oh, there's too many bargain hunters on Yelp. It's just like Angie's List, or it's just like HomeAdvisor. It's not the case. You can set your, your ad up to get rid of the bargain hunters. So like, we don't have our quote requests turned on. You just have to call us because when you do request a quote on Yelp, it's sending it to 5, 6, 7 other companies. You don't want to— of course you're going to compete on price at that point. But if you have click to call, that means they're selecting you out of the 7 other companies advertising. And if you can convey your, you know, your wrapped trucks, me and Sergio standing next to each other smiling, it looks real, real professional. You know, they know they're not going to get a, you know, $100 for 30 windows. They're not getting that.

Yeah. So, okay, so 50 to 60% of a dollar comes in, goes out to your, your subs. So what is, what is to keep it from— what is to keep your interest aligning, which is you want to have a long-term sustainable business with your subs, or could obviously be motivated just to do a terrible job, take the money and run. Or not give a crap about your reviews. What do you guys do to kind of align those interests?

It's as simple as our thought process for it is W-2. Everyone's argument that when we were switching to sub-model was you don't have control over it, which is true to an extent. But the thing is, is W-2 employees will never care as much about your business as you will, right? Would you agree with that?

So it's not a never, but mostly, most of the time, right? I have some W-2 people I work with that care more about the business than I do.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Okay.

We'll say most of the time. Yeah. Most of the time.

That's because they're unicorns. So anyway, go ahead.

But you put a sub out there, it's still their business. And in our experience, most of the time they care about the quality of their work. They're going to do a good job. And the way we explain to them is this is a fire hose. We just have to turn it on for you and you're going to have endless, endless work. You're never going to run out of work. So you don't have to worry about marketing yourself and spending money on advertising. We're that. We're your marketing arm. So you mess up and you keep screwing up. It's okay. We just turn the fire hose off and plug someone else in.

So, so walk me through the mentality of these, of the subs at this point. I mean, they're, they're probably not super sophisticated digital business people, but at some point, does giving 40% off the top, like, how are they thinking through that? That idea, right? It seems like they're taking both the risk and giving up 40% or 50% of the revenue. How does that math work in terms of what they're thinking about it?

Yeah, you said it there in the beginning. And we also frame it in a way where we're one of the highest-priced companies in the county. So even at 60% of a job, they still make out pretty well just because we charge a premium in the first place. There's that too. It's like you said at the beginning, there are a lot of old-school mentality type of guys. They just love to clean windows. Funny enough, they love cleaning windows. That's— they take joy in the types of tools they have. They're going to the window cleaning store, buying all types of different stuff because they enjoy their craft. That's not something I'm interested in, but more power to them. I can give them the ability to do that by just turning the work on, basically.

Yeah. No, no. Okay. So it totally makes sense. So before we leave the sales process, I had a couple more questions. So customer demographic, does this business only work with rich customers or is it like more— you said Orange County is very wealthy, so it's pretty wealthy.

No, it doesn't, because I know, like I said, I'm pretty plugged into the window cleaning community. So I met guys with a million-plus operations in 100,000-person metros.

Yeah.

So it works because you can offer other things like soft wash. So soft wash is removing mold and algae and stuff off of roofs and siding with chemicals and bleach mixture. You can do gutter cleaning, all types of different things, house washing, because you can package this stuff together and upsell it. So you turn that $200 average ticket into a $600 average ticket, so on and so forth. And people, especially like say in Florida or Georgia where it gets real humid and there's a lot of moisture in the air, you get a lot of mold and allergy and stuff growing on these roofs. So it makes these smaller metros easy to come in where there's less competition and grow that company really quickly. Through adding all these services together and marketing yourself as a home exterior cleaning company instead of just a window cleaning company. I got off on a tangent there. What was the original question? I don't know. I can't remember either.

I was looking at my notes. Now, I think we were talking about— we were talking about the mentality and then trying to talk about—

Oh, is it only for rich people? So no, it's not only for rich people because in Orange County, I would say window cleaning by itself, yes, it's only for wealthier people.

Yeah.

Unless someone's really particular about, you know, cleaning their windows or they live in a townhouse where they can't clean their own windows, then sure, we'll get the one-off. But our customer demographic is almost 80% like entrepreneurs.

Yeah. Well, they've— they're probably short on time and willing to pay $300 for two— a folk— a person to spend 2 hours cleaning their windows.

Right. Exactly.

Totally dig it.

Another underrated thing. Real quick is since our customer demographic is other entrepreneurs, they love to see, especially when you're starting out, younger people, you know, getting out there and trying to start something. So we got a lot of support at the beginning just because we were young.

It is such a rarity. I mean, you know, you're, you're a younger guy, you're in your early 20s, basically what I was guessing. I'm in my mid-40s, so that's why I'm such a fossil. I'm twice your age. Exactly. I've, I I have lived your life twice, Johnny. That's the way this works. No, I'm just kidding. I hate it when people talk to me like that.

Anyway. It's true, dude. Yeah.

It just felt, as a 20-something, it felt so patronizing. But now as a 40-something, I'm like, well, I kind of deserved it. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Anyway. But I got myself off topic. But oh, I think there is that going on. There's something about the way y'all as millennials, or I guess you're closer to Gen Z, something almost about the way you guys were raised. Like, there is just— it seems like a smaller percentage of young folks are taking an entrepreneurial path that isn't like a super sexy entrepreneurial path, right? Like, everybody wants to go like be the next Mark Zuckerberg or whatever. And, and like, very, you know, very few people are interested in ideas that are more proven, even if they're smaller, right? Everybody wants to be a super unicorn of stuff. So it does surprise me as a middle-aged entrepreneur.

It's—

I'm okay with it because I don't need the competition mission. But I don't know, curious your thoughts about that and feeling special as a younger person.

Yeah, definitely. Nobody wants to do this kind of stuff, especially starting out. You got to do the stuff by yourself. You know, you have to go out and actually clean the windows and learn how to clean the windows. And that was a process in itself. But now that I've aged a little bit and know a little bit more about business and growing, I have a different thought process. If I could go back, I absolutely would not be doing window cleaning. I would start something else. But Oh, it taught me, it taught me a lot because I didn't come at it from the thought process of, of, uh, I, I didn't even know business was a thing. Like, I, I didn't know you could start a business. I thought you needed a degree from a 4-year university to be able to even start something. And so I was working a crappy job, shitty job, and I was like, this sucks. Like, what? And so I started going on Reddit and I found a subreddit called Entrepreneur, and I was like, oh wow, people are just starting things. And so I went went to my buddy Sergio, I was like, hey dude, you know you could just start a business? And he was like, well yeah, you didn't know that? I was like, no. And so, and so we started Googling ideas, um, and we started a t-shirt company, uh, with $300, spent $300 on a logo and, uh, canned that the next day because we were like, wait, we both don't know anything about fashion, and so let's make money right now. Googled some more ideas, found window cleaning, found out that it was an actual industry that people pay for cleaning dirt off of glass. So we're like, all right, buy $150 worth of equipment, some Walmart polos, and let's go start knocking on doors because I do not want to work for someone. And that was the whole reason we started. And for the first 2 years, it was just beer money. It was just side hustle money. We didn't really think about it as a business. And then I started listening to podcasts and stuff, How I Built This, big one, and Built to Sell. And I started learning, wow, people gain their wealth by selling their businesses. That's crazy. Maybe we could sell the window cleaning business. And then I started learning about systems and then, you know, joined the Entrepreneurs Organization and started going through Scaling Up. I don't know if you're familiar with that and just learning. And I was like, wow, like this, this is a crazy country. You can do a lot of things if you just, you know, build systems and, and grow something. It doesn't really matter the industry, supply and demand, right? So yeah, that was my thought process.

Yeah, no, it's super cool of how you got to today. What's interesting to me though, is you're also interested me also is your, you know, your bio says you're scaling to be a $10 million business, but also you're working on this something that's not a window washing business. So like, how do I— is that shtick? Or like, how do I think about those two things?

Getting onto Twitter, my bio was— that was the goal, scale to $10 million. But I mean, you can— I'm sure you can attest to this as an entrepreneur. You get— I have a problem with shiny object syndrome.

Yeah.

And so I'm constantly thinking about other ideas. And when, when the Yelp agency idea hit, I couldn't not do it. And it kind of worked out perfectly as we were switching to the sub model and it got a little bit more automated with our systems. It just made more sense to go and do that. And we've kind of switched our focus from, from scaling the business to $10 million because it was like I was saying earlier, the juice really isn't worth the squeeze to, to get to $10 million. You know how many trucks we're going to have to put out there? A lot.

How many?

A lot. I think it's like 31 trucks or something to get to—

well, you could do $2 million. You could do the math.

Or $10 million.

$10 million divided by $125 an hour. Hold on, that's a lot of zeros.

I think it's 31 when we did it. So each truck can produce about $20 grand a month.

That's $80,000. You have to sell 80,000 hours a year to get the $10 million window washing business.

That's a lot of window cleaning. So we're just kind of like, you know, let's let it grow naturally. We'll get— we still want to get to the million-dollar mark. So the goal, and we'll just see where it goes because I mean, the systems are in place now. The really only issue we'll run into is replacing subs in and out, but that's what our operator can take care of. It's not a big deal.

So the subs, it seems like you've gone from the worry about a W-2 employee leaving, which of course somebody else would have to set them up with a truck and all that kind of stuff and healthcare benefits or whatever. Now you've— the risk of this sub situation is You know, you have— you run the risk that somebody else pays them better, um, or they're not available if you're, um, if when you need them, or that they take the whole thing and they say, congratulations, I'm gonna hire this Yelp agency and I'm gonna have my own Window Wolf cleaning business. Like, so what's the, you know, what's the kind of dynamics there? What kind of threats and benefits do you— I mean, we talked about the benefits of the 1099 version, but Now, it seems like there's some threats there. Like, how are you mitigating those?

Yeah. So we have a little system in place where, like, so California, they have a rule AB 5, what distinguishes contractors versus employees. One of those things is you can't give them a schedule. So we say, "Hey, you let us know what days you're available and we'll schedule jobs on those days, whatever you want." And most of the subs want their schedule packed. They just want to work. Some will even work 6 days a week. So they just say, "Book me from the 15th through the 22nd. I want all those jobs." We say, "Okay, that's what you want." We book them. And how we keep them is we found so far that, like I said at the beginning or earlier, high prices and really good jobs. So we're taking care of the whole booking process with the employee. It just pops up on their phone. They see, "Okay, I got 15 windows. The house is this big." And in City of Orange. Oh, this is going to be easy. Boom, they go knock it out and they get paid really well because we charge a high price. And that, that percentage basis is what most companies do around here because there's so many window cleaners. So they— some companies will pay 50%, 55%, 60%, but they're not paying it at our price point.

So I'm not—

okay, it doesn't— competition doesn't worry me. That doesn't, that doesn't worry me.

Yeah. So I'd love to switch to that. That's actually— thank you for the segue. Like, So who are the other players then and what are their models? Are they all W-2 folks or 1099s or how— who are you competing with on a day-to-day basis?

It's a lot. There's hundreds of window cleaning companies. When we were switching to the sub model, I'll give you some numbers. I went to one of our suppliers and said, "Hey, can I get a customer list because I need to subcontract some work?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure." Printed out their whole window cleaning customer list, like 300 window cleaning companies just in the county. Just in Orange County. Uh, lots of them aren't online. The big players that we are competing with are, uh, some are sub— most are W-2, but there's also a lot of sub models in there. Uh, I don't know if you want me to name names, but there's like, you got Orange County Window Cleaning competing with Squeegee Pro. It's just so fragmented that, uh, it's— I can't— I don't know how to put into words. Just so fragmented that I don't really— I do compete with people, but at the same time there's constantly people coming in and out, a company selling, new companies getting started, so on and so forth.

Yeah. So you said there's 300 window cleaning companies in Orange County?

That— just from that one supplier.

Just from that one supplier. And so where do you guys stand in terms of size? Are you one of the bigger ones or one of the smaller ones?

Yeah. So we're one of the— we're one of the bigger ones. We— a typical window cleaning company, we sit around $200,000 to $300,000 in revenue here is what I found. And, you know, we're— we'll do 7s. And we're also the number 1 if you do window cleaning near me in Orange County. We're going to come up 1 or 2 on Yelp depending if you're in North or South County. If you're in South County, we'll probably come up 2. In North County, we're absolutely coming up number 1 every time. Uh, Google My Business, we have over 100 more reviews than the next guy. So in terms of our placement in, in like the advertising and the online game, we're number 1. But you have companies who've been around 20, 30 years who have built up that fat book of business from just referrals and being in business for a long time.

Yeah. How many of them are doing kind of the modern customer engagement model with digital and how many of them are like, "Call us at this number"?

Most of them aren't. Like I said, we're still the only one to do completely online booking in Orange County. So I would imagine if they can't set that up, they probably aren't doing much for customer retention. Other than your basic admin giving them a phone call, something like that. But you're so tied—

Oh, go ahead.

I was going to say, you're just so tied to how many trucks you have on the road. So you can have a database of 10,000 customers, but you might only be able to service 500 of them in a month.

It's totally the story of why something ends up as a very fragmented market. There's very little in terms of economies of scale.

Right.

Of a business like this. So like when you win, I think you've answered this already, but I want to get it crystallized. Like when you win customers, like why do you win? Because you said you're not the cheapest.

Yeah. So like I said, conveying the brand. So wrap trucks, you see me and Sergio smiling again, going back to the people like to support younger guys starting. You see a picture in our polos, all professional next to our wrap trucks. So it looks really nice and you're getting greeted with a smile. One of our things is smile when you answer the phone because you can You can tell a difference when someone's smiling over the phone. That's kind of a thing we say. And it's our customer service. It's, you know, if we're late, we'll send you a gift card, uh, online, a little e-gift card, like $25, buy yourself some lunch if we're late. We do customer walkarounds. We tell them everyone's insured that's going to their house. If anything were to happen, you're covered, don't worry about it. Uh, stuff like that.

Yeah. Well, it sounds like the flywheel for you very much is like Good Yelp reviews allow you to charge more, which allows you to have higher-performing subcontractors who then deliver better service. And then you make sure that service is really good, and then that gets you better Yelp reviews and Google reviews, and the flywheel goes like that.

Exactly. Exactly. And I think that, you know, you just, you just framed it perfectly.

I think if you take that model, that'll be $5,000.

Yeah, if you take that model though, because Yelp only works in California, I want to make that very clear to anyone listening, or if anybody wants to start a window cleaning business, take that same model but apply it to Google My Business and Facebook and Nextdoor, and you won't go wrong. You'll, you'll grow faster than most, most people in, in your area. It's just super important in this business to convey your, your reputation. Uh, you'll win so many jobs just by having 50 more reviews than the next guy.

Yeah, super cool. And then so you're personally only spending 3 hours a week on this business now. So congratulations. That's pretty close to mailbox money.

Yeah, that's nice. I've been loving my schedule the last couple of months, that's for sure.

So and then you're working on this new digital agency for Yelp. So just 30 seconds. What the heck is that?

So, so you help home service businesses grow on Yelp. That's our shtick. We use Orange Window Cleaning as a case study. To, to show everyone, look, we can do this for you too. Uh, we go in, we have autoresponders. So we're only one of a couple agencies that have an auto response built into Yelp because Yelp is really closed off with letting people into like their APIs or, you know, whatever. And we, uh, optimize your profile, your campaign. Uh, we have, uh, we're an exclusive Yelp partner, so we can, we can see all searches in the area. So for example, if you had a plumbing company here in Orange County, And you wanted to know how many people are searching for plumbing on Yelp, I can pull that data. I can see how many people are clicking on your profile, how many page views you have, how many people search for plumbing within 20 miles of your business location. So we get all that data exclusively. No one else has access to that. And then we, we just do what we did for Orange Window Cleaning and, and do it for other companies.

What, how many customers do you have so far?

So we have 5. The cool thing about Yelp too is we get a kickback on all our customers' ad spend. So up to 25% kickback on the ad spend. It's the best untapped thing that you haven't heard of.

Well, it sounds great for you.

Yeah. Sounds terrible for the people you're working with. That's not a selling point. It's not a selling point. Maybe you might want to cut that out, but—

I mean, no, I mean, that's typical agency model, but it's also why business owners hate Yelp and a lot of them, including me, are just like, don't get involved with those people. Not build a business on their platform because they're going to try to capture all the value, which I think—

I think in California you can't— as a home service business, you can't not be on Yelp. You can, but you can't. You're missing out on some— you're leaving so much money on the table if, if you can fulfill that, that supply or demand.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about kind of macro challenges, right? Like, so you have— you talked about what's going on with California, AB5 and all that stuff has made your life a nightmare. Love to dig in on that. But then also COVID and PPP and all of the stimulus? How is that, how have those things that are happening both California-wise and nationally affecting the business?

Orange County's kind of an anomaly when it comes to COVID. You don't see really any masks here. We don't have a mask mandate anymore. COVID blew us up. We 4X through COVID while everyone was kind of scared. We kept cranking our ads, kept reaching out to our customers, And after April, you know, because everyone's business kind of died, you know, March, April, uh, when it was still new. But after that, we, we were able to capture so many more leads just from, from not being scared. And customers didn't mind us still coming into their house with the mask on. They still wanted their windows cleaned. They were home looking at their dirty windows. So it was a no-brainer. Yeah, their windows clean.

The Orange County is a pretty— I don't know a better way to say it— pretty conservative part of California compared to the People's Republic of San Francisco or anything like that. My uncle, who is an amazing person, lives in South Bay, LA, and he refers to Santa Monica as the People's Republic of Santa Monica. It's the funniest thing ever.

That's hilarious. Yeah, Orange County, I've noticed that too with COVID The more conservative the area, the less masks you'll see, and that's kind of how it is here.

So yeah, welcome to Texas. So is your business partner— you said he's the one day-to-day in the business and you guys are 50/50. Does he take a salary or is he just— how does that work?

So we just both take a check every, every month.

Okay.

But we're 50/50 in the agency too. So that's kind of how we sorted it out.

Okay. So he's getting a free ride on your labor and you're getting a free ride on his labor.

Exactly. Divide and conquer.

Nice. Okay. Well, and where's your plan to take the agency? What are you going to do with that?

So we want to get to $100K by the end of the year. I think it's doable. And then we want to go to $1 million in ARR by the end of 2022. That's our goal.

And so how does that— maybe I missed it, but are you charging people a monthly subscription or how does that work?

So we charge them a small fee of $4.99 and then whatever ad spend they want to do. So typically we recommend $1,500 to make it an even, you know, about $2,000 a month. To really optimize for that, that kickback.

Nice.

And, and them, and obviously them, you know, getting good return on ads because you got to put out some money in order to get a lot of leads back in.

And is the team there currently just you, or how's—

so I have a VA for this, for this company too that's doing, you know, they're responding to reviews too. We do that, we respond to their reviews, uh, set up their profile, upload pictures, and then set up their, their ad real cool. So if like they have a wrapped truck, we'll make it so their wrapped truck is completely displayed in their portfolio. It doesn't look like anything you'll see from the other Yelp placements.

Um, and then where's the— where's the VA located?

Philippines? Yep.

This is fascinating. It's a fascinating thing.

We actually have the VA on Orange Window Cleaning. We, we have the VA as our admin right now, so she's doing outbound and, uh, taking inbound calls from the Philippines.

Super cool. Super cool. So let's go back to, you know, I keep harping on this, but these— the subs and how to, how to make that not the limiting factor for your business. Or maybe you don't care. It sounds like your ambition has kind of shifted from being a $10 million $10 million window washing business to being a $10 million agency.

I still want, want the window cleaning business to do well where we don't have any plan to like sell it anytime soon or anything like that. So the, the whole thing with the subs is it makes it easier if we wanted to get to $10 million, which I already said we, we really don't care about getting $10 million, but if we wanted to, it'd make it easier because we just have to add on subs. Maybe we would have to go back to maybe a hybrid model if we wanted to reach that, just so we can fill, fulfill the demand. We might run outta companies that want to sub for us. But does that answer your question?

No, no, I dig it. I think also, like, what, if anything, does it make sense for you to do with regards to developing future subs, right? Like, you can grow your business by 25% at this point by adding another sub and then upping your Yelp spend if you wanted to do that. But, you know, there's, there's so many window washing companies running around now. Like, what, what's your, what's your calculus in terms of thinking about both being able to replace it if one leaves now as a sub and also how do you groom kind of new ones to be ready for you?

So like I said, we went to our supplier and we have a huge list of like 300 companies. So we just call them, shoot them emails saying, hey, if you're interested in subbing, they'll give us a call and then we'll sit down and have, you know, buy them lunch or something to see if they're a good fit first.

Yeah.

So the subs we have right now, just because we're getting into our slower season and like I'm looking at the sky right now and it's a little gloomy, So I already know it's going to be a slow day and we have to let the subs know that. So we already have guys that we kind of prioritize the work for. So once they kind of let us know, hey, I don't want to work 2 weeks from now or a week from now, and it's like, okay, we'll start calling that list. Hey, can you take work this week? And setting that up.

So, and to go back again, like, like how do you know besides getting a 1-star review immediately after the job that the customers are ecstatic? Like it sounds like that's part of your flywheel. Like, how are you making sure you have zero unhappy customers? Or is it okay that that's just part of the cost of doing business?

You know, it's not— it's not that big a deal. It's not— not that it's not that big a deal. It's not that difficult of a service. So people don't expect that much, especially if you do a good job at setting expectations, which we do over the phone. We let them know. We're cleaning dirt off your glass. This doesn't include any construction debris. That's a different price. We're not removing any hard water. It's just the dirt off the glass. And we're going to wipe the tracks down. We're not deep cleaning them. That's also a different service. So we make it very clear over the phone. So that's number 1. Number 2, day after, admin is doing a follow-up call saying, hey, how was your service? Sometimes they say, oh, well, it was good, but this X problem happened. Uh, they missed a window or they missed some tracks, whatever. It might be, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry about that." Call the sub, "Hey man, you forgot to do this. When can you go back?" "Oh, I can go back today." "Okay." Call the customer, "Oh, we can come back today." Boom, problem solved.

Totally dig it. So what kind of threats do you see around the business in the future? What are you worried about?

Nothing much, man. Call me naive, or I don't know if it's me being naive, but they're not being in business long enough, but I don't see— The, the great thing about it is we naturally grow every year so long as we're retaining customers. Yeah. And even if we shut off our advertising, we could still probably hit 7, over $700K, uh, next year just from retaining our customers and some universities that we have. Yeah. But it probably is just losing subs or maybe running out of subs to, to, to use. But I just don't see that happening with the, the sheer amount of window cleaners there are.

Got it.

And maybe getting audited. Uh, that would suck. I don't wanna go through that. Especially using subs in California, right? And they're going to be grilling me.

Yeah. Are, are any other window washing companies starting to see that, or is it—

have you heard of your, your colleagues in the community running into that, uh, getting audited? Not really, no. I haven't, I haven't heard of it. The one guy I know who's been subbing for like 10 years in Orange County hasn't, hasn't run into any issues.

Hasn't got it yet. How did you get the idea to do the subs rather than W-2?

It was actually when we were doing this. So we had two, this summer we had two universities going on at the same time and we were still W-2. And this one particular university we were doing was a pain in the ass. We had an 85-foot articulated boom lift there and we had to maneuver it around all these buildings and in some nooks and crannies and stuff. And it was just, it was crazy. And so we were sitting there training the guys how to do it. I was getting up on the lift myself at some points. And we had this huge residential job that we did last year for like $4,000. And that's, that's a big number for residential jobs. So we're washing the whole power, washing the whole house, the surfaces, cleaning all the windows inside and out. It's right on the coast. So it was just really, really nice house. And where me and Sergio are sitting there like, dude, how are we going to get this done? We have like 5 guys right here on, on this university. We've got another 3 on the other one. How are we going to do this? And I remember I knew a guy who said, hey, if you ever need a work sub, give me a call. I call him up like, hey man, what's your schedule like? And he's really good. I really, I trust him. And he's like, oh yeah, I could take that. Gave him the job, no problem. Customer was really happy. I paid him his 55% cut because that's what he was asking for. And I walked away with like just over $2,000 and I didn't even think about it. So that's kind of what got the ball rolling.

So you were forced to, and then it turned out great, and you're like, let's do this again.

Exactly.

So it totally makes sense. You know, is there any opportunity to, you know, or any techno— technological innovations coming down besides— it sounds like you've adopted all this digital marketing and customer interaction stuff. Are there any other things coming along, you know, in terms of chemicals, water, types of things that are happening that are on your mind, or you see as opportunities in the business in the future?

No, not really. I mean, there's different—

window washing.

I was going to say that. I mean, you have drone window wash. Honestly, I don't think that's going to work, dude. Like, I really don't. I think it's all the window cleaning drones BS. Get out. If you're in that business, just get out of the business.

It's— oh, there really are drone washers?

Yeah, there's been so many companies to come in and try to do it, and they've all failed. They've all failed. But people don't learn the lesson. You have different sectors of window cleaning, so, you know, residential, and then there's storefronts, which is route work. And then there's commercial. So storefronts, commercial are separate. And then you have high-rise. So really you're only hearing about the residential end of the business. I'm not really big on commercial. I definitely will never do high-rise. You won't— I'm not going to ask someone to do what I wouldn't do. So high-rise is a no-go. And then storefront, I just don't want to go through the process of building up that route for no $20, $30 a pop. Not worth it in my opinion. But there's different little technologies in each. The biggest one is your water-fed pole, which I explained earlier, the big carbon fiber pole. Highly recommend if you want to get in the window, window cleaning business, you can get started for $1,000. Tank rental and a water-fed pole costs about $750, $800. You can get a good 30-footer and it's going to save you so much time and make you so much more money.

Yeah. Well, I think you just described a why the residential market is so fragmented. It's like $1,000, you have a little business. Congratulations. You just have to worry about getting some customers.

Yep.

So if I want to talk myself out of being in the commercial business here, which is the opposite of most things, right? You're much happier to be in the big ticket thing. The things you hate about commercial are, well, you're hanging off the side of a building if you're doing high-rise, or you're getting nickel and dimed to death by some storefront person who pays you 30 days later. Is that basically— that's basically the value prop that if you're in commercial, you have to deal with?

So no, no, no. So storefront and commercial is different. Storefront. Okay. Storefront takes time to, you know, you got to go knock on these doors, find the owner, say, hey, can I clean your windows for $30? Sure. Clean my windows.

Okay.

Boom. Clean the windows. That's one, one account you have on your route. Now you want to build that route up in the same area so you can send a crew out to knock that route every week. Or if you build up a big enough one, you've got a crew completely booked every month. Cool thing about that, sucks building the route. If you can pull it off, that's how you combat seasonality in the business because you're still cleaning their windows in January, February, March when it's raining really bad. But it's a pain in the ass to build. Commercial, you've got long sales cycles and lots of the time they've got a window cleaner already and it's one of those things where as long as they're doing a good job, just because you're calling them saying you offer window cleaning too, they're not going to make the switch. They've got dudes doing it for 10+ years. The only way we got into the universities was by acquiring a company. So that's kind of the pain in the ass. And you factor in every job is different. They might have different water spigots. You might be running to Home Depot to get a new type of faucet to have to plug in there to hook up to your hose bib. Just little things like that. Residential, it's the same thing over and over again, easier to systematize. And it's paid same day, so you're cash flow positive, or at least really close to cash flow positive.

Yeah, super interesting. And you, before we started recording, you were expressed you're, you're kind of bored by the window cleaning industry, though I don't think you're bored of the paychecks, but you're less excited about it in terms of shiny objects and stuff. Like, what, how do you feel about that at this stage in your career? Or did I mischaracterize you? You could totally say it.

No, yeah, yeah, like I said, I mean, I said it before, if I could go back in time, I would probably pick something else. Uh, and that's just because of scalability. I understand if we want to scale, you got to add labor, right? Uh, subs kind of help with that, but still you're adding labor to fulfill your demand, right? And it sucks. I don't like it. So if I could go back, yeah, I would start something on the internet, to be honest. But it's just I didn't know what I didn't know. So, and that is what it is. I love my window cleaning business, don't get me wrong. I am bored of it though, just because it's It's cleaning windows. You can only do so much. You know, once you get past that initial learning curve, there's nothing really interesting. Like, we bought a company, I can roll up more window cleaners. The process of buying a window cleaning company is different than the companies you talk about in your podcast, I would say, because pricing differences and owners being super tied into the business of no employees. So it's really easy to go in and buy these companies, but It's just not something that interests me anymore. I figure I want to spend my time while I'm young going for something big, not building a window cleaning business. But that's not to talk down on the window cleaning business. I think it's a great business. You want to start it, you can systematize and automate it, and you have really— you're competing against people who aren't running their businesses effectively.

Yeah, totally dig it. Yeah, I thought for a second you were going to say, well, I'm getting into real estate private equity, which seemingly everybody else on Twitter is like, I found an apartment building. Give me $300 grand.

No, no, I don't. I mean, real estate is cool, but I'm not looking at any like crypto or real estate or anything like that. I don't really dabble in that right now. I'm really focused on getting on myself and starting businesses and just seeing where I could take. I love starting things, dude. Like that's my thing is I had a lot of fun starting the business and I'm really glad I have Sergio, my partner, because he's really good at implementing systems and executing. And I'm more of the talker and the sales guy. Get things where we need to go. But yeah, I just, I really enjoy entrepreneurship.

I totally dig it. Yeah, real estate, private equity to me looks so boring.

Like, yeah, it's just, I don't, I don't understand the hype around real estate. I know it's a good store of wealth and, and, you know, you can create some good cash flow for yourself, but I think at this, at my age, starting a business and running businesses is just much more fun.

I own a lot of real estate, just, you know, because we talked about the fact I'm a fossil and it's I am totally unentertained by it. So it's so boring. It's so boring. But I think, I think there's a lot of people that just like that. Like, you don't come across as somebody that really likes getting in the weeds too long. Like, when it's new, it seems like it's fun to you. But after you get to understand how it works, like, you're probably bored with it and you're ready to move on to the next thing. The real estate guys who stick into it, they love just becoming 0.2% better over and over again. And that's not me. Like, I'm interested in the 20% improvements, and you can only do that 5 times. So there you go. Super cool. What, if anything, can my audience and me do to support you? I know you're active on social media and you also have your own podcast. I don't know if you're still producing it, but what can we do to be supportive?

Yeah, so we just started the podcast a couple weeks back with 2 episodes out. It's called You Do What for a Living? So it's almost I don't want to say we're competing. I don't know if we're not competing, uh, so to speak, but we're more of like a YouTube-focused, um, have on interesting entrepreneurs, really similar to this, but it's all, it's all in person only. So it's, so you're only really going to see Southern California entrepreneurs, uh, so it's different, it's different. So we have that, uh, that's just like a for fun thing right now. And then, yeah, uh, Twitter, I'm really active on Twitter. Or at least I'm starting to be. Twitter's great. I've been able to connect with tons of cool people, you know, especially Liam Kircher and Bryant. Bryant, you had on the pod.

Oh yeah.

Acquisition Anonymous. And we have a little Discord community for young, other young entrepreneurs who want to go and connect and kind of learn. And 40 or under 40 is the limit, but it's not super, it's not super, what's the word I'm looking for?

It's ageist. I'm calling the state of California on you. How dare you? How dare you? We're not super strict on it.

So, you know, Girdley, if you want to come in, I don't mind.

It's fine. I'm not going to come in there and talk down to you guys.

You do you.

Yeah. So, so yeah, I'm not going to be the old guy at the club. No, I'm not the old guy at the club. Anyway, please continue.

Come on, man. So yeah, join the Discord.

We've—

we're up to like 1,300 members almost now, I think. So it's grown pretty quick. And follow me on Twitter @SqueegeeGod. I tweet about niche businesses too. Every week I put out a niche business thread. Like, like this in podcast or in Twitter form, thread form. So I've talked about all types of stuff from, from concrete chipping to tent washing and screen window screen repair, like all types of different businesses I'll tweet about.

Super good. All right, well, I'll figure out something else to have a podcast.

You're the niche business enthusiast. I'm like niche business enthusiast junior.

So that's great. Happy to be partners in crime.

Cool, cool.

Well, thanks for being on, man. You were fantastic and look forward to getting this one up, out and into cyberspace.

So Really appreciate you. Alright, no problem, man. Thanks for having me.