How To Start A Pressure Washing Business w/ Aaron Parker

3 Things You Need To Know BEFORE Starting A Business (Pressure Washing)

• Aaron Parker

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I'll smoke it till it burns me, bro. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the Lean and Mean Academy where we talk about one truck. Big profits, baby. Okay, today's video, I just had a guy comment on one of my videos. The don't start a pressure wire washing business without knowing this. Alex alex commented, thank you for the awesome video. I'm starting a company with a buddy of mine. Super helpful. Thank you. What is the one piece of advice you'd give to a new guy starting up? And I saw this, I don't know, about an hour or so ago right before I was going to the gym. I came back, ate some pot roast, delicious with a little gravy, had a little sourdough on the side, man. Little homemade sourdough. And that's how I like it. And I thought about this. I was like, I'm not going to give this guy one piece of advice. I'm going to give him three. All right. I'm going to give you three points so Alex, thanks for commenting. I'm going to give you three points so that, hey, I answered a lot of these questions that you guys ask on the channel. They're in my book on Amazon, it's literally 102 questions from the channel. So if you're asking questions like this, you probably have some of the same questions that those guys have and go on Amazon, type in Aaron Parker, start a pressure Washington business. You'll find it there. But before we jump into this, before I answer Alex Alex questions, mike Vidan, Cody Yarbrough, Justin Rogers and myself, we have a big event coming up. The number one pressure washing event on earth, WashCon live. Okay, it's going to be at Southeast SoftWash headquarters February 10 and 11th. 1st day is going to be a very long day of training for the regular guys. Second day is a VIP. VIP is almost sold out. I was told by Mike Vidan to tell you that VIP is almost sold out. I will put a link in the comments or you can go to washconlive.com and grab your tickets. Cody is going to be teaching you OSHA regulation, property maintenance, mitigation, so you don't kill stuff with chemicals, how to clean, how to mix chemicals, how to do troubleshooting on your rigs. Cody is just a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the mechanical side of his business. And he is the top SoftWash rig provider on earth. So you're going to be able to gather a lot of knowledge from him. Mike Vidan is going to be showing you automation, how he built a million dollar pressure washing business. He's been in the game for 25 years. He's not new to this. Okay? He had a landscape company, why he sold that just to strictly do pressure washing. He's going to be there talking to you guys about that. Justin is a social media guru. Frankly, you guys know I would give him the throne as far as the social media side of things, justin has over half a million subs on YouTube. He makes tons of money. He gets tons of leads from Facebook. He's a Facebook ads guy. Like, that's what he's good at. He knows how to put money behind ads. He knows how to structure him. He knows what to write, how to say it. And he gets the leads and he makes the sales. This year, he got a $30,000 hospital cleaning off of a $10 Facebook ad, which is plum wild, okay? He knows how to convert. So if nothing else, come to learn how to harness social media as something that you can put into your business. A lot of guys have Facebook pages, but very few people know how to make it really profitable like Justin. My section is going to be on SEO content strategy, how to really make Google your bitch, all right? Frankly, that's what we want to do. Google is a narcissistic son of a gun. I don't love them, all right? And so that's why I like to use them and make them give me free leads. And that's what I'm going to be teaching you on my section of the day. All right? If you want to come to WashCon links in the description, link in the comments. All right? Let's jump into this little piece of advice that I was going to give Alex on him starting his new business with his buddy. Now, look, here's the deal. I don't love the fact that you're starting a business with your buddy. Frankly, that's the first way to lose a friend is to start a business with him. Why do I say that? Because if you both are not really good at either or position in this business, one of you needs to be really good at Ops, and one of you needs to be really good at marketing and sales, all right? And you can both be mediocre there and get better. But you do not need to overlap here, okay? So it's like a gender role in a family, which I completely believe in. Mama is mama and Daddy is daddy. And they have two different roles in the home. Both very important, but both very different, okay? They work together with Synergy, Ops guy, marketing sales guy, okay? But if you're both sales guys, who's running the Ops? You got shit running around out there like a chicken with its head cut off, okay? If you're both Ops guys, who is making the sales? So that's my first piece of kind of warning, if you will. If he's not that and you're both the same dude, you need to watch out. Here's my three pieces of advice. Yes. For one, I'm going to give you three always undersell, over deliver. My first piece is your first metric that you're going to focus on in your business. Is only this IPA, you say? Aaron, what is IPA? Well, it's not delicious hops with hints of elderberry and lingenberry and pecan. It's not that, okay? So shave your beard, take off your little weird glasses and your beanie. It's actually income producing activity, all right? Income producing activity is the only metric that we're focusing on for the first five months, six months. It's how many people did we call? How many people said yes? How many people said no? We will call them again later. That's what you focus on. And if you build an Excel sheet, that's all you're taking metrics on. If you write it down in your notebook, it's who we talk to. What did they say? Did we close them on the line? Which is dotted? Are they on the schedule? That's it. Stop thinking about all this other stuff. New guys get caught in this fog, like, really early. And I get it. It's fun to think about business. It's fun to brainstorm. It's fun to write down all the ideas you got. But most of those ideas are garbage if you don't have IPA, okay? You got to have income producing activity. And when you're a new business, it comes from cold outreach. So focus on IPA, income producing activity. The second thing a new guy needs to know, never put branding before exposure in the first part of your business. I'd say the first year. First year, you don't have a business. So all you guys reading Gary Vaynerchuk talking about branding need to put the book down. You don't have a brand because no one knows who you are. So with all that is going back to my first IPA, how are we getting the message out to people about what we do? Don't go signing up for the little back of the what is it? The country club scorecards. No. Do not buy a billboard your first year. We need high intent buyers. And if people are not highly intentional buyers, we need to be the ones with shoe leather marketing knocking on their door, talking to our family. And people need to be, frankly, kind of pissed how much we talk about our business, because they're not really pissed. They'll probably give you leads just to go away. Great, bro. I don't know who. I don't have anything that needs to be clean. But your Aunt Rita, her house is disgusting. She'll probably give you some money. Perfect. That's what we need. We need people just a little like, I'm tired of hearing about it. That's where the money lane is, all right? So never put your branding before your exposure. Year two. Look, you're probably going to get a new logo anyway, all right? You're going to have more money. You can get a better one, all right? So don't focus on branding. Don't focus on shirts, don't focus on wraps. Focus on getting to the money. Focus on exposure. All right? The third thing, start out at high ticket. And look, if you come to WashCon, I'm going to be beating this into you and pulling the old person, the broke mentality out of you, all right? Because a lot of this comes down to self esteem. And I'm going to dispel like a lot of the old heads, the old crusties are not going to like this, but good. Take a dump in the comments. There is no hierarchy. So a new guy with a brand new little Simpson from Home Depot can charge $1,000 per house. It merits that, right? We're not talking about just gouging people. Hell, charge $5,000 if it merits that per house, depending where you are, right? Be on the upper end. Be the high ticket individual. Let the old guys flow into this I need lead thing. Because, look, when you grow your business, those guys have to run a business. They have to pay people. But you and your buddy, y'all can take a day off, right? So be high ticket. Look, if you're going to work, make the money. My buddy, Ben Wilson ben, hell, Ben will make four grand at the beginning of the day, works by himself. He'll take three days off a week if he wants, okay? That's how Ben has structured his lean and mean business. It's brilliant. He is high ticket. Ben cleans. I've been on jobs. Some of the jobs are on my channel. Ben cleans $5,000 houses all the time. You all think it's foreign. It ain't foreign. That's like three to five, 6000. Like Ben's cranking those kind of numbers by himself, okay? So it's a self esteem situation. That's all it is. And so maybe I can tell you to start off at high ticket, get the low ticket nonsense, or I got to start off at $100 because I'm brand new. No, you don't come to WashCon. Take one of our courses. Learn how to do it properly, okay? Because if you're going to charge like I'm telling you to charge, here's what you owe me. You owe me excellence on that job. You don't owe the customer the integrity. You owe the excellence of the job. The integrity. The customer could be on drugs. They could be on antidepressants. They're just rich, right? So if they get off their medication, they're nuts, right? Don't let the customers you don't owe them the integrity. You owe excellence to the craft. You owe excellence to the job, to the skill, to the maintaining of their property, to not dragging hoses over their newly planted lilies, to not spray and bleach all over their boxwoods, okay? That's what you owe the market. And if you're willing to do that, you can charge the upper end. Because I'm going to tell you, the barrier to entry to this business is very low. Crackheads can get started in this business. They can. They can. You don't have to have a certification or a training like HVAC and some of these other businesses. You don't. So a guy who's look, he's down. And now he's under the bridge. He can start this business. And for some of them, they're turning around their life. That's good. But for some of them, it's just a quick money hit, okay? So that's who's at the bottom end. If you're not that, then you can charge these upper level prices. You don't have to be in the business for 20 years to start charging high ticket. I made a promise to myself in my van when I was broke as hell late 2016, early 2017. I said I was going to be the most expensive pressure washer in this city, and if someone beat me and was higher than me on price, I was going to be offended, because I'm the most expensive selling around here. Why? Because I'm going to do an excellent job, and you're not going to beat me on quality. And if something goes wrong, I'm going to own it. I'm going to be here. When I said I was going to be here, on the day I said I was going to be here, I'm going to show up, all right? And it's going to be an excellent experience because I'm going to force it to be all right, because it's going to be excellent demanding excellence of yourself, and you can charge excellence prices, all right? So I say this in the beginning of your business, hammer out some of that stuff. Start charging here's. Here's my protocol for it. Charge more than you feel comfortable. Be willing to lose 50% 50% of the leads, okay? Because you're going to get the other 50, and you're going to make really good money. And when you're charging at high ticket, you lift the market, but you also lift your profits, and you also can upgrade your equipment faster. You can spend more money on your Google ads, more money on your Facebook ads, more money on your marketing material, and all of everything else takes care of itself. Look, for me, there's a lot of guys who love to be in the books. They love to be in the Excel spreadsheets. I'm not I don't look at any Excel spreadsheets. I kind of know where I'm at. I have a bookkeeper, and I have an accountant, and they do it all. They handle it all, and I pay them premium because I don't like it. I don't want to look at it. I want to spend the money. I know I'm profitable. I know where I'm at. If anything weird happens, we'll look at it. But for me, I know what needs to happen, and I know how much money needs to be spent to make this thing. And then I know my ratio of closing. That's all I need to know. And that's just how I operate. It okay if you're a numbers guy. You're differently. You're a little different, and that's fine. But start high ticket. Start where you're uncomfortable. Close the sales. Get the job. You'll thank me later. You'll come back to this video and you'll comment on it. I hope you do. So, Aaron, I tried that technique. I was thinking about charging a lower ticket, and I started charging high ticket, and I actually started getting it. And the day you get it, my friend, is the day that your life changes. You can never go back. You hit two of those home runs where you thought you were only going to get 500, and you listen to my video, and then you get 800 and you get 1000. You won't be forever changed because you cannot go back into the matrix once you're out of the matrix. All right? All right. So I hope this video helped you out, Alex, and give us a thumbs up. You all subscribe. Hit the bell so you get all the notifications. I look forward to seeing you guys at WashCon Live. I'll see you in the next video.

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