The Rizzler Strikes it on His Own || Business execution thread

[The Rizzler]

My purpose for this thread
I plan to use this as a blog/discussion thread to document the step-by-step of my journey in self-ownership and entrepreneurship. I hope to hit on details that are skipped over by people afraid to "let out all their secrets". This stuff may seem obvious, but for me, it was something that took me time to figure out. I hope to document my progress in this venture and show those who are on the edge of pulling the trigger on starting a similar business that it is totally doable and within their ability to get done today. I was inspired by GravyBoats thread and another thread that was posted about a Canadian dude doing a window/gutter/house cleaning business, but I can't find it anymore.
My History and lessons learned
I'm currently 21 years old, and when I read the Millionaire Fastlane , I, like you, wanted to start my own business and free myself from working for someone else just to be enslaved to a mediocre life. So I started into action, at first I thought I'd do drop shipping in the fashion niche. It didn't kick off and was a flop for me, I was hesitant to spend on ads, I didn't know how to do SEO (still don't) or social media marketing, and was putting too much time into grinding out what could have been outsourced for cheap. I then worked in the lead generation market targeting local businesses in my town. I got nothing.
Before this, I was working at my father's auto shop. My father was a mechanic for all of his life, and while he amassed a wealth of knowledge and experience, he never was able to launch into the next ring of success and spent his life working manual labor jobs at his small auto shop. I worked with him for about 3 years after the government shut down American schools. He paid my rent and fed me as long as I went to school and worked for him. I "saved" about 19k in cash (most of which is debt that he still owes me). He's currently retiring, by building rental properties on the empty lot on his land, and through observing his life, I learned something valuable. 1. Don't make your livelihood depend on your physical labor, try to be the brains behind the body, not the muscle. 2. Property is the key to living for free. 3. there is no honor in staying small-scale and dying poor.
Despite learning the first lesson, my skill set in working for my father for about 3 years did not prepare me for the online world and the opportunities there. I don't know how to code, I don't know how to do online marketing and I haven't had social media since 2018. So I bit the bullet and started a service business doing external house cleaning. Not revolutionary by any means, but it's what I can do.
The step by step
I went to home depot, bought my 180 dollars worth of cleaning supplies (at the bottom of the post) and a 100-dollar used extendable ladder, and built a website on Shopify (there are better options, it was just a leftover from my e-commerce venture) and watched youtube videos on how to clean windows, gutters how to sell it. I then practiced at my parent's home. I washed their windows over and over and over again. I learned how to clean water stains, how to scrape off bird poo and paint, and how to clean the frame and screens. I bought a gutter scoop and used my totally not stolen home depot bucket and cleaned out the gutters at my home. This was all about 2 weeks ago. And today I finally got the balls to knock on the first door. I was terrified of doing sales and drove to a neighborhood twice just to sit there, imagine scenarios in my mind, try to role-play my pitch, and then get flustered at something that didn't even happen and drive back
After the first few doors, I realized I needed a few things. A polo, a notepad, a clipboard, business cards, some way to track my houses contacted leads made and scheduled jobs, and a sales script. I used Vistaprint for my business cards (modeled after the business cards in American Psycho), went to the clearance section at Kohls, got a tight blue polo and black pants (that don't fit, but it's what I've got), borrowed a little clipboard and note pad from my father and went to YouTube for a script. I found an app called SalesRabbit that has been great at tracking my routes.
I watched a lot of great videos, but to distill them down, watch Jordan Belforts Sales School, and watch The Roof Strategists videos on door-to-door sales. These are the two sources that I used to learn the basics and I wrote out my own script based on them.
After that, I drove to the closest suburban street, parked my old truck, and took it one step at a time. I put on a smile, got out of my car, grabbed my sales stuff, and went door to door trying my pitch. At first, I completely blanked and went totally into "sales voice" mode and forgot my script entirely and the moment I got any objections I just said sorry and left. But with each house, I'd take a minute to practice the script again and find answers to their objections on youtube like "not interested" "I don't own this house" or "x does it for me already". I'm not great, but I'm making progress.
Results
I went to 27 homes from 11:00 to 12:30, and most homeowners were not at home, so most of my stops were unanswered. Next time, I'll go out on weekends and after about 5 PM. Of those that were there, I got 6 straight-up "no's" (which I'll double back to and use different sales techniques on), three potentially interested leads and one scheduled a gutter cleaning for next week. I didn't do as many doors as I wanted because I had college classwork to finish and do more research on dealing with objections, rejections, and how to run ad campaigns.
My Gear
Here's the list of my gear, it's pretty bare bones for what my business does.

• Window squeegees with 6,12, and 18-inch blade
• Window scrubber 6 and 12-inch
• Unger 6-gallon squeegee bucket
• Dawn dish soap and Fabuloso concentrate (use maybe 1-2 bottle caps of soap per gallon and the same with Fabuloso)
• extension ladder (with pivoting feet) and ladder stabilizer (a safety must-have)
• microfiber cloths
• a hip bucket (doesn't matter which one, just make sure it's plastic and holds the scrubber and water, and at least one squeegee. This was gear recommended to me by a family friend that did window cleaning for a few years)
• a 5-gallon home depot bucket for gutter muck and a gutter scoop, I got the orange handheld one from home depot.
• rubber gloves, preferably thick ones.
• A scrub daddy for hard water stains paired with Bar Keeper Friend soft cleanser (liquid form) works amazing for hard water stain removal. Bar keeps friend is oxalic acid so you'll need to rinse off the windows and anywhere the runoff hits to prevent damage when you are done
• Get a toothbrush and a decent handheld vacuum with one of those narrow attachments for cleaning the dirt on the window rails.

That's all I've got for the tools to do the job. I probably got a bit more than I needed, but I want to be able to upsell the customer on things like hard water stains and gutter cleaning.
I know a lot of you want to get into marketing, property management, or e-commerce because that's the trendy thing to do in the internet age, and you do not have to labor, but I see trends in AI that will eventually displace a lot of those jobs and the jobs left really will be for sales, and service jobs.
BONUS:
I wrote this post over 2 days and today I got my first call from an interested customer, he wanted to have a quote for his gutters to be cleaned and I scheduled him for Monday morning. I got two people asking for work on Yelp today and I gave them a rough quote for what they wanted to be done. Maybe it's a bad idea to give out a price like that because I can't really fight on price, my value comes more from the work and the human interaction, but I did it anyways.
Today I thought it would be a good idea to hit the local people I knew first to get a reputation and some Yelp reviews. I went to my church members' houses and did them for free, asking only for a "donation" if they think I did well. I still gave them a bill for what it would cost, but said that they can pay what they think is fair. They all paid in full. I completed one house with 10 windows and 70 feet of gutters. And another with 13 windows and 122 feet of gutters. I totaled about 580 dollars today in cash with 5 hours worked. With those, I learned some valuable lessons:

1. Get better sun protection, I'm too pale for this.
2. Move the customer's car to the sidewalk so the gutter muck does get on them.
3. Have a system to easily and professionally quote them on the spot.
4. Set up Venmo, CashApp, and all the easy payment systems so that payment is a breeze for them and me.
5. Another person makes this so much easier, specifically to do two jobs at once or to double-team a house.
6. Have something to catch the stuff that is run through the gutter spout when washing it out like a pasta strainer or something.
7. PICTURES! PICTURES! PICTURES! VIDEO TOO! Super important to do this for the customer and your social media/Yelp page/ads

Thanks for reading my effort post. Leave a comment or advice or questions and I'll try to answer them as fast as I can.

 

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[perchboy]

Good job taking action. Did you run ads on yelp or did you find them organically?

 

[Hurks2048]

My purpose for this thread
I plan to use this as a blog/discussion thread to document the step-by-step of my journey in self-ownership and entrepreneurship. I hope to hit on details that are skipped over by people afraid to "let out all their secrets". This stuff may seem obvious, but for me, it was something that took me time to figure out. I hope to document my progress in this venture and show those who are on the edge of pulling the trigger on starting a similar business that it is totally doable and within their ability to get done today. I was inspired by GravyBoats thread and another thread that was posted about a Canadian dude doing a window/gutter/house cleaning business, but I can't find it anymore.
My History and lessons learned
I'm currently 21 years old, and when I read the Millionaire Fastlane , I, like you, wanted to start my own business and free myself from working for someone else just to be enslaved to a mediocre life. So I started into action, at first I thought I'd do drop shipping in the fashion niche. It didn't kick off and was a flop for me, I was hesitant to spend on ads, I didn't know how to do SEO (still don't) or social media marketing, and was putting too much time into grinding out what could have been outsourced for cheap. I then worked in the lead generation market targeting local businesses in my town. I got nothing.
Before this, I was working at my father's auto shop. My father was a mechanic for all of his life, and while he amassed a wealth of knowledge and experience, he never was able to launch into the next ring of success and spent his life working manual labor jobs at his small auto shop. I worked with him for about 3 years after the government shut down American schools. He paid my rent and fed me as long as I went to school and worked for him. I "saved" about 19k in cash (most of which is debt that he still owes me). He's currently retiring, by building rental properties on the empty lot on his land, and through observing his life, I learned something valuable. 1. Don't make your livelihood depend on your physical labor, try to be the brains behind the body, not the muscle. 2. Property is the key to living for free. 3. there is no honor in staying small-scale and dying poor.
Despite learning the first lesson, my skill set in working for my father for about 3 years did not prepare me for the online world and the opportunities there. I don't know how to code, I don't know how to do online marketing and I haven't had social media since 2018. So I bit the bullet and started a service business doing external house cleaning. Not revolutionary by any means, but it's what I can do.
The step by step
I went to home depot, bought my 180 dollars worth of cleaning supplies (at the bottom of the post) and a 100-dollar used extendable ladder, and built a website on Shopify (there are better options, it was just a leftover from my e-commerce venture) and watched youtube videos on how to clean windows, gutters how to sell it. I then practiced at my parent's home. I washed their windows over and over and over again. I learned how to clean water stains, how to scrape off bird poo and paint, and how to clean the frame and screens. I bought a gutter scoop and used my totally not stolen home depot bucket and cleaned out the gutters at my home. This was all about 2 weeks ago. And today I finally got the balls to knock on the first door. I was terrified of doing sales and drove to a neighborhood twice just to sit there, imagine scenarios in my mind, try to role-play my pitch, and then get flustered at something that didn't even happen and drive back
After the first few doors, I realized I needed a few things. A polo, a notepad, a clipboard, business cards, some way to track my houses contacted leads made and scheduled jobs, and a sales script. I used Vistaprint for my business cards (modeled after the business cards in American Psycho), went to the clearance section at Kohls, got a tight blue polo and black pants (that don't fit, but it's what I've got), borrowed a little clipboard and note pad from my father and went to YouTube for a script. I found an app called SalesRabbit that has been great at tracking my routes.
I watched a lot of great videos, but to distill them down, watch Jordan Belforts Sales School, and watch The Roof Strategists videos on door-to-door sales. These are the two sources that I used to learn the basics and I wrote out my own script based on them.
After that, I drove to the closest suburban street, parked my old truck, and took it one step at a time. I put on a smile, got out of my car, grabbed my sales stuff, and went door to door trying my pitch. At first, I completely blanked and went totally into "sales voice" mode and forgot my script entirely and the moment I got any objections I just said sorry and left. But with each house, I'd take a minute to practice the script again and find answers to their objections on youtube like "not interested" "I don't own this house" or "x does it for me already". I'm not great, but I'm making progress.
Results
I went to 27 homes from 11:00 to 12:30, and most homeowners were not at home, so most of my stops were unanswered. Next time, I'll go out on weekends and after about 5 PM. Of those that were there, I got 6 straight-up "no's" (which I'll double back to and use different sales techniques on), three potentially interested leads and one scheduled a gutter cleaning for next week. I didn't do as many doors as I wanted because I had college classwork to finish and do more research on dealing with objections, rejections, and how to run ad campaigns.
My Gear
Here's the list of my gear, it's pretty bare bones for what my business does.

• Window squeegees with 6,12, and 18-inch blade
• Window scrubber 6 and 12-inch
• Unger 6-gallon squeegee bucket
• Dawn dish soap and Fabuloso concentrate (use maybe 1-2 bottle caps of soap per gallon and the same with Fabuloso)
• extension ladder (with pivoting feet) and ladder stabilizer (a safety must-have)
• microfiber cloths
• a hip bucket (doesn't matter which one, just make sure it's plastic and holds the scrubber and water, and at least one squeegee. This was gear recommended to me by a family friend that did window cleaning for a few years)
• a 5-gallon home depot bucket for gutter muck and a gutter scoop, I got the orange handheld one from home depot.
• rubber gloves, preferably thick ones.
• A scrub daddy for hard water stains paired with Bar Keeper Friend soft cleanser (liquid form) works amazing for hard water stain removal. Bar keeps friend is oxalic acid so you'll need to rinse off the windows and anywhere the runoff hits to prevent damage when you are done
• Get a toothbrush and a decent handheld vacuum with one of those narrow attachments for cleaning the dirt on the window rails.

That's all I've got for the tools to do the job. I probably got a bit more than I needed, but I want to be able to upsell the customer on things like hard water stains and gutter cleaning.
I know a lot of you want to get into marketing, property management, or e-commerce because that's the trendy thing to do in the internet age, and you do not have to labor, but I see trends in AI that will eventually displace a lot of those jobs and the jobs left really will be for sales, and service jobs.
BONUS:
I wrote this post over 2 days and today I got my first call from an interested customer, he wanted to have a quote for his gutters to be cleaned and I scheduled him for Monday morning. I got two people asking for work on Yelp today and I gave them a rough quote for what they wanted to be done. Maybe it's a bad idea to give out a price like that because I can't really fight on price, my value comes more from the work and the human interaction, but I did it anyways.
Today I thought it would be a good idea to hit the local people I knew first to get a reputation and some Yelp reviews. I went to my church members' houses and did them for free, asking only for a "donation" if they think I did well. I still gave them a bill for what it would cost, but said that they can pay what they think is fair. They all paid in full. I completed one house with 10 windows and 70 feet of gutters. And another with 13 windows and 122 feet of gutters. I totaled about 580 dollars today in cash with 5 hours worked. With those, I learned some valuable lessons:

1. Get better sun protection, I'm too pale for this.
2. Move the customer's car to the sidewalk so the gutter muck does get on them.
3. Have a system to easily and professionally quote them on the spot.
4. Set up Venmo, CashApp, and all the easy payment systems so that payment is a breeze for them and me.
5. Another person makes this so much easier, specifically to do two jobs at once or to double-team a house.
6. Have something to catch the stuff that is run through the gutter spout when washing it out like a pasta strainer or something.
7. PICTURES! PICTURES! PICTURES! VIDEO TOO! Super important to do this for the customer and your social media/Yelp page/ads

Thanks for reading my effort post. Leave a comment or advice or questions and I'll try to answer them as fast as I can.

Sounds dope Rizzler,
It’s interesting how with everyone so caught up in internet businesses, the simplest needs often go unnoticed.
Are there any other exterior cleaning businesses in your area? What do you do that they don’t? Is your value skew simply convenience?

 

[The Rizzler]

Good job taking action. Did you run ads on yelp or did you find them organically?

Yes, at first I ran ads only on Yelp, but then I moved into some good ads as well. Most of my leads come through online ads and marketing, but door-to-door knocking seems to have a high yield in my area, about 2-5 percent.

Sounds dope Rizzler,
It’s interesting how with everyone so caught up in internet businesses, the simplest needs often go unnoticed.
Are there any other exterior cleaning businesses in your area? What do you do that they don’t? Is your value skew simply convenience?

There are 4 as far as I can tell in a 10-mile radius to me. They offer pressure washing and they do more large-scale operations. They clearly have more money for equipment than I do, but I think I can get them on being quick, flexible, having to deal with little overhead, and being able to use technology to my advantage by marketing, convenient payment methods, quick estimates/quotes and things of that nature as well as being very personal and connecting with the customer on a one to one basis.

 

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[The Rizzler]

Update
The next day I got a bunch of Yelp requests for window cleaning and gutter cleaning. I went to a nice lady's house and quoted her 290 dollars for window cleaning only, and scheduled it for Monday evening. She lives in an affluent neighborhood and I think I can get her to go with a gutter cleaning as well while I'm up on the second story. She also has her parent's house that needs window cleaning and solar panel cleaning and will give me that job if she likes the job done on her home. I also did a gutter and window cleaning for a church friend and they "donated" 100 bucks, gave a review, and referred me to a bunch of their friends on Facebook.

I needed a handheld vacuum for window sill cleaning and cleaning up any leftover puddling water, so I bought a DeWalt vacuum (photo below). Much more pricey than I was hoping (about $150), but I have the batteries for it already, and I used a carpenter friend's tax exemption ID to save on the 7.25 percent, so it made sense for my situation.

This coming week I have a Monday gutter cleaning in the morning and the $290 job in the evening. Tuesday I have a gutter inspection and cleaning in the morning. I'm still running my ads which are super helpful in getting customers to come to me; all but one of my leads and upcoming jobs were from Yelp and Google ads. I haven't done much door-knocking, so I'll use the weekends and late evenings (when everyone is at home) to do that. It still produces about a 2-3 percent return for new leads, and as I get better at the pitch and persuasion, it'll get much better.

The next step for me is to develop basic systems for tracking expenses, and revenues, and finding the basic managerial numbers like the minimum revenue per job to be profitable, costs for travel to see if I need to charge a little travel fee, and developing rock-solid training protocol so I can hire guys to work in areas outside of my normal reach.

I also noticed I'm spending too much time quoting people in person. It costs gas and my time, so I'll need to develop my working team to sell the job, do it on the spot, and get paid before we leave. I also need to develop online quoting systems that the customer can fill out themselves, and approve so that we can get there, do the job, and get paid in one fell swoop; saving a trip and time in the process. Yelp has been helpful for this on the windows, but the gutters are much harder to estimate due to the charging being per foot, and they don't know how long their gutters are.

Money is out there. If you have a great offer, it'll come to you. You just need to start. Make an offer they feel stupid saying no to and you'll never be in need of customers. I'm on my way to escaping the Slowlane, it just takes a little push to get it all going.

Lessons learned

• Write up a rate sheet on Excel or google sheets and give a copy to them when you go to a customer's home. It puts the "power of the price" in their hand and makes your business seem transparent.
• Be nice and smell nice. I've had 2 customers say already in the week I've been doing this that my friendliness and cleanliness were a huge positive in their eyes. Apparently, it's common for guys to smoke a joint in the car before going up to the houses and then having a bad attitude.
• Have a mobile app that can write quick invoices. I use Square Invoices because it's free, but I've had issues with sending the invoices to my customers via text message, it's just a bit inconvenient. And make sure the prices on the invoice match the prices on the sheet.
• If you do windows, be sure to specify if it is per window or per pane. Most people count the whole framed unit with multiple panes as "one window". Because of that, make sure to have your prices set for the idea of "one window". For example, if you charge 3 dollars for a single pane, charge 9 dollars for "one window" to make up for the windows with 3 or more panes, and to simplify it all for the customer. And that brings it to my next point
• Simplify it.
• Don't be afraid to ask for a review, testimonial, or referral, or even for them to post on their social media about the job done. These are immensely useful in accelerating your business and getting more leads, especially in the suburban women demographic. I have three potential leads from women that all came to me from one customer posting that I cleaned her windows and gutters on Facebook.

GET THAT MONEY

 

[BizyDad]

Welcome to the Forum. You're off to a good start.

 

[The Rizzler]

Welcome to the Forum. You're off to a good start.

Thanks! I'm finally moving along.

Update:
Got two jobs done yesterday. I did a gutter cleaning for 258 dollars which should have been 350 because I didn't quote him for the gutter guards, and I finished a full window cleaning service yesterday that pulled in $300 in cash and the lady there gave me a sandwich and a banana when she found out I didn't have any lunch. I realized it is a good idea to set up a separate banking account for your business, so I did that and deposited the money.

I worked about 7 hours total, mostly in the sun (not fun) for 558 dollars. I'm slowly developing the procedure and method for the cleaning that makes it quicker and easier, and I learned yesterday that my scheduling needs to work out with the sun and where it's going to hit on the house. I couldn't clean 3 windows because they were getting beaten by the sun and dried before I could wipe them. So I am going to revisit them in a few days and finish them. As I develop this method, I will onboard workers to do low-risk cleaning and will teach them this method so that I can finish a 300-dollar job in 1.5 hours instead of 4. The method is as follows:

1. Mark the screens with tape (to identify for reinstalling) and remove the screens. Clean immediately and leave to dry close by.
2. Use a toothbrush or some soft brush and a handheld vacuum to clean the frame and track
3. do a quick wipe of the windows usually near the top and bottom to see if they need debris removal
4. if yes, wet them, and use a wide razor to remove any paint, bird poo, or debris, then use bar keepers friend and a scrub-daddy/mild abrasive (scotchbrite works) in a circular motion to clean the water stains. (this is the most labor-intensive and can be sped up if you have a power tool that can spin a scotchbrite pad.)
5. Wet the window again, squeegee it either in 1-2 down strokes, or if it's too big, use the S method.
6. Use a dry microfiber cloth to dry the edge of the window (only use one finger to wipe it. If you use more, you didn't do it right and should redo that pane)
7. A quick wipe of the frame and maybe vacuum the track if water gets into it
8. Put the screen back, and you're done. NEXT!!

All in all this method should take maybe 5 minutes with one guy working the window and the other cleaning screens, then working on the other widows when done. A house with 20 windows should take maybe 1.5-2 hours with me working the second story.

Don't let a slow day be a wasted day

I have a few slow days where I get one or no jobs, on those days I'll usually work on my Yelp page. I'll use the photos I took from the week's jobs and make portfolio posts, manage the next week's work, and look into how to do certain jobs like solar panel cleaning, soft washing, and pressure washing. I'll also do door-to-door knocking and try to hit some leads. I got one guy today who was interested in getting his windows cleaned, but had his neighbor offer him the same. I'll try to be more persistent, and build more rep with him and hopefully, I'll get the job over his neighbor.

Some houses I've been to have roofs that are too steep to work on and I couldn't deep clean the windows like they wanted, maybe I should invest in a roof harness system to repel down from the top and clean the windows with. Or maybe I should just say that I can't deep clean those yet. Maybe it's not worth 40 dollars.

Quick Tricks

• Bring a hose shut-off valve and an extra-long garden hose for the job. It makes managing water and cleaning screens and gutters far easier and time effective.
• Schedule your jobs to where the sun will not be on the part you work on. Preferably the west side of the house is done in the morning and the east side at noon or in the evening.
• have basic screwdrivers and sockets (and maybe a bit driver) for removing gutter guards.
• Develop systems for your work that make it effective and always look for better ways to do the job. It's worth every second of your time

 

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[The Rizzler]

I crunched the numbers and I recouped the cost to get the tools and equipment and had a net profit of 550 dollars over the past 5 days. Now that I'm finally equipped and ready to roll it should be pulling in about 500 dollars a day.