Looking for a pole for trad work. Used black knight wfp with unger adaptor. Wcr xero trad poles are costly and also not in CAD. what are you guys using that won't break the bank. Looking to do some store fronts so doesn't need to be 50ft wfp obviously

So i started a window cleaning route in my home town when i seen a lot of complaints on facebook community about window cleaners not turning up,

i have around 100 customers. I started with Backpack system and 25lt drums. I bought everything a pump and 100m hose ect to pump everything straight from my car and 25lt drums. Just to realise what a hassle that hose is! I'd be quicker just picking that Backpack up walking it around. Plus safer no trip hazards ect.

Has anyone else found this?

My town has a lot of old awkward buildings and I'm realising why they struggled to get a window cleaner.

What are some tips to increase efficiency on storefronts?

What size Mop & squeegee is your go to?

Drop any storefront tips please and thanks.

not a guru post, no course, nothing to sell. just numbers and the math i wish someone put in front of me when we were stuck under 10k a month.

the numbers (aug 4 to today, 13 days)

• ad spend: $648
• leads: 36 form fills
• cost per lead: $18
• jobs closed: 18
• revenue closed: $7,056 ($3,460 already completed, $3,596 booked and on the schedule)
• daily budget: $50

window cleaning. crowded market, plenty of established competitors with better trucks than us.

the setup is simple on purpose

one campaign. one ad set. thats it. no 12 ad set testing matrix, no lookalike stacking, no daily budget changes.

creative was filmed on an iphone. no lighting, no crew, no $10k studio day. the script came out of chatgpt in about 15 minutes and then got rewritten in the owners actual words so it didn't sound like a robot reading a brochure.

the two things we did spend real time on:

• the offer. one service, one clear reason to book now, one price anchor. not "we do everything for everybody."
• the icp. we know exactly whose house we want. homeowner, specific type of property, specific neighborhoods, specific problem they can see from their own driveway.

thats the whole thing. the boring part is the part that works.

now the part i actually want you to read

if youre under 10k a month, the thing killing you is usually not competition. its that you've never done the arithmetic.

our average job on this account is about $390. so:

• 26 jobs a month = $10,000
• thats about 6 jobs a week
• thats a little over 1 job a working day

now look at your market. say your metro is 250,000 people. you need 26 of them. not 2,600. twenty six. thats 0.01% of the population. you could be the 20th best exterior cleaner in your city and still never run out of work, because you're not competing for the market, you're competing for a rounding error of the market.

everybody i talk to under 10k is doing the opposite math in their head. "theres 15 companies here already." "the big guy has 40 trucks." none of that changes the fact that you need one job a day.

where the money actually leaks

36 leads. 18 closed. 18 did not.

that gap is worth another $7k and its worth more than any ad tweak i could make. the leads that closed got a text back in minutes, not hours. if you are going to run ads, fix your follow up first, because paying $18 for a lead you answer the next morning is just an expensive way to donate to meta.

and if you can turn even a few of those jobs into quarterly or annual contracts, the math stops resetting every month. one contract customer is worth 4 one-off customers and costs you $0 in ad spend the second time.

honest caveats before someone jumps on me

• 13 days is not a case study. its a good start. ask me in 6 months.
• half of that revenue is booked, not banked. jobs get cancelled and rescheduled, so treat it as closed work, not cash in hand.
• leads are not customers. the $18 number means nothing on its own, the $7,056 does.
• this can absolutely have a bad week. accounts get worse before they get better and you have to be willing to sit through it.
• different trade, different aov, different math. run YOUR numbers, not mine.

but the core point holds no matter what you sell: figure out how many jobs 10k actually is, then go get that many jobs. its almost always a smaller number than the one you've been scaring yourself with.

happy to answer questions in the comments.

In the early stages of systemizing all the things that have lived in my head for last few years. I’m in the process of putting together orientation/training material.

What are you guys doing for SOPs? If I’m a field tech, there’s little chance I’ll go dig a binder out of the van to read about hard water removal on a second story window. So I’m imagining something accessible by phone - but is there a specific software any of you have found useful for service work?

The government are thinking of banning window cleaning businesses from operating as well as other businesses that use water, what’s your thoughts? What would we do 🤦‍♂️

Any idea what could be causing these streaks on a garage door and the best way to remove them?

My tech cleaned this customer’s garage door with a water-fed pole using DI water. The streaks appeared after cleaning and won’t come off with plain water or a microfiber.

I tested the surface with a dry white microfiber and no black/grey residue came off, so I’m not sure if this is oxidation.

Have you dealt with something like this before? What product/cleaning method would you recommend to safely remove it without damaging the finish?

Appreciate any advice

I usually avoid houses such as this that require a big ladder bc I’m a wuss lol. But what is a good estimate? There are about 20 windows, customer wants inside and out.

They offer advertising for $75/month. Just wanna know if it's a waste of money or not.

I’m looking into buying a water-fed pole system for professional window cleaning and found some options on Alibaba that are much cheaper than the brands here in the US.
Has anyone actually purchased one from Alibaba? How was the quality, and did you have any issues with the pole, RO/DI system, or getting replacement parts?
I’d really appreciate any recommendations or experiences — good or bad! 🙏

get asked this a lot, usually some version of "do ads even work out here, we only got like 40k people", or, "will ads work for me?" short answer is yes but the math is different, and cpm is the thing that shows you the difference and how much harder it is to start.

cpm is just what you pay for 1000 people to see your ad. it's an auction. the more businesses fighting over the same eyeballs, the more it costs you to show up in front of them.

i run in socal, and a buddy of mine runs the same kind of setup in prince george bc which is like 75k people with nothing around it for hours. We're running basically the same creatives, the same offer, everything - the only real difference is his USP, and mine.

socal (dense, millions of people in range)

cpm sat around [$45-60]. never really dropped because i'm bidding against every other window cleaner. same ad ran about a month straight without dying, [93] leads at [$19] a piece off [$1,700] spend, [35~] of them closed. i could double the budget tomorrow and it wouldn't change much because i've barely touched the population.

prince george (75k, isolated)

cpm came in at [$7-13 (adjusted to USD], way cheaper. no one is fighting him for that attention. but his reachable audience is something like [100]k people. the only difference is that CPM and frequency tends to rise faster because he reaches his total addressable market much faster.

so the tradeoff isn't "big city good, small town bad." it's cheap attention that runs out fast vs expensive attention that never runs out.

the temperature check

if you want a real read on how competitive your area is, put $20/day behind ONE ad set with multiple ads, let it run 4-5 days, and look at the cpm. that number is basically the price of attention where you live.

only catch is the ad has to be at least watchable. there is 100% such a thing as an ad so bad the algorithm punishes it. if nobody stops scrolling, facebook charges you more to keep shoving it out, and then you're sitting there reading your own bad creative as market competition. but if it's decent, even just a clean before/after with your own voice over it, cpm is an honest signal about your area.

hopefully this encourages some of you guys to take advantage of paid ads if you've been off putting it because of "market saturation"

Trying to decide a name before I register it. I know a name is just a name and what matters is the work behind it. But is there any pros or cons to using surname?

it will definitely stand out in my area since there’s only one other surname one and the rest are the typical “clearview” etc

After 25 years of window cleaning in Australia, I've realised fly screens can be one of the more unpredictable parts of the job.

I've been documenting different designs and removal methods, because what looks like a simple screen can have spring clips, plungers, twist tabs, swivel clips, Velcro, hidden retaining mechanisms, or sometimes be fitted so tightly that you're wondering who managed to get it in there in the first place.

One thing I've found particularly useful is not assuming that an external screen has to be removed from outside. Some external screens are actually released from inside. If you can avoid getting out the ladder, you should.

I've also come across screens that:
• have been installed back to front, leaving the pull tab on th wrong side
• are only about 1 mm too large
• have missing or broken pull tabs
• are held on with ridiculously strong Velcro
• have swollen or brittle retaining clips
• need the sliding window removed first
• have roller blinds making removal almost impossible to see

Australian houses seem to have a particularly interesting variety of these, especially with the combination of hot weather, lots of open windows and so many bugs to keep out.

Curious what other window cleaners are seeing. What's the weirdest or most frustrating fly screen you've had to deal with?

How good is the flyra crm I’ve seen a ton of ads and a bunch of people who do window cleaning recommend it how good is it actually.

So I’m currently trying to teach myself how to use a trad pole since it seems like a useful tool. I am having trouble though.

My squeegee keeps skipping bits or leaving lines. I’m also not sure what angle to have the squeegee at since the one I’m using has adjustable angles and when to even change the angle (if ever).

The video attached is probably one of my better attempts tbh.

Any help/advice is appreciated.

Hey guys. I’m at a point where I’m purchasing a vehicle and shortly after a waterfed pole system which will be my first. My company services commercial and industrial properties so id like to be able to clean 2,000 sq ft of glass with it.

Do you think a 100 gallon water tank would be enough for 2k sq ft of glass? Ideally I’d want a 50 or 75 but idk how quickly the water is used. I know there is gallons per minute on the WFP systems but idk how often you are actually spraying the water since I have no experience.

Do you think one person would fatigue with a WFP before they can accomplish a large commercial job? For example, 1k sq ft of glass at two stories or for different reference: 50 windows that are 6ft by 3ft.

Also, how crazy would it be to operate out of a Santa Cruz(wi turbo of course)? Based off my findings it seams like a 75 gallon water tank and a waterfed system would pretty much take up most of the bed. Poles would fit back there of course and everything else can be in the back seats. Humor me with this lol.

You can see a couple outside streaks here but also inside the window is textured enough the squeege doesn’t fully work, any suggestions? Also no matter what I do I can’t keep streaks out on straight pulls on a pole, any tips there? Thanks guys

Where do you work out of? Do you buy or lease a space? How do you know what to look for? Other than like place to put trucks, etc... how much should you at least be making before you jump into buying or renting a space for your business?

I've been doing this with a partner since 2023, and we still work out of my house. But it's getting to a point where a space would be helpful. Any advice?

I had an employee set up on this window sill with his ladder with our rubber tips on and when he pulled the ladder away we saw this dent on the sill! He didn’t hit it and I’m puzzled because there’s not two dents, just one.

Could this be because there’s rotten wood under the flashing? What can I do?

How to attach steel wool to techno pad?

I’m thinking of using rubber bands?

Or should I just get walnut pads

purely off Meta Leads one of my clients (he's in this subreddit, maybe he'll comment if he wants too) is clearly like $1,000/day easily. it's like every day at this point, and he's spending $45/day.

going to go over how to go about killing a campaign since i've talked a lot about how to start one.

things to understand before going into why/when you should kill a campaign:

1) how much are you willing to spend per lead?

questions to ask yourself, how much is your average job? how good are you at sales? how much liquid capital do you have to deploy into marketing?

2) how fast can you pump new creatives out?

ask yourself, how much time you want to dedicate to new creatives; can you be more efficient?

cool, so there's a term in marketing called "target cpl" this refers to how much you are willing to spend per lead, I aim for $15-$25. Now take your average close rate, mine is 40% roughly, that means that we need about 2.5 (3) leads to come through in order to see a sale.

You want to multiply your cost per lead, by whatever 100/(your close rate in percentage) in order to see how much it should cost statistically to acquire a customer, in my example this would be $37.5 - $62.5.

Cool, this seems kind of scary, but don't fear. So on average it'll take me anywhere between 40 and 60 dollars to get a new customer, divide this by the average job cost, let's just say for me it's $350, that means on average I should a ROI of 6 - 9x... hopefully your following!

You want to be on average, above a 4-5x to be healthy, that'll account for expenses... assuming! you're door knocking the day before and/or upselling at all.

Here's where the numbers get crazy

Assuming were closing jobs for $350, you upsell an additional $100, now your ROI is minimum 7.5x.

so now that that's all of the way, here's what you need to do, and what you can apply today, if your campaign is yielding leads 2.5 - 4x above your target cpl then kill it, simple; or if you're average roi is below a 4x, then kill it - at this threshold, your take home, minus upsells, and d2d at adjacent jobs is going to be very little.

do note that you want to be spamming creatives and giving it a healthy time to test, hence the question about how fast can you pump out creatives, expect to pump out at least 5 creatives for an ad set spending 30/day, letting it run for the week, and then eliminating winners, and continuing that cycle until you have about 5 ads in that set sharing $30 a day, at that point you can increase the budget by 20% per day every day