How to Start a Pressure Washing Business: Part One

In this module we focus on building the Business Model Canvas for a pressure washing company. Before we dive into it, I think it’s important to understand what a business model is and how walking through each of the building blocks will contribute to your success.

By the end of this module, you’ll have a better idea of how business models vary, and which one will work best for your pressure washing business.

This lesson is based on the writings of Alex Osterwalder, the inventor of the Business Model Canvas and lead author of the book titled: Business Model Generation. In it, he describes a business model as: “The rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value”.

Market research is the starting point for any new business venture or expanding business. Starting and running a pressure washing business is no different. We need to understand everything about your market.

When conducting your research, you will gather, analyze and interpret information about your specific market, the competition and the type of services a pressure washing company may offer for sale in that market.

You will also gather, analyze, and interpret information about the past, present and potential customers for pressure washing services. We’ll also explore parallel business models or what I’ll refer to as Niche business models

The objective of this lesson is to complete the first building block of the Business Model Canvas. The Customer Segment block pinpoints the different groups of people or organizations your pressure washing business desires to serve.

As any entrepreneur knows, customers are the heart of their business model and without profitable customers; your business won’t survive.

This is where the research data from the last lesson you worked so hard to gather will come into play. The goal is to group customers into distinct segments with common needs, common behaviors, or other attributes.

A value proposition is a simple concept to understand, it solves a customer problem. This building block describes the bundle of products or services that create value for a specific Customer Segment. The value you create for your customers may be a mix of elements that cater to their needs.

When developing your Value Propositions, empathy is the word you need to keep in mind. Focus on just a few customer pain relievers and gain creators and do that extremely well.

Focus on job pains, or gains that many customers have or for which a small number of customers is willing to pay a lot of money for.

How will you interface with your customers? That’s the question we’ll answer in this lesson.

The Channels Building Block describes how you communicate with your customer segments so you can deliver your value proposition.

Channels represent customer touch points and play an important role in your customer’s experience.

This building block is about the types of relationships companies can establish with each of their customer segments. The customer relationships you are mostly likely to establish running a pressure washing business is one of personal assistance.

This building block represents the cash a company generates from its customer segments.

Don’t confuse revenue with earnings though. Costs must be subtracted from revenues to create earnings.

What is it going to take to make your pressure washing business work? What types of assets are necessary? Every business model requires key resources that allow you to create and offer a Value Proposition, reach markets, maintain customer relationships, and generate revenues.

Your resources will be dependent upon which business model you choose.

The Key Activities Block describes the operations of your business model. Every business model will have Key Activities. These Key Activities are the most important things your pressure washing company does to make its business model work.

The Key Partnerships Building Block helps us determine whom we need to partner with to make our business model work. We need to form Key Partnerships to optimize our business models, reduce risk, or acquire resources.

What is it going to cost you to run your business? The Cost Structure Building Block describes all the costs incurred to operate your business model and can be divided into two broad classes of business model Cost Structures. These are cost-driven and value-driven.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that it takes money to make money so let’s break down the costs you could incur to start and run a pressure washing business.

The business model canvas allows you to take a 10,000-foot view of your business model. Think of it as a blueprint enabling for building your business.

It can help you make financial sense or show where you need to strengthen certain parts.

When it comes to branding, everything I know I learned from my friend and mentor Bill Schley. Bill co-authored the book titled; Why Johnny Can’t Brand.

He’s a popular speaker and regular guest on national television and radio programs focused on branding and communication. You'll also learn how to write a micro-script tagline for your business.

In this lesson, I’m going to introduce another book Bill Schley wrote titled: The Micro-Script Rules. This book has the secret for propelling your ideas with simple, penetrating, and viral power.

Developing a meaningful and effective tag line for your business is an exercise in cognitive psychology and what Bill likes to call survival of the simplest.

The last two lessons are stepping-stones to creating your new logo. Now that you’ve got a name and a tag line that tells the story of your business, it’s time to sketch some ideas based on those words.

The same rules apply here as they did with your name and tag line in that you want to keep the shape simple.

Graphic designers will tell you to avoid popular clipart or generic symbols like a star or arrow and I would agree to a certain extent. You can get some great ideas from clip-art to give you a foundation to your logo.

The last three lessons have been an exercise in creating your brand’s image. The visible elements of your brand such as color, design, and logo combined with your company name and tag line.

This is only the beginning however, a successful brand includes your customer’s complete experience with both the service and the company, making it a powerful tool for gaining market influence.

Creating a positive brand-image for your pressure washing company is paramount to its success.

The purpose of this lesson is different than you might expect. I’m not going to tell you to write a business plan.

The traditional business plan may be necessary for an existing business applying for a bank loan. If you have an existing business and want to ask a bank for a loan, then you may need a traditional business plan.

Your plan would consist of all the legacy financial data to prove your profitable history in addition to your operational details on how the business is run.

If you’re starting a new service business like a pressure washing company, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. Let me explain.

So far in this module, I’ve introduced the three parts to the LSM which are Vision, Steering, and Accelerate.

The important thing to remember about the Lean Startup Method is the importance of learning. The entire first part of this course focused on the vision, so the rest of this course will focus on steering and acceleration. What you must to do is learn along the way.

At the core of a pressure washing business startup is the spark or catalyst that transforms your ideas into services.

As each customer segment purchases and experiences your service, they generate feedback and data.

The fastest way to realizing your goal is to take action and just start your business! Let’s get reckless and implement the LSM. This means you need to get comfortable starting before you think you’re ready.

Now that you’ve branded your company with a name, tagline, and logo you’re ready to get it registered.

Before you can do that, you’ve got to decide upon your business legal structure. To avoid costly legal battles, make sure and choose the right legal structure for your business.

Before I get into the weeds about how to structure and register your business, let me tell you a story about how I got started.

Now that you’ve, chosen a business structure, decided on a name, registered your company, and obtained your Employer Identification Number (EIN), its time to get your business licenses and liability insurance.

You may need to obtain a business license from the city you live in as well as a state contractors license. Check with your state to see if a pressure washing company requires a contractor’s license. It may not be required.

The business license informs your city or county that you’re conducting business so they can collect some fees or taxes (or both).

Basically, you’re paying for the right to do business there. Check with your municipality or local city hall to find out if you need a local business license.

This lesson defines what your business does. If you’re going to niche yourself down to a single service, then your list of key services will be short. Even if you begin as a niche business, you can always plan to expand your key services over time as you learn what works and what does not.

Since we’re focused on a new pressure washing business, the list of services you could offer should be limited to the most profitable services. The goal is to maximize your time and resources to make as much money as possible.

Your customers may want you to clean all kinds of things but I’m going to recommend against it. You should specialize in a small niche of services and do them all very well.

When it comes to starting a business, entrepreneurs often let financial considerations stop them dead in their tracks.

They quit before they even begin with the excuse of “I don’t have any money”.

I’m going to show you how to overcome the limiting belief associated with money. Yes, there are obstacles to overcome but hey, that’s part of entrepreneurship.

A successful entrepreneur is someone who has overcome their limiting beliefs, overcome their failures, and turned them into successes.

Using the Lean Startup Method mentioned in lesson three of this module, I encouraged you to just begin your business. Now I’m telling you that you need to do an honest assessment of your costs and have a cash flow plan.

Even if you have all the tools, you need and a work vehicle to take you there, a pressure washing business or gutter cleaning business will still require a capital investment.

A capital investment could be the equipment you need to get started or the cash flow to keep your business running day after day.

If you’re running a legitimate business, you must keep your business expenses separate from your personal expenses. Plan this out so you’re ready begin accepting payments or spending money upon launch of your pressure washing business.

Consider getting a business checking account as well as a savings account, credit card, and a merchant services account.

A checking account is a must and will be tied electronically to your accounting system. We’ll go into more detail about connecting your accounts in the next lesson. The goal is to track every dollar that goes in our comes out of your business.

Too often, business owners don’t take the time to understand the numbers. They pass the responsibility off to a bookkeeper, accountant, or spouse to worry about.

I’m here to give you some tough love. You must take the time to understand what’s happening with your business!

You must understand how to track income and expenses, maximize tax deductions, send invoices, and accept cash, check, or electronic payments.

You need to be able to track each project’s profitability and understand how to read basic financial statements.

Pricing your services is much easier than you might think but before I tell you what my pricing is let’s go over a few factors that affect your price.

One of the first thing that’s going to influence your pricing is your location.

If you want to specialize in residential house washing and you live in a rural county where the homes are a mile apart and the medium yearly income is less than $20,000, you’re in trouble.

Marketing is the engine and Sales is the gas pedal of your business. If there’s one module in this entire course where I can say I’m an expert it’s Marketing and Sales.

As a business development professional, marketing a service business and selling jobs is where I excel. I just love the challenge of driving sales and growing a company.

Marketing and sales are directly tied to branding so keep Module 3 lessons in mind as we go through this module. I suggest you go back and review that module before proceeding with this one.

Your Marketing and Sales strategy will determine how fast you can grow your business. It will also determine your budget. The faster you want to grow, the larger your budget needs to be.

To create a strong online presence, we’ll refer to learning objectives of some previous lessons and introduce some new ones in the following lessons.

To begin, a website is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy, but your online presence is the sum of all the platforms you’re on in addition to your website.

Establishing a positive online presence is an indispensible task for your pressure washing business in the digital age.

Your online presence is a direct reflection of your company’s reputation. It’s the collective existence of you and your business available for all to see so you’d better take control with a good online strategy.

If you were paying attention during the Branding phase of this course, you may remember I said:

“One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not giving any thought to how the customer interprets what they do when they see your company name.”

To complicate matters, now I’m going to tell you that to begin the process of planning your new website, you need to define keywords and keyword-phrases in the context of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Today, everyone seeks products and services via the Internet so if you want to build a pressure washing business with high-dollar top-line revenue, you’ve got to have a well planned and executed website.

There are so many great tools you can use to create a simple but highly effective website to help you achieve your goals. I’ll introduce those to you in this lesson and provide links to resources at the bottom of this lesson page.

Having a website is an absolute necessity if you intend to be taken seriously as a professional pressure washing company. If you want to accelerate your earnings in a short amount of time, install force multipliers.

Using a force multiplier is like putting a supercharger on your daily driver. Instant high-performance supercar!

What are force multipliers for a pressure washing company? I use software that automate two of the most important tasks associated with this business.

Promoting my pressure washing business is hands down my favorite thing to do. I love when the phone rings as a direct result of my marketing strategy.

Your marketing strategy will incur one-time costs and have recurring costs.

When it comes to using your work vehicle as a promotional tool, you can do low-cost magnetic signs to full graphic vinyl wraps.

I highly recommend a wrap for several reasons but most importantly, I’m getting 8% of my leads each month from homeowners who see my truck.

Since my vehicle was wrapped a year ago, I’ve gotten 29 leads at a close ratio of 69% and an average ticket cost of $454. That’s $9,073 and more than four times what I paid for the wrap.

The first bootstrapping promotional strategy I used to get my get my business off the ground was a doorhanger. This is great strategy for startups on a limited budget and it works.

I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, lower budget equals greater level of effort? This absolutely applies to doorhangers as they require a significant level of effort.

Lucky for you, I’m about to share one of my money-saving secrets that increases sales with less physical work.

I spent more than 20 years wearing a uniform in the military. Professional business people wear uniforms every day, it’s call a suit. Well, today people are mostly business casual, but I think you get the idea.

Showing up to a customer’s home in a uniform is a must. It may not seem like a big deal but it’s that razor’s edge details like this that set you apart. It provides an appearance of professionalism and automatically instills trust and credibility.

I’m not a big fan of direct mail advertising mainly because it’s expensive. I’ve been in business for two seasons’ now and I have not spent much money on direct mail.

I just think it’s time has come and gone. For the money it cost to send out 1000 postcards, you can fund an entire month’s worth of Google Ads.

This is due to the level of targeting Google can provide. Post cards are no different from dropping off doorhangers at random houses.

I’m about testing what works and then dumping all my limited funds into the one that works the best and for me that’s Google Ads.

Imagine yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. This customer is in your service area and looking for exactly what you do best in the neighborhood — maybe a friend recommended your business to them. If they search for your services on Google, what will they find?

This is where a Google Maps Business Profile can help!

In this lesson we’ll explore creating a Facebook page or should I say Meta Business page.

In case you weren’t aware, Facebook is changing their name to Meta. By the time you view this video the full transition may have already happened.

Anyway, the reason I recommend setting up a Facebook Business Page (FBP) is because of the benefits to your business. FB Pages offer several benefits but the main one for me is the powerful backlink a Facebook business page provides to your website.

This lesson walks you through using Facebook ads to generate leads for your business.

It’s hard to define what a business directory is because there are so many different types. I think you can categorize them by what you’re trying to accomplish.

Business directories allow you to build a company profile to promote your business. We just covered the Google Business Profile which is by far the most important one you can have.

Aside from a Google Business Profile, I only use business directories to provide backlinks to my website. Backlinks are other websites that “link” back to your site by displaying your URL on your profile.

Blogging is a difficult task for any business but it’s an important if you want to build organic website traffic. If you want to build your pressure washing company into a $20,000 a month powerhouse, you’ve got to do it.

By now you may have predicted I’m going to suggest you need blogging strategy. Well, you’re right. I never said becoming tremendously successful was going to be easy.

Having a Social Media strategy is just as important as blogging when it comes to brand awareness. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are the ones that I rely upon the most.

I know this may seem overwhelming especially if you’re an army of one, but I promise it’s the combination of all these strategies that will get you to $20k month. Plan to spend 3 hours a week working on your strategy.