Your current staff have contacts who need your cleaning services. One of the greatest ways to grow your company is to expand your network by incentivizing your current staff. Way too many local businesses make the mistake in thinking they are already paying their staff . and providing them a job so of course they will bring in referral business. Most of the time this simply is not true. We know this because when we started offering our staff a share of the profit or a specific commission on new deals, projects, or customers that they bring in the referrals increased.
Initially our staff was just leveraging their friends and family and having them use our services, but we realized as time went on that our staff was actually selling our services to people they just met in order to get that additional financial incentive. This can also be a great way to learn if any of your current staff members would make good full time sales reps for your company. If there is a particular employee that stands out and consistently brings in new business maybe look at having more of their time spent bringing in new customers.
Your business is only as good as the people you hire. If your hire unreliable people then it will be hard to build your business. I have cut corners on hiring and it has cost me both in the short terms and the long term. Bad hires create extra stress, generate unhappy customers which lead to negative reviews, and mean you have to repeat the hiring process all over again. Here we will provide some practical but powerful hiring strategies to support our hiring objectives and allow your business to generate a great reputation in your local community.
Yesterday we provided 3 low cost but high time ways to get the word out on your new window cleaning company. Today we are going to share the opposite. High cost low time involvement for building your business. Some of these will depend on the cash you have available and the growth of your business. Most the the time higher cost lower time strategies were ideas we grew into after build a larger recurring customer base and knew we already had a specific amount of revenue coming into our business.
It does not matter how great your business services are if no one knows about them. When starting a window cleaning company you better be ready to get your hands dirty. See what we did there. If you have not learned yet you will. We love to have fun. Building a company comes down to who is able to hustle and make things happen. A well run company will build massive amounts of referrals, but you have to hustle in order to get there. Todays post we focus on several ideas that relate to starting your marketing and letting people know you are in business.
Not all ideas are equal an not all ideas require the same amount of time or money. I will start with ideas that are heavy in time but low on cost and I will also share some ideas that are more expensive but leverage the time of other individuals. A well run marketing plan will rely on various ideas and stages to ensure that different opportunities and maximized.
Low Cost High Time:
Tomorrow we will tackle three more marketing ideas that flip the script as they are not as time consuming but cost more money.
A successful window cleaning company comes down to a couple key areas. They are simple, but don let their simplicity fool you into thinking you can cut corners. Cutting corners will cost you thousands of dollars in the life of your business. It isn’t worth it. Take the time to do things the right way and treat your customers the right way and your business will explode.
The first key to building your window cleaning company is marketing. You have to generate interest in your services. Without marketing it is difficult to get the word out and have people actually calling you for your window cleaning services. When I first started my marketing was good old fashion hustle. I went door to door offering a 50% off service of local retail shops on the streets of New York. If they said yes, I made should to provide them with the best window cleaning job they had ever received.
This leads me into my second key for building a window cleaning company. Over deliver. In the beginning, I charged my clients half of what I wanted my on going fee’s to be but I provided them double the service. I would clean extra areas or extra parts of the window even if they didn’t ask me. I wanted my customers to feel like the significantly under paid me. This would cause them to call me back and it led to a bunch of referrals.
The more you focus in on the second key of providing great service the more your customers will do all the marketing for you.
My third key is to reinvest your profits back into your business. When I first started I barely had the tools needed to perform a window cleaning job. I had no ladder, an old squeegee and rags to dry with. But as money started coming into my business I reinvested into better tools that would make more more productive, with better results, and open up new opportunities for business like taller building and ultimately high rises.
You can start a window cleaning company with very little money down, but don’t allow that to limit the bigger vision you have for building your company.