Hello friend,
So it seems you’re tired of working hourly and making $200 a day?
If you’ve finally decided to flip the script and be the one paying other people hourly, this is one of the best ways and specifically the best way that I’ve found that just about any able bodied person can do: clean stuff.
When we say stuff, I mean things of value, and in this case, houses, driveways, and roofs. These are the highest ticket objects that most people own, and an easy way to get your foot in the door of entrepreneurship.
The heart of being an entrepreneur is by creating value from where there once was nothing. You don’t need to invent the next Tech stock, you don’t need to buy copious amounts of real estate (yet), and you most importantly don’t need to go into debt to fund any of this.
You just need to be willing to do the work, get your hands dirty for a bit until you are enough of a leader with power and funds to be able to hire others to help you and make your life easier.
This past week I worked for 3 days, an average of 6 hours each day on my own, and made $2,050 in cash, one of those days we made $600, the next $1,000, and the last day $450.
I then proceeded to take the rest of the week off to go fishing, relax, and hangout (while also hitting my daily workouts and writing/online business goals).
This upcoming year I expect to have many similar weeks, if not more, as even during the dead of winter with my roof cleaning/pressure washing business we were able to have $1350, $825 and $700 days with relative ease. Sometimes even making $200 an hour just to get up on a ladder and do stuff that most people don’t want to do.
It isn’t a glamorous occupation, but it works. I often like to joke at parties that all I do is clean gutters when in reality jobs like that can make you $100-200 an hour, and as a guy in his mid 20’s there are alot worse jobs I could be pursuing.
At this stage in your life I would argue that your sole priority should be to make money.
Yes this business also gives me the free time and funds to be able to work on my other side projects and more passionate business models such as coaching my clients, writing, and putting helpful content out into the world, but my main motivation is I can make a lot of money by cleaning gutters, roofs, driveways, and houses.
For you to do the same there are really only a couple first steps.
Many people will start their LLC and get their paperwork figured out and this can be the smart way to go but honestly I would advise that you just start cleaning.
Some good first options are friends or family houses first, make some money and get some pictures, credibility, and not necessarily worry about making the business legit just yet. I know I’ll probably get hate for saying this but it’s true, I know of guys in the industry who make 80k a summer, have 2 employees and are neither licensed or insured.
You absolutely do want to get licensed and insured and all that as soon as you can, but if you want to give the business a shot first I would just get started.
What Equipment Do I Need?
Again there are quite a few opinions out there but mine is that to get started all you need is a ladder, some trash bags, and maybe a leaf blower. This really depends on your area, but here in the Pacific Northwest cleaning gutters and roofs is hands down the best way to go. I almost never even use my pressure washer, because I’ve done the math and know I make way more money when my feet leave the ground.
For roofs/gutters:
- Ladder
- Leaf blower
If your area is different, and you’re somewhere in south Florida for example where there isn’t as much moss and shit on roofs then go the pressure washer route. Buy a middle of the road washer somewhere around $500. Use a Home Depot credit card to get that, your garden hose for water, and your surface cleaning attachment.
For driveways/houses:
- Pressure washer (around $4-500)
- Surface cleaner attachment (big circle that allows you to clean 15”-18” at a time)
- 100’ hose standard 5/8ths garden is perfect, I like the gray gravity hose.
For the techniques of how to do certain jobs like pressure washing techniques and such, checkout Youtube, for now you need to focus on getting paid.
In fact, for my first roof cleaning job I had already agreed to the price and terms before I even knew how to clean a roof. I watched a video on the way there and got it done. Don’t try to learn everything all at once. Learn the business as you go and only focus on jobs in your area that pay the best.
Now, all you need is to find someone who will give you money to do clean their stuff.
How to find customers 101
This is a short and condensed version of the book I’m writing that will be out very soon and you can get it for even more tips and tricks of how to use ads to get customers the smart way.
Now, in the business world there are only two currencies we measure, money and time.
This is not the standard equation of time=money, but both are units of measure for how we can essentially “pay” for things.
In this sense there are only two ways to acquire customers. Pay money for them (advertising), or pay in time (commonly referred to as “hustling”).
Both work very well and are essentially the same thing, a way to get your business in front of other people, hopefully people that will pay you money.
All rich people know that advertising is by far the best way to grow their business because they know that money is infinite, while your time is not. You only have a certain amount of hours and minutes in the day, week, or in your life. No one is printing more time.
This is why I always tell someone to either learn how to advertise, or have someone else advertise for you (we can do both of those for you). However, I too used to have no money and the idea of throwing it at Facebook Ads with no idea the return on investment I would get didn’t exactly thrill me. At this stage in business, just starting out with no money I chose to spend my time and hustle to get customers. The best way to do this is by going door to door.
I’ll cover this topic more in depth in another article or video but at its core door to door is very simple. You find a house that likely needs your service, grimy sides of the house, moss on the roof, dirty driveway and you knock on the door and ask the owner if they would like you to clean it for them.
That’s it, again there are many intricacies but here we need to focus on getting in front of as many houses as possible. It’s a numbers game.
My advice is to do a few houses door to door and get an idea of what people in your area want and how they think so you can advertise to them later. Your best nuggets of info will come straight from your customers mouths and is very useful.
After you have done a couple jobs you should now have the necessary funds for advertising and marketing. This is just getting your business in front of people virtually over the internet but in a much more scalable and efficient way.
With ads is how I’ve really been able to consistently make $300, $600, and even $1000 a day. The power of a kick ass ad is amazing and can often bring you 3-5 messages a day from spending $10 – $20 a day on the ad campaign.
Now as far as I’m concerned the only two places you should be advertising on are Facebook and Google. No other platform is nearly as relevant for our target audience which is: homeowners, people who can actually hire you above the age of 35.
My personal preference is Facebook Ads, because we’ve had so much success with them and I think it’s a great and easy way to get started. Google ads can be a bit more complex and right now we don’t need them.
Facebook allows you to build a page and start running ads right away, where with Google you really should have a website and everything set up. Don’t worry we’ll build the website soon, for now we need to focus on getting jobs and Facebook is the fastest route to do so.
This step as well I don’t want to go too in depth as that’s something I cover extensively in other articles and especially in my book but the basics are this.
How to quickly start running Facebook ads
Even if you’ve never run ads before, if you ever want to consistently make more than a few hundred dollars a day, you need to advertise. The ability to use technology to find the people most willing to do business with you is an amazing skill, something that can help you much further down the road when you have a bigger business or are helping run other people’s businesses.
I’ll say that again but more concise: Advertising is a skill that can feed you for life. It is greatly in your benefit to learn how to do this and do it well.
To get started on Facebook all we need is a business page, about $200 set aside for the first 2 weeks of ads, and our ad itself- usually a before and after picture of a completed job.
For all the technical specs and how to get started more in depth go here to read my other article on this topic.
First you should have a good looking business page. This is where people can leave reviews, comments, and ‘Like’ your page. You want some good pictures of you and the types of work you do well, you can’t have too many ‘Before/After’ pictures.
Once this is looking presentable we can now go and run our ads. Click on over to the Ads manager and click start new campaign.
Like I mentioned earlier we only need to spend between $10-$20 a day on our ads. These ads will be shown to people age 35 and up, with any interests that make them likely to own a home.
The only way to go is to have ads go to “Send Message”. This enables the customer to start talking to you directly and get the sales cycle going ASAP. Be natural and quote them over the messenger app, this can save you a lot of time instead of going to every single customer’s home and drafting a quote.
Our ad must showcase good work, in this industry people love to see before/after pictures and they work very well to build interest in your work.
The ad itself should look something like this.
You can build pictures and ads on Canva.com for free and a good ad can be used over and over again for months. Proper size is 1080×1080 and I prefer to use single images (simpler and makes more money).
Test, Test, Test. For $10-20 a day you should be getting around 3-5+ messages from customers at least. This translates into 1 out of 3 or 4 customers will follow through and book a job. This means if our cost per message is between $3-$10 our cost to acquire a job is between $10-30. I’ve found it hovers around $20 but we have had ads that got us booked jobs for less than $8. $2 dollars a message is rare however but it can be a nice surprise.
If you can spend $20 and make $300 from a job you now have a verified money printing machine. Often $20 turns into $600 for us then either doing 2 of those jobs a day or adding upsells we can get to $1,000 a day.
Note: doing 2 roofs a day is not a very sustainable practice, I would much rather do 1 job a day and pace myself than bust my ass just to get 1k a day, however I’ve been there and done that and I know what I personally prefer.
At this level when you have profitable ads you now have the ability to acquire as many jobs as you are willing to pay for, you can hire crews, bring on more trucks, and scale as much as you want.
Mindset of Making money
It all starts with learning how to leverage systems like Facebook ads. Leverage equals power.
You can absolutely hit the pavement day in and out and get jobs by going door to door, in fact I recommend it if you don’t have money for ads, but true business scale comes from leverage.
All successful people know this. Why try to work harder and less efficiently than you need to?
Once we have an unstoppable inflow of leads is when sales and business get easy. Now you can start charging what you’re worth, and be at the top of the market with quality priced jobs.
You can work with only the best customers that can afford you and its fantastic to see. Believe me there are people out there who don’t even blink about spending $1,300 on having their roof professionally cleaned.
Minimum I like to be making $60-100 an hour to clean a roof, $40-50 an hour to pressure wash driveways and houses. I’m at the stage now where I can eyeball it but generally you should be charging at least $500 to clean a roof/gutters, $400 to wash the house, $100-300 for the driveway.
Those are very loose guidelines but you’re market will tell you what they’re willing to pay. Listen to them. Charge as much as the market allows and never be afraid to walk away from a job if they’re cheap.
I sure as hell didn’t figure this all out on my own, I had a lot of help and now I can reflect back and mentally thank many of the people who posted free blog articles, Youtube videos and even many of the paid courses I bought, some of them not cheap at all, some of them less than $2 bucks.
It took me quite a while to learn to trust these systems like ads and realize I could make money by working smarter and in fact working less hard. To this day i’m still on the search for how to work smarter and less hard and make more money through leverage.
This is what I’ve developed so far, I hope you learned something and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out to me or comment and share this article with someone else who “gets it”.
Have a great day, go out there and crush it man.
- Your man, Spencer Claeys
P.S If you read this entire article you’re the type of person I want to know and be friends with, shoot me a friend request on Facebook or join my free Facebook group about pressure washing Here.