This tutorial will point you in the right direction to building a successful window cleaning business.
Let us start at the beginning and this involves planning, best business owners will tell you they put a great deal into the planning stage of their business. As the saying goes ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ and that is true about a great deal of businesses who fail to do their homework. Purchase a diary, write your business plan and see time scales. This is good in future when you review how the business is doing and you can plot your goals and achievements. Recording when you want to start acquiring customers, purchase equipment and a start date are all useful targets to write in your diary.
You may be working forty hours a week in your regular place of employment. Window cleaning is ideal because you can fit it in around your schedule. Your weekends and evenings may be best and you will rapidly fill your diary with customers while working the day job. This will have little impact on your finances and the money you earn from window cleaning can be invested into the business.
Get some business cards printed with Window cleaning business and contact details on them, I cannot stress how important it is to have window cleaner clearly printed in striking. Business cards are not expensive and there are plenty of good printers on-line. When you receive your business cards make sure you give them away to all you meet, awful in the glove box of the car or in the kitchen draw. Yell from the rooftops that you can clean their windows.
How much do you charge is a question without an easy answer, all depends on how much you need to live on and the going rate on the town you live. No decent charging twenty pound when all your competition is charging under ten, you will struggle to find work. Also no point in charging so little you barely cover you fuel costs. You have to strike a balance and the rule of thumb I use is the pound a window (or a dollar), average three bedroom house in the UK will have 10 windows (let you do the math).
You need some windows to clean now, why not start on your own house and move on to friends and relatives. This will give you plenty of practice, yet there is nothing like getting practice on the job. Get some paying customers and get practicing.
The quickest yet in addition expensive way of getting customers is to purchase a round or route, this is a rundown of established customers that another window cleaner due to retirement or has recently got too much work will sell to you at a price. They go from anything from three to five times of the monthly takings, I have seen some rounds for ten times the amount for example a round with three thousand pounds worth of work a month may go for a much as 30,000 pounds.
Canvassing is another method you will gain work and requires you to thump on peoples doors and ask them would they like you to clean their windows. Not hard but rather takes time to cover an area. You get to meet your customers face to face and you can pick your work, on the off chance that you do not like the look of a house do not thump.