The Weird Reality of Growing a Business

What does growing a business actually feel like?

In this episode of Clean for Profit, I break down the weird reality of business growth—how your problems shift from getting clients and making money to hiring, leadership, and building systems that actually last.

Not long ago, I was focused on leads, booking jobs, and surviving month to month. Now the challenges look completely different. We’re talking about managing a team, handling pressure, and making decisions that affect more than just me.

If you're starting a window cleaning business or any home service business, this episode will give you a real look at what comes next as you grow.

Topics covered:

•  Early-stage vs growth-stage business problems 
•  Hiring and managing employees in a service business 
•  The shift from self-focused to team-focused decisions 
•  What scaling a window cleaning business actually looks like 
•  Building systems vs just staying busy 

Subscribe for more episodes on starting and growing a window cleaning business, marketing, and building a profitable service business.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Clean for Profit. My name is Colbean. And uh listen, we've been doing this for I think this is our 19th or 20th episode now. And uh I made a commitment when I started this to post weekly. And I gotta say, if I can be totally honest with you guys, I'm limping in this afternoon. I got really bad allergies, uh, kind of like a few weeks ago. And uh I am starting the bee pollen regimen, so I thought it was uh thought it was reserved for hippies only. But uh my friend who had about as bad of allergies as I had this time last year told me that it was the only thing that worked for him, and he looked great today. So we're giving that a shot. But I just wanted to hop on here real quick and talk about how the way that you think about your business has to change as you grow, because your problems change. And what I've found is over the last eight years or so, eight to nine years now, when I've been running my window cleaning business, as a solo guy, I was always worried more about quality than anything, like the quality of our finish, the quality of the service that we were providing. And obviously, that's that's extremely important. That's something that needs to be thought about. Um, and you know, another thing that I was always thinking about was how booked out I was. I never really booked out that far. Um mainly because whenever I started seeing some success with my marketing, I would dial back a little bit because I didn't need it. I just needed to book a few weeks in advance, and I could raise my prices when I started booking out a little bit more. I would get a few more no's, but the yeses that I would get would become more profitable, and that was it. And now, you know, I've been solo for or had one helper on and off for almost eight years now, and over the last couple of months, uh we've gone from that to uh four guys, if you include myself. So we've got two trucks, sometimes three, on the road if I'm doing estimates, and I want to be able to split off and go solo for a part of the day and do estimates. Um but there's way more there's more unique concerns that I have at this scale. So now more than ever, it matters to me that my schedule is booked. Um, not to maximize the amount of money I'm making, although obviously that's a benefit, but I want to make sure that I can kind of uphold the word that I gave to the guys that I hired when I hired them to the best of my abilities. They don't mind uh, you know, I'm I I actually don't know this. But you know, they I don't think they would mind a day off here or there if things are a little bit slow. But, you know, if they sign up for a full-time job, I want to make sure that I'm doing everything that I possibly can to provide that for them. Even if that means I'm making a little bit less profit per job. Like if I can soften my pricing a little bit and increase the amount of, you know, increase how booked out my calendar is, then that's a that's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make, especially in the short term. Because short-term clients are expensive to acquire. You know, the cost of acquisition for a single or a first-time client is way higher than it is to retain them, as long as you have good retention systems. And we've built pretty good retention systems into our business over the last couple of years, especially the last six months, with some of the uh some of the automations that I've built out into our business. So I'm a little less worried than I used to be about charging as much as I possibly can for every client. And I'm more concerned now about making sure that my guys are staying busy, making sure that I can provide them with hours. And then there comes the part where, you know, for the last eight years, it's been me in the truck. It's been me. I've been nose to glass for like 90% of all of the glass that's been cleaned under the name Sierra window cleaning. And now it's like way less than half of the glass that we clean as an organization is seen by me. And I'm hoping that in the next, you know, well, for sure in the next six to twelve months, but hopefully in the next three to five months, uh, it'll be like less than a quarter of the glass that gets cleaned is cleaned by me. Minimum. Minimum. Maybe less less than five or ten percent. And so that's a problem too, because it matters how I hand that off. You know, you have to do that with with quality. And when it's not the owner that is looking at every single pane of glass and making sure it's a pass, we have to make sure that we're that we're ensuring quality other ways. So there's a couple things that I've done. The first thing is that I'm trying to constantly refine my training processes. Um, and I need to do a little writing and honestly, probably content creation internally for my organization because so far it's felt like every hire I make is a new opportunity to learn from my mistakes, basically, in training. I mean, I'm doing better every single time, I think, but I I always have new notes about the next hire based off of how I did on the last hire. Um and so making sure that quality is a central pillar of our company culture is something that has occurred to me as obviously very, very important. And it has been a central pillar of our company culture. It's just that the company has just been me and one other guy on and off for the last eight years. So making sure that we have a way that we can that we can communicate that to new people that are being introduced as employees to the organization is one of the most important things that we can do. And then similarly, balancing that with like I have a partner that works with me, and I love him to death. He's great, he's a great technician, um, he's a great operator, but sometimes he gets too caught up in that perfection, and he'll spend longer than he needs to on a specific set of problems, like even just a handful of windows, where we're like trying to do magic basically for our clients, um when it wasn't quoted, and so you know, he's he's one of my one of my leads, and so there's been like the little bit of a tug of war that I've found between the two new guys that we have. Because when they run with me, I'm obviously worried about quality, but once they're trained, once my guys know how to clean a window, what matters is that they're doing quality with efficiency. And I even see this as a mistake long term, like in how I trained my my lead, where it's like for years and years and years, we just led with quality and quality only. And the efficiency part I kind of carried. So if we were being inefficient, I would just move faster. And I wouldn't communicate to him really that that's what I was doing, and that's that that's what we should be doing, is holding ourselves to certain production standards. Um, our production standards were always just based off of quality. Um, and efficiency was just something that I was able to superimpose because I was at, you know, way over, I was at 100% of the jobs. So, anyways, that's been a unique, a unique problem. I think the last one that I've kind of come to find myself adjusting to is that, you know, we're doing it's April, it's April 19th today. April 20th when this episode goes live. And um, this month we're going to do over 50% of the revenue we did last year. Or just just shy of it, which is absolutely mind-boggling. I have no idea how we're even doing that. I mean, I do. I've I'm I'm there every day still, so I know exactly how we're doing it. But um, the weird thing about that is that I've barely kept any of it this year because we've been investing so heavily into the business, into cars. I've bought two waterfed pole towers. I bought a zero pure max plus with a 30-foot uh zero pole, and I've got another uh zero pure with another 30-foot pole on the way, so that I can outfit a Tacoma, which I also bought recently, um, instead of just having the van, which I also bought recently and paid for a wrap for recently, and I'm getting drafted uh revisions done on the wrap for the Tacoma. Um so I just these costs add up really, really quickly. And that's fine. I mean, I'm not I'm not overextending myself, but we're we're stretched, and I I'm not interested in taking on debt at this point to continue to move the needle, and so because of that, because we're bootstrapping, um a lot of the times it feels like I'm really close to like I've got my toes hanging off the edge. And again, we haven't like taken any any risks, like we're not like like my guys are getting paid, um, you know, my family's eating, etc. But I have never made this much money and not kept so much of it, which has been a feeling that I wasn't really anticipating. Um yeah, I wasn't anticipating feeling that way. Like I've had $24,000 months, um like months where we made, you know, $22 to $24K as like a solo guy, and that always felt good because I was keeping most of that, and I was just I had a big shovel to shovel all of the extra into basically my savings uh or you know, retirement or various investments. And now it's like you know, I it happens a couple times a month where like just my business checking account will be at like $15,000 or whatever, and then a couple days later it's at like four. Um, so anyway, uh I don't want to dive too deep into the financial side because it's gonna be unique for everybody, just depending on where you're at. So I mean I could I could decide to stop growing and refining my business today, and after labor, just keep 100% of the profits. Um and eventually we're gonna do that. I mean, I'm hoping in the next couple of months we can kind of pump the pump the brakes a little bit on the amount of investment that I'm that I'm doing into the business, but I just want to make sure it's at a good place where we can like where we can sustainably chug through some really solid months. Um because if I grow too much, I'll be overextended really quickly. And I'm getting to that point. Like I I need two leads and two full-time technicians, and I'm not quite there yet. That would allow me to get out of the truck and go sell full-time, basically. Once I'm there, I will be interested in potentially continuing to grow. And and I am still interested in growth, but uh, anyways, I don't want to get too rambly on you guys, but I just uh I just wanted to kind of give you some of the some of the things that I've been thinking about recently in regards to growth. This is the most that I've ever had to think of my business from the perspective of like an operations manager. I'm finding myself like ascending the ladder for this business that I'm currently building. It's like I'm building the ladder while I'm climbing it. Um, and I I think the next really the next goal is to for sure to get off the truck because it's so time consuming to be doing the day-to-day operations of the business from a production standpoint and be a great sales salesperson. So fortunately, hiring an administrative assistant has taken a lot of the phone work out of it. I mean, she makes you know anywhere from 20 to 60 phone calls a day for me. So that's been that's been a very helpful thing to get off of my plate. But she's fueling a job with that another full-time job, basically, or could be, which is like sales, going out, doing estimates, closing accounts, and scheduling out the technicians. And so I have the pressure of that position kind of weighing on me, uh, asking, demanding my attention. Um, and then I have technicians that still need some training before they can kind of run solo. So I think operationally, that's my biggest for sure, that's my biggest bottleneck right now is I'm still required in the field. Um, so this is a long shot. I mean, this podcast isn't exactly the Joe Rogan experience, but I am looking for somebody that is experienced in window cleaning that lives in the Northern California area. Uh, I live on the 80 side of Sacramento, towards Nic Tahoe. Um, and uh yeah, so that that would be that would be an awesome hack is to like get somebody on board that was open-minded, so they were open to our operational standards, but also had experience uh in a lot of the little things that you guys know about when it comes to running a window cleaning business or or running a smooth job site um and running smooth operationally. Like getting to that point where I have a team lead or an operations manager that can manage three to four trucks, including like rescheduling and stuff like that, and putting putting me in a full-time sales position, um, that's the next like real step of ascension. We're not there yet, that's for sure, but uh that's kind of where we're aiming at. So, anyways, um I just wanted to run a quick solo episode by you guys. Um, like I mentioned, I really limped into this, into this one. So um, I hope this was useful to some of you. Um yeah, man, I it's I've been tired. I've been tired for sure. That's for sure. If I can just be be open with you guys real quick. This is it's really hard. It's really hard worrying about other people and their livelihoods. And uh outside of my family, I've never really done that before. So yeah, I'm hoping that it you know, the other thing is that when I'm in the field, when I'm in the position that I'm doing right now, it's hard to take a step back and think about the business as a whole. Because I'm trying to clean the window that's right in front of me. And so this is the first year in like six years, bro, that I've I promised my wife this year that I would take weekends off. And and for the most part I have. I mean, I'm podcasting on a Sunday right now, but I'm not out cleaning windows. But um, when I'm still in the field, which I am, it's hard to think at a high level for where the business is going. And so I find myself really it's really hard to rest on the weekends right now because that's the only time that I have to think about to think about the business from a high level. And part of that is just me. Like I have the entrepreneurial itch, so it's it's constantly coming up in my head. But I think another big part is just that I I don't have any time during the week where I'm scheming about where the business needs to go. So yeah. It's gonna be nice one day, hopefully in the near future, to have uh, you know, two or more leads that can lead another technician in the field through the day-to-day and have two to four trucks running, just just in that position. I can do sales and and operations management, you know, making sure the fleet is maintained, etc. And sales. Like, I mean, that's still two jobs for sure, but that's manageable. And then another step back from that would be hiring an OM and being in sales full time. And I feel like that I could do for a good while. Like we could scale to for sure to several million with me in that position. And I would be happy to do that because this the sales part, other than driving, um, and I don't even I actually like driving too. Um, that's my favorite part of the of all of this, is meeting people, um, learning the challenges of a specific job, making sure it's documented, and then closing. Um, that's my that's my favorite part of all of this, really. So, anyways, um, I got a little ranty here. I hope you guys appreciate it. I appreciate you listening, especially if you got this far. Um, I hope this was useful. Look, the the goal of this podcast is to document my and mine and Dave's growth as business owners and to share what we're learning. And I learned a lot this month just about what you learn when you grow. I I know that sounds like meta and weird, but like I didn't think this time two months ago that I would be thinking about these problems for whatever reason. I think in hindsight it's really obvious. But uh, but these have been weird, weird problems to try to like chew on. And my job feels way different than than it ever has. Um, and it's a really cool challenge, but it's so new that it's been really challenge to make sure that I'm even thinking about these problems in the right way to begin with. So, anyways, thanks for listening, you guys. Love you, appreciate you listening. Hope you guys are crushing it this year. Uh, reach out to me if you ever want to chat. And we'll talk to you next week. Have a good one.