r/WindowCleaning

I live in a high rise more than 20 floors up. My building hasn’t bothered to hire window washers in 4+ years and they are FILTHY. They also open up a maximum of 4 inches, so I can only scrub as far as my forearm will let me. I’ve seen various products online that use magnets or suction cups to clean windows from the inside out, but I don’t want to spend $150+ on something that’s potentially trash. Is there anything I can do besides wait for a storm with strong winds?

Just had to quote those stained glass windows in a church, how would you go about cleaning such glass? Don’t mind the marriage this was sent by the owner. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m struggling to clean my windows thoroughly as my arm/hand can‘t reach the whole way to the window as it’s between the outside window and itself.

im thinking i need a special tool that has a mop or microfibre cloth to clean it but im not sure what as its really narrow.

i was hoping to get some tips here from those in similar situations!

thanks in advance

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.

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’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! 🙏

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.

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.

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"