Starting a Window Cleaning Business
In 1990, I was just starting my career with the company I’d wind up giving 18 years of my life to *shudder*. Starting out then, I was living pay-check to pay-check and never had any money left over at the end of the month. Though I knew that after a year or so, my wages would be brought up to standard, I was struggling to make ends meet.
Even back then, I had the entrepreneurial bug, and I was wracking my brain trying to figure out a way to make money after work and on the weekends. I didn’t need much – just a few hundred a month would subsidize my meager pay-check nicely.
I tried painting, but quickly discovered that one actually needed to know how to paint. After a few jobs, and many complaints, I decided to try running a window cleaning business. One of my fellow employees recommended this as a great way to make some easy money on the weekend. He had done it when he was new (and struggling) with the company. Do you get the feeling that this corporation was cheap?
I borrowed his old equipment (fold up ladder, bucket, squeegees, and scrubbers) and spent about $50 getting some fliers printed. The following weekend, I distributed them in a well-to-do area of town. I included my home phone number (cell phones were non-existent back then) at the bottom of the flier in big, bold letters.
The next Monday, I went to work as normal and left my answering machine to take care of any customers that might phone. During the day, I pretty much forgot about my window cleaning venture as I got caught up in my duties at work.
On the way home, I briefly thought about my window cleaning business and wondered if I got any calls at all. When I arrived at home, I was pleased to see a few messages on my machine. Initially, I thought the messages were from friends or family, but they were people responding to my flier, and they wanted me to clean their windows! At that point, I can’t describe how happy I was. I kept repeating in my head: This actually worked – This actually worked…
I wound up throwing everything into my hatchback and tied a ladder to the roof. It must have looked pretty amateurish, but now that I think of it, the other window cleaning companies didn’t look much better.
I made a lot of mistakes as a window cleaner – fortunately, I learned from them and refined my approach. The window cleaning business ended up making me a few hundred a month…and then some.
To this day, I still get out there and do the odd job for some of my old clients. I don’t advertise anymore because I don’t want to do this full-time and I’ve got plenty of work with just repeat customers and referrals.
I do it now for the exercise I get, more than anything. Spending a lot of time online in my other businesses doesn’t leave a lot of time for exercise. Window cleaning provides that exercise at $40/hour. ?
That’s not too hard to take!
