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