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The Wash Bros Podcast
Join The Wash Bros, Matt Jackson and Clay Smith, as they talk friendship, business, and how working together as owner/operators of competing businesses has helped them achieve even greater success.
The Wash Bros Podcast
Season 2: Episode 1: Thriving Through Seasonal Challenges, Marketing Mastery, and Building a Strong Personal Brand
Ready to revolutionize your pressure washing business? Discover how to strategically plan for peak seasons and manage those slower winter months with foresight and confidence. Matt Jackson and Clay Smith, your Wash Bros hosts, reveal their secrets for thriving in a competitive market without diversifying into unrelated services. Learn from their personal experiences, like taking time off in January, to understand the critical importance of budgeting and saving—a key to maintaining stability and seizing opportunities when spring arrives.
Explore the dynamic shift from traditional methods to modern business efficiency with insights on CRM systems and marketing investment. As inflation affects operational costs, hear why targeting the right clients who value quality over price is essential. Matt and Clay discuss the challenges of standing out in a saturated market, especially against new entrants undercutting prices. Discover how personal branding and creative engagement can be the differentiators you need to foster trust and earn organic referrals.
Effective customer retention and strategic marketing are pillars of sustained success. From managing leads with CRM systems to investing in necessary equipment for operational readiness, Matt and Clay share strategic decisions that have fueled their growth. Hear their unique takes on marketing strategies that balance immediate returns with long-term customer engagement, and learn how building strong supplier relationships can enhance your business's resilience. Whether you're looking to upgrade your equipment or refine your marketing approach, this episode is packed with practical tips and insights to power your pressure washing business forward.
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What's up, guys, it is Matt Jackson and Clay Smith and welcome to our second season slash rebrand of the Wash Bros podcast. If you've guys been following us on social media or if you've been following us on all the podcast providers in the past, you and fans of the show, you're going to be interested in our new rebrand this year and we really want to pound content and do more interactive stuff. Um, and you'll see us probably do podcasts from job sites and and here and there. So we're expanding this year so it'll be a lot more value-packed uh and entertainment for you guys. So you want to kick this off, clay.
Speaker 2:I mean, I know this is going to be our second, second one yeah it's.
Speaker 2:It's great to be back. I'm glad we're rebranding this. We're getting it back, serious, getting back going with it. I know that we've had a lot of people ask about hey, what are you doing now? What's going on? Where are you going to kick off another podcast episode? Last year was just a big growth year for the both of us. We just have been busy and we gained a lot of knowledge. We stumbled through a lot of things and I'm glad that we could share a lot of things that we were going through and try to help each other out and try to grow so that we can help the guys that actually listen to our show and our podcast here.
Speaker 1:Exactly yeah, because I remember when we were doing the like the last last time we were doing the bros, I was kind of in that growth season, and then last year you were in the growth season, so it's it's one of those things. We were like catching back up and like the journey I went through in 2023, 20, uh, you pretty much went through 2024 of last year. So we're like recouping now and we're like all right, we both made these huge leaps in our businesses and now we can break down what we've learned and how we're approaching the 2025 season and bringing back the Wash Bros and talking to all you guys in the audience as well, and hopefully we can get everybody on board and help out and inspire people and get everybody ready for the spring that's coming up real soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most importantly, you uh need to set yourself up for success. Um, so one of those things I'd like to talk about today is prepping yourself for the season. So you know that there's a peak season coming up in the spring. Um, it's my favorite time of the year because this one we we get get a lot of business, get a lot of leads, get a lot of opportunities to to grow your business per se. You, you got to set yourself up for success no doubt.
Speaker 1:yeah, the spring season for us, and pretty much for everybody else too, it's like make or break, because I know winter, especially if you're not doing christmas lives or you're not doing these other services to kind of maintain cash flow, like it's been since middle of january, since a lot of us have had really solid, like predictable, cashflow. So we're all kind of ready gearing up and I guess the big thing would be like how are we? What we're doing today is going to dictate how successful we're going to be in like April, may and June, which is that busy season that we want to max out. So we're making all the money we possibly can during that season. So is there anything that you have been doing, clay, that you've been doing it to get ahead of people, getting everything ready to go? So when somebody is looking at your Facebook in the middle of April, they're not looking at you and saying, oh man, where's all this business coming from? What have you been?
Speaker 2:doing so this time of year we're pretty much sitting here setting ourselves up for the winter, and then in the winter we're kind of setting ourselves up for spring. So what I mean by that is, in the spring you need to set yourself up financially for the winter that's coming, because there's going to be a rainy day. There's going to be a rainy day. There's going to be a time from. You know, if you're not doing lights, like me and you, we both do solely washing. We survive off of nothing but pressure washing. We don't do the extra services, we don't do Christmas lights, we don't do painting, we don't do gutter cleaning. We don't do any of that stuff.
Speaker 2:I do offer the dryer vent cleaning that one of my guys part-timers does occasionally, but we solely rely on pressure washing and you don't really see that much in our space, in our industry, and that is kind of the tricks that I like to teach people. Hey, you can do this one service if you plan everything out right and you set yourself up for success. So mainly what I like to do is I'm like, okay, I need X amount of dollars to pay the bills or whatnot, and I just I mean, like this past year we took January just about completely off and went on vacation. I didn't work for three weeks, didn't think about work for three weeks. It sucked because you go from 100 mile an hour to zero, but you need to set yourself up for spring and the winter and in the spring set yourself up for the winter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and especially in the growth phase of a business, like if you're not careful with what you're doing, it's easy to lean on like not having like a tighter budget. When you're making all this money and have all this cash flow is like growth, growth, growth, revenue. And then when that stops, if you're not, if you don't have something in place or you don't have savings in place, it's going to really hurt. And that's where I think you see people go out of business because they can live off of bad spending habits in the spring, summer and fall. And then kind of the true test is when, when's coming in, they're like wait, how long did I plan? It's like a farmer. You can't just, oh, I'm making all this stuff, and like it's harvest season and I'm not storing anything away, and then I gotta wait until the next busy season to to make and eat again. That's like with pressure washing, like you're we, we know the seasonal curves, so we got to be prepared. As for like the saving aspect, to be able to survive and have enough like cash reserves and footing so we can like, hey, reinvest in the slow season, have the equipment fresh and then have money for advertising so we're not just starving going into the busy season and we're not able to like spend money on advertising or marketing or all those necessary things required. So we can really like set ourselves ahead of our competition come this season.
Speaker 1:Because I feel like a quote I've heard is like separation season. It's like are you going to be a victim and just sit around and like whine and complain and just keep your fingers crossed that like, oh, once spring comes, I'm going to be taken care of? Or you actively planning each day where you can get ahead of everybody else in that springtime and so your season can like blow up. And then people look at you out of nowhere and they're like, oh man, you were just killing it this year and that was like your last year. You really blew up and like took a ton of market share and surprised a lot of people yeah, it's definitely great to surprise people too.
Speaker 2:Uh, I love to say you know, sit down while I have a minute anyway, because you literally go from a hundred mile an hour to zero in our industry and, uh, it definitely makes you wonder. It kind of scares you a little bit, but it's all a middle game, right. So you got to find ways to keep yourself busy even though that needle may not be moving at the time.
Speaker 1:You got to find ways to get that needle moving when you're you're caught, you're caught up, right yeah, and I know this is my let's see 21 would be my first full-time year, so this is going into like the fourth full-time year and every every year has been easier and a little bit better and it seems like the slow season is less and less and not as frightening. So, and I know too with you, you seem like you're both you and I, both kind of like okay, we, we can take January pretty lightly, and then February comes around. Late January comes around, and then it's like hey, business is starting to roll in, you're getting busy, you got some commercial jobs rolling in and you're able to put like decent revenue behind yourself. Is there anything, uh, that you, you've done, that you recommend, uh, that's helped you so far, because I've seen that you've been, you've been pretty busy when a lot of people are like begging for work uh, like we've talked about before, I believe the consistency thing is what plays comes into play with me.
Speaker 2:Um, I'm always invested in myself, no matter if I'm making money or not. If we don't have any revenue coming in, I'm still putting myself out there, still building my brand, I'm still consistently doing everything that I was doing when it was busy. Um, like the google thing, I've said a couple of times to you like I'm just, I don't really, I'm a true believer. If you start messing and tweaking with things, it messes everything up and messes the algorithms up and it messes the. It just messes everything up and that's just. That's just a me thing. Um, but I'm I'm all about being consistent with everything I do and any of my marketing plans, and, uh, I just kind of get everything together and I look at everything I'm doing and I say, okay, this is where I want to be and how can I get there.
Speaker 2:And then through the years, the last few years, I've learned what works, what doesn't work, and what may work for me may not work for you, and obviously we're two competitors in the same area. So we kind of talk each other uh out on that, because we don't want to be bidding against each other on like these google ads per se. We kind of want to try to figure out what's going on and uh, it's definitely tough, man, especially when it's like me and you. We're two good buddies and we're just trying to make a living and try to be good at what we're doing, kind of like coke and pepsi in the drink world. You know we want to and then if we can help people while we're doing it like if I can do it, so can the next guy and uh, a lot just hear a lot of people make excuses.
Speaker 2:So if we quit making excuses and do the things that actually work, be consistent at everything that, uh, we have learned I think you can really be successful. Especially there's a couple. You know, like the small things don't really bother me as much as they used to, because I've already been about through all of it. You know like an O-ring would ruin my day back in the day, like a bad O-ring going bad in a hose would ruin my day, or an injector going bad would ruin my day. Like that stuff doesn't bother me. That's small things yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 1:And and then too, I think, like having connections and like how you and I talk back and forth, that that also helps, not just like tracking, but like keeping our sanity where. It's like if you, if you isolate yourself and you're saying, oh, like me against the world, there's, there's only me in this game and I'm competing with everybody else like that's a depressing way to do things, and and like you start to realize that there's enough business out here for everybody. And we've just like defined our, our lanes of travel and you're like, hey, we're all on a racetrack together, like going as fast as we can to win, but we're not going to just disregard each other or try to run each other off the road. It's like there's there's strategy involved and it's like, hey, if you're on a track by yourself, you're not going to go as fast as if you're on a track with your friend, like he may win Sometimes, you may win other times, but you're going to motivate and push each other to do better than if you're just out there yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like that lake house I was at the other day and he was like damn, I was just there. A lot of the same customers, whether we realize it or not, and I think a lot of guys get a little salty about that. But goes back to following up your customers as part of the sales process. That's uh, I think that helps me out a lot, having a sales background. If you don't have a great sales background, you don't understand the processes of following up with customers and the correct way of doing business with people. If you haven't or don't have a CRM, I highly recommend it. Maybe set some automated campaigns in place for text messages, emails, the whole nine.
Speaker 2:I was speaking to a guy actually in our area the other day and he said he didn't even have a CRM. He's doing everything off pen and paper. I was a firm believer in pen and paper until I got a CRM, um, that kept up with all of my customers and my, my phone numbers and everything and I could look at my reports. I could say, okay, this is normal for January, this is normal for February and compare year after year those numbers and data. They matter because if something goes south and you're you need to know if you're going backwards or you're actually moving the needle and doing a little better than the year prior.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt, and it is one of those things we also joke about too. People are like I don't ever spend money on marketing. Well, if, if you were dominating this area five, 10 years ago and you haven't spent a dime marketing, you're probably getting irrelevant nowadays. Like there's so much people have entered this space and so many, like like you and I take each other's customers all the time. If, if we weren't marketing, it wouldn't even be a game, like you would just take the customers. So it's these people. They're like oh, it's the new guy or it's this.
Speaker 1:I was like what tools are those new guys using that come from different backgrounds than just I'm a blue collar pressure washer and I'm a technician and are able to take market share and like grow their business, as like you and I have grown our businesses. I feel like a lot of these people. It's like they wear it as as a badge of honor and it's like a sense of pride, of like, oh, I don't need no fancy Internet device to help me grow my business. I I'm able to grow because of all my customers. And they don't understand that's not how the times work nowadays.
Speaker 1:You can't serve your customers without doing what we're doing.
Speaker 2:Well, nowadays, a lot of the guys, they just start with the social media, which is how me and you and I started. It's cheap, it's easy. Everybody's got a phone in their hand. You get out in front of everybody and you can work for cheap. You can try to build your customer database or whatnot. That's kind of the issue I've been running into lately is back when I was getting started. Those houses are getting dirty again and they're like oh, you can't do this for 150 bucks, no more. Well, no times have changed. Groceries are high, gas is higher. I mean, everything's went up with inflation went up with inflation. Hey, we have this minimum in place now there's no way we could do it. But you got the guy down the road that doesn't have the overhead that we have. That can do it for that exactly.
Speaker 1:It's one of those things. It's like, hey, that was the easy pond that we were fishing in back in the day when we didn't have money, we didn't have branding and we were having less value to provide. So, yeah, if you're like man, I make I make $30 an hour, $20 an hour in a job. If I can pressure wash somebody's driveway and it takes me an hour and I can make 150 bucks, that's killing it. And you see, like, as we grow and, as you like, evolve as a company and a brand, you have to invest in yourself. You have to invest in growing into bigger customers who have more money and who value actual company, as opposed to, like that low cost value option of like, hey, can you clean my house this one time and who's the cheapest option? And you and I see the same thing, like, we run these email campaigns every so often and it's like, hey, if I've been doing houses around the area for five, six years, these people who I've done their house four years ago, they're reaching back out because it's dirty and they're used to paying, like you said, 150 or 200 bucks, however much it was when we first started. And then they're like sticker shocked by saying, hey, we're over double the price, but like if we were just relying on those people to come back to us, we would never be able to grow our business and kind of narrow down all those customers. It's like we're sending out emails the last couple of days and you're looking at like how many emails we have. We're like over 2000 contacts in our CRM and not everybody's going to be our customer as we grow. So it's it's one of those things where, like sorting out the customers that value us and that their jobs are sizable enough where they can hit like our minimum order quantity, and being okay with saying like hey, I know you were my customer from back in the day, but if your budget is like 150 bucks or 200 bucks, I'm sorry, we no longer can. We no longer can service your house for that price, just due to basic economics.
Speaker 1:But there's plenty of other people who are pounding down the door on facebook wanting to like undercut everybody else. And that's like the slow season. You're starting to see people coming out. They're hungry, they haven't had work in a while and they're just undercutting everybody, and that's that's what we're seeing on these Facebook groups that like, yeah, we will get recommended a lot. But there's also like 60 other people that say, oh, I can do it too. I that say, oh, I can do it too, I can do it too, I can do it too. And the likelihood of those people going with you or me unless they really want to go with you or me is not very high, because a lot of times they're just under bid, under bid, under bid, and that's like not where you and I want to be, because no uh, it's just like I was telling you.
Speaker 2:A minute ago I just got off the phone with a guy that was another local pressure washer, looked like, uh, he was a little new in the area and calling me saying, hey, I think this customer is trying to pin somebody, pin us against each other, and I'm like man, I'm not in the business to compete. You know, I spent too much money on marketing and it takes a while for you to kind of realize that, like if you're really all in and you truly believe in your brand and you have a good brand and you value your brand, you built value in your brand. Everyone just about knows you know that, that you're good. People see you everywhere with our raps.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of people see me everywhere, whether I realize it or not, and every time I talk to me I see your trucks everywhere and I'm like awesome, cool, you know, and that that's really cool to be seen around town and to know that you're legit. They think you're legit, they know you're legit just because they've seen your trucks. They see your 300 google reviews, your 400 google reviews, however many you have, and you build a good reputation over the years and you're all over the internet. You can see us on tv, you can see us on youtube. You can see me on YouTube. You can see me on Facebook, instagram, and that's another thing. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. You need to diversify your marketing.
Speaker 1:I think that's huge because if anybody is listening to around this time, like February 10th, when we're shooting this episode, and they've had a Google account, they know that Google's been really fishy this past weekend, this past week, with not displaying the correct amount of views. So people are waking up thinking, oh, I have 500 reviews on Google. And then there's like, why is it showing 410? And when you're putting all your eggs in one basket and this is a thing with Google in general like Google's always really finicky You're trusting these huge tech platforms and you're just a number for them and they're over here trying to sell you ads and all this stuff. So like they don't care if you're you're not getting all the reviews. They don't care about you, they're just caring about everything as a whole. So like we're putting all of our eggs in these baskets of these companies that don't care about us and all it takes is like an algorithm change and then we're we're no longer able to get the same amount of business from these sources that were like our Holy grails of business.
Speaker 1:And like Facebook is big. Facebook is a good one for me that I started on, but like we're talking about, with so many people who have jumped into this space. It's hard to compete on Facebook because there's 60 to 70 comments of companies in our area that do the same thing we do, that are willing to just race to the bottom in pricing. And it's like you gotta be diversified, you gotta be spread out and like how you and I both like we try to be all over the board when it comes to like how our customers are seeing us, not just oh, I'm the number one guy on Facebook and then two days later somebody else is running the same ads as you, and they're every five seconds. They're like trigger fingers in these facebook groups where they're like hire me, hire me, hire me. It's like that's.
Speaker 2:That's an exhausting way to do business, in my opinion yeah, when I left the car business I kind of got out of being acting too desperate, even when I was selling cars. I think that's what set me apart. I wanted to be different and I wanted to not do what everybody else was doing. So if you could set yourself apart and be a little different than everyone, find your own twist, find your own spin. And you know, everybody calls me the watch daddy. So that's another catchy thing call the watch daddy, call c3 or call matt the driveway guy, call matt and matt the driveway guy, right. So how can you set yourself apart?
Speaker 2:Brand yourself, personal branding is important and it ties into your business If you can build a good personal brand, which I believe has helped me so much. I have not stepped foot in not a single whatsoever, have not stepped foot in any networking, ever networking meeting, which is a lot of people. I think networking is great if you don't know nobody in the area. But I did a good part. I did a good job on social media, building my personal brand with the people that are on my I guess my social media. And then we started the tiktok pressure watch guru. If anybody's listening, go follow me on Pressure Watch Guru. You can see a lot of my work there, and Facebook Reels too. Give me a follow on my Facebook page, clay Smith.
Speaker 2:Give Matt a follow on his social media as well, and you can kind of follow us and see like what we're doing, what we're doing to personal brand ourselves and personal branding. Going back to that, one of the main things that I like to do with a personal branding is there's a little tab that pops up in your notifications every morning and it says wish these people a happy birthday. And it's usually about 10 to 15 people and what I usually do is I quit that and every morning when I wake up, I wish everybody happy birthday on my Facebook post. It's personal, it takes five seconds. It's like sending a birthday card really, and you're doing it on social media and these guys are like dang, he actually pays attention to my stuff. Part of personal branding People are going to remember you when they need pressure washing.
Speaker 1:That's actually a really good snippet right there. That would be a good reel.
Speaker 2:Very good reel.
Speaker 1:You're creating that personal touch. You're not over here saying, oh look at me, I'm posting about stuff. You're like actively, like reaching out and being personable to somebody and they're making a connection to you and they're like, oh cool, that guy that runs that big business, whether or not I met him in person, I follow him. He reached out to me and did something kind to me, so I'm going to return that favor. And you do get a ton of reviews or you get a lot of responses within all of these groups where people are like call Clay Smith, calls, and I imagine a lot of these people haven't used you, but they've just followed your brand and they say, hey, I know I can trust this guy and then I'm going to recommend him. So that's like the best marketing you could possibly get right there.
Speaker 2:It's free, easy and it gives people an opportunity to click and see what you do. You know, I'm going to be the first one to tell you. When I first got started in this business, I just added everybody in my suggested friends list. I needed to get in front of people, and that was one way to get in front of people was just adding a bunch of random people that I had mutual friends with on Facebook, and I've gotten a lot of business from doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's good. That's because, too, like to the point of like oh, a networking group. There's no better networking than like a social media network where people are on their phones all day long and especially when they see you doing stuff like if you have 100 people comment on your post, these people will follow you and they'll see the update of. Like oh, clay smith is doing this, c3 wash bros is doing this. Like you're not gonna get that level of engagement from going to a networking event and just shaking somebody's hand and saying, hey, bro, like this is what I do and like I've tried it here and there with some like chamber of commerce things and I was like I'm just wasting my time honestly. And then you're just like connecting with people that can't help you too. That was the thing I think threw me off the most. Like you're connecting with somebody who's trying to sell themselves to you and they're not really a valuable connection that you're going to be able to grow a business with.
Speaker 2:Right, the networking thing I think that was the biggest thing with me is they're there for the same reason you are, so they're looking for work, they're looking for whatever, they're looking to build connections, which is great. Like I say, starting out it, I would rather be door knocking.
Speaker 1:Exactly. If you're door knocking at least you're knocking on a customer's door that could have a dirty house and there's like here's a problem that I can help you solve.
Speaker 2:Right, right. And another thing I wanted to go back to the thing about the customers that you had three years ago that think you're going to do $150 housewash. Well, another thing that we're doing this year is okay, well, if you grab a neighbor, I can give you a $50 discount, right? So if I can get two neighbors, I'll give you a $100 discount and just cap it out at a minimum or whatnot, because if you're in that same neighborhood and you can pile up five houses at $200 a pop, well, I don't know how quick you are or whatever, how quick your guys are, but me personally, I could probably get there at 730 in the morning and make a thousand dollars before one o'clock. Easy, if they're all lined up together. That's, that's the thing.
Speaker 1:And yeah, and I swear I've done a lot of that too and you'll get these like not necessarily like an HOA job, but it'll be like five or six neighbors and they're like hey, we're ready for you to come out and clean our street again, and that builds up and before you know it you're like I got like five or $6,000 of work just being in these neighborhoods.
Speaker 2:And then when everybody sees you and they accumulate over time. Add a couple every year. Before you know it, you're doing the whole neighborhood yep, and you're like you.
Speaker 1:You almost have to reverse engineer and you're like what's my daily rate? If I'm here for the day, like you said, I have a full tank of water and I'm driving 10 feet, dropping the hoses and doing another house. It's not really costing me that much money at all.
Speaker 2:yeah, that driving time and setup time and all that mess, it's uh, it definitely adds up and that's one of the things that I started doing last year. I used to not get started until 9 o'clock, and when it warms up, I usually leave the house at 6.30 in the morning. It's already the sun's coming up or whatnot. The sun's up, I'm working, so I think I did as many as six stops solo last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2:So that is two days to a lot of people. So a lot of it is time management. So if you can figure out how long it takes you to clean a house where that job is located and you can get your scheduling down pat and maximize everything that you're doing to get the best profit possible, then you're Gucci.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt it's a simple game. It's just like consistency. It's all numbers. Then you're Gucci. Yeah, yeah, no doubt it's a simple game. It's just like consistency.
Speaker 2:It's all numbers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all numbers and that's where, like we're saying, the CRM's important and with CRMs nowadays, a lot of them do the dirty work for you.
Speaker 1:They track everything, they give you the pretty graphs, they show your year over year and your percentages of growth. And if you're flying blind and you're like I can do it on like people, just message me on facebook and I just put it in my google calendar or whatever they do, like you there's they're costing themselves so much money, not only of, like the money they have this year, but of the next year and the following year, and there's no way to really track like we do. Uh, through our crm, we'll we'll send out like six months or yearly like follow up emails of saying like, hey, look, we cleaned your house a year ago. Like, now you know how clean your house can be. Let's get you on the schedule for this year. Like you're sending out, say, you got three, three to four houses a day If you're solo, maybe like six to eight if you got a team, that's that's accumulating a lot of emails a day to these people that like, hey, every year, come back, come back, come back.
Speaker 2:And then, before you know, you got like 20 or 30 emails going out going to these past customers, and that's almost a way of automatically farming the base you have, yeah, and then eventually you know, if you kind of want to, I don't know if you get a little overwhelmed, you're not able to find the work, the employees, or find the help to help you knock out the work and kind of auto your marketing back a little bit and just kind of farm off of what you've already accumulated.
Speaker 2:Because, though, if you can maintain the customers you've already paid for, I don't know what the average is, what $40 to $50 a customer right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so $40 to $50 times, do what yeah? Like my conversion on Google. Yeah, that's probably like $30 to $40 per lead.
Speaker 2:So who knows?
Speaker 1:how much is closed off of that?
Speaker 2:And that's if you get the customer. So, with all the leads, every lead that I get goes in my CRM. So when the lead comes through our website, we put it in the CRM and we send the estimate through our CRM. And I used to not do that, but I got very consistent and very disciplined with doing that because that costs me money. That's my money. I'm wasting my money per se if I'm not trying to. At least, whether they hire me or not, I still have a customer to email, to text or whatnot with these campaigns and I think that it that it will definitely pay off in the long run if you're doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt. And and then what I've started to implement too is is you can create like a newsletter so you can take all those contacts and then you can shoot them off into like a like MailChimp or one of these things, and you can design like a really pretty newsletter with like every month you say, hey, this is like may, this is like a seasonal thing, here's like a discount, like here's why you should have your house brush brush. You're not necessarily like hard selling them on every time, but it's like a monthly newsletter that people just get in their emails and they check on it.
Speaker 2:So it's like like little blogs they can read if they're interested. Just whatever you can do to stay on top of their email, and they see your name constantly exactly.
Speaker 1:It's like a nurturing campaign. It's like, hey, like we're not trying to say you need to buy this, like hard sell you. We're just saying like this is what our team's been up to. Like here we we grew this way. Like I had a kid last year. Like here's the newest member of our team. Like tongue-in-cheek stuff people like to read. I mean, you figure, they got an office job, they're bored, they're checking their phone all the time. They're like, oh, I remember that I cleaned, cleaned my house.
Speaker 1:It's good to see his business group you're not over here cold, calling them, making them uncomfortable, trying to get them to like, hey, make a decision, give me your money. They're over here, like no. I've been following this guy for years on social media. I've been following him on. Now he sends me newsletters like you can do text blast. So, like the importance of having that data of customers is, like you said, priceless like you. And then to another point, say, say you, you're growing and you're like I got too many trucks. I want to condense a little bit. And then, just maybe I want to run solo with a helper and just like, make as much profit as I could. You could just like focus on that list of business and say I'm going for the highest price point customers that are already my customers. If I don't need to fill two or three trucks, I'm going to go like laser, focus on the highest ticket I can do.
Speaker 2:And you're cherry picking out of, like, your best customers that you can work with 100, get your higher ticket, and that's another thing that I've uh kind of focused on. Do I want to be volume or do I want to chase those higher tickets? So it all, it all builds back to how you set yourself up and what you're trying to achieve, what you're trying to accomplish and setting the goals in the winter, for the spring, and then setting your goals, uh, for the, for what you want to do in the winter like for me last year it was taking that vacation I was talking about and then for the for the spring. It's uh, uh. So how do I, how do I set myself up for the marketing? Um, how do I prepare myself for the bad stuff that I know is already coming, like o-rings, I want to have extra o-rings. I want to have extra hoses that are 200 a piece. I want to have the extra guns or wands or whatever, um, because all that stuff's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:It's just when is it gonna happen? You need to be prepared for that because, like last year, I was down for two days because both of my engines took a crap at the same time, both my pressure washers. I think between work and between the machines that I had to switch, we lost around $18,000 and that hurts If you're not prepared. You know that's. That's another growing point. That's another growing pain that I had to get through. I had to know that I needed to be prepared next time.
Speaker 1:And I learned your lesson by, instead of making it myself, I was like, hey, if you went through this, I'm going to buy, I'm going to get a new machine, I'm going to trade what I got, and I I upgraded one of my machines because nothing is worse than like there's an electrical issue that I can't figure out, or like I'm putting these like temporary fixes on a machine and then your guys calling you or you're out in the and my machine's not working and my only option to fix this is to go buy a brand new machine where I don't want to buy a brand new machine.
Speaker 1:So it's like figuring out a long time ago.
Speaker 2:You definitely got to take care of what takes care of you, because if you don't, then you're you and you and a mix for something crazy coming on. It's coming, yep, it's going to have you. It's a bad day.
Speaker 1:It's a bad day waiting to happen for sure, yeah, that's, but what are some things you think, because we're at, like, our 32-minute mark. So what are some things that you think the audience would want to know that you're doing that's successful for you, that would help them get ahead of the spring this year and really make a mark on 2025 yeah.
Speaker 2:So, believe it or not, like we're on the february 10th mark and I'm already spring busy, and I think the biggest thing that played into part with me was being consistent in the marketing. Um, whether I was bleeding or not, I was still paying into the marketing. All of my marketing has not been I, it's been the same ever since. The only thing that isn't the same is the TV, the TV commercials. They're very costly and that's the only thing I turn off. I can turn those back on. People still talk about how they see me on TV all the time and I don't even have the commercials on right now. So they're getting ready to ramp back up, even have the commercials on right now. So, um, they're getting ready to ramp back up.
Speaker 2:If, uh, the tv was kind of just, uh, just kind of like a you know let's, it would be cool to be on tv thing, and it's actually it's a long-term play. First year you don't really make money off of it, the return on investment, and then, um, it's a long term. It's a different kind of customer than google. The google is a right now customer and the tv is a long-term customer. Definitely don't recommend it till later on. Um, what you're. You know you're going to be successful. I know you're successful and you're going to find those better customers on tv. So, um, another thing, so number one was my marketing. I've set myself up, um, I've learned over the last three years uh, this is my fourth full year. You're one year ahead of me as far as, however many years, but anyway, like full-time, I made a jump like.
Speaker 1:My first full-time year was 21, so like halfway through 20 is when I decided to make a jump when the world was shutting down with my first full year.
Speaker 2:I started in 21, so, yeah, I've learned off of all these years all the, all, the headaches and everything, and I've grew every year so everything has worked. Now put everything I've learned on, so marketing would be number one. Number two is having uh. Number two would be just having two of everything like something's gonna break. I don't care how new it is, it's gonna break. You're gonna bust those. You need to be ready to throw another hose on there. You're gonna bust the o-ring, you're gonna. You need to be ready to put another o-ring on um, just little stuff.
Speaker 2:And you need to know what you're looking at, like if your machine is doing something weird. Educate yourself, look up things on youtube, educate yourself. I tell everybody all the time I go to youtube university for a lot of things that I learn. And uh, educating yourself constantly on your, on your industry and what's going on around you and what's going on out in the field. Like I say, the the equipment thing I think that was the biggest thing is learning what my machine's doing.
Speaker 2:When something doesn't seem right and it can be as little as an injector not pulling properly, you know, know, it's that ball stuck or whatnot. You can't get a daggum chemical out. Well, every second that that chemical is not coming out, you're not making any money. And then, number three, I think it's building relationships.
Speaker 2:I have people call me all the time, me and you. I know we use the same chemical distributor and I've had a lot of people call me and trying to sell me their chemical and it's five dollars cheaper a drum and I'm like it's not even worth it, like you probably have to give it to me for free in order for me to switch back and forth. I mean I've built such a good relationship with these people. They would open the doors on their day off to make sure I was good with these people. They would open the doors on their day off to make sure I was good. Right, building relationships and doing business with people and take care of the small businesses that take care of you. And that's the biggest thing that I've learned over the years and how I prep for my season and sending these campaigns out, looking at the, looking at the numbers, knowing what to expect, knowing that I need to hire somebody before this next month and get somebody trained up because it's about to get really busy.
Speaker 2:May is typically the busiest month of the year one of them and February is kicking off to a great start for me so far this year. So those are some things that I could definitely make sure you need to know before the spring. Just off of the stuff that I've learned and be all in all the time, I've had a good friend of mine who used to say that all the time, be all in, I used to want to be the tight ass. I didn't want to spend that money, I didn't want to invest in myself, and once I started investing into myself, that's when I really started to see my business soar. So that's just kind of a couple of key key marks that I've learned. What would you say that has helped you?
Speaker 1:I think, like you said, the consistency. And then you're building your brand up to a certain point where you, like you just are in more of a maintenance mode of it and I mean just creating. Like what we've been doing is just like getting everything ready, we got equipment upgraded, uh, and then we're kind of like mapping out like how, how long we're running one truck and then the second truck we kind of bring in next month, and then and then just figuring out like all right, all these customers we've like starting to nurture, we're running a like a discount sale or like we're we're running like a hey, pre-season, pre-season sale, where if somebody wants the book before march 1, like they get a discounted rate before we go into our full pricing. Like we're trying to create some urgency there to get people on the books like towards the end. Like this, this week on february usually starts to fill up, like you were saying. You're going through like spring numbers and it's like, hey, if we can fill a truck like four or five days a week, that is that's like the goal for us. And then, and then we really start ramping that momentum up for like march, april, may, june, and then trying to carry us through the summer.
Speaker 1:So what we're this year that's a little bit different than before is trying to like be more proactive, going after commercial work. So there's property management, facility management companies, and we're trying to go after work where, like hey, we can pull two trucks on and be like very cost-effective, yet we make a lot of money for ourselves too. So, like how can we utilize like pretty much our current schedule and and find ways to say, instead of doing a thousand dollars or $1,200 a truck or 1500 bucks a truck, how can we like find a $5,000 job and we throw two trucks on it and do it in like a day, kind of like you had a situation over the weekend where you're like I was able to like have you in a helper and then you're making like four or 5,000 bucks on a Sunday, like getting into bigger stuff. Like that, where you're like thinking smarter and not necessarily harder.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that was the most money I've ever made in about six hours. So definitely having the two, two eight gallon a minute machines. Definitely recommend getting eight gallon a minute machines. You're actually the one that got me jumped in from the four to the eight. I know if anybody's listened before Matt gave me a eight gallon machines. You're actually the one that got me, uh, jumped in from the four to the eight. Uh, I know if anybody's listened before. Matt gave me a eight gallon minute machine. He basically gave it to me. I hardly paid anything for it, just because he wanted to see what I could do with it and sure enough, I went crazy with it. But definitely recommend that eight gallon machine if you're in that four gallon minute mart.
Speaker 1:You've been in business for a little over a year and you know you're going to make it that's the big thing too, and it's like there's a fine line between like oh, I'm going to spend forty thousand dollars financing a skid and I have no business, and saying like oh, we've been doing this, and there's like there's actual proof that you're doing it right and there's success, and if you just get that upgrade, you'll be way more efficient and you'll be able to, like, make more money and have more money to grow your business.
Speaker 2:There's there's nothing wrong with that four gallon minute machine. I mean, I did that almost for two years and, um, I made a lot of money doing it. But pulling up to a I don't know how big that building was 100 square foot, 100, 000 square foot building and all you got is four gallon minute machine. That's going to take you a little while. Uh, you know, and I pulled up with two, two, eight gallon a minute machine yesterday, two big rigs and we knocked a uh what, almost a five thousand dollar job out about six hours, six, seven hours, and I wasn't even tired when I got home.
Speaker 2:So to give you an idea of the water you can push out, if, if you could, if you could, if you could swing it, go ahead and do it. Um, if you know you're going to make it and get through that first year or two, and that that's been a big, uh, definitely a big push for me. If you, if you're still in that four gallon a minute mark, and, uh, if you get a couple of weeks in you and get some money rolling in and just go out and bite the bullet, even if you broke even those first two, two weeks to a month, go ahead, uh to be the best investment you've made so far yeah, because, and then too, this is one of those things invest in things that other people aren't necessarily doing, especially when it comes to marketing.
Speaker 1:Because you see the youtube guys, they're all saying the same. They're all saying the same things. It's like, oh, you got to go door knocking, or you got to go like hang flyers on doors, or oh, you got to like throw rock flyers or whatever the thing is. And then, or you're going through Facebook groups and we're starting to see, like everybody's doing the same thing. So, like if these were your ways of marketing, like back in the day and it worked for you, great, but like when everybody's starting to do it, we need to start evolving into shifting into different things.
Speaker 1:So that's where, like the personal brand that like you do really well at like it's based upon, like your almost your personal Facebook page, because you get like insane amounts of numbers of people that see your personal Facebook page, and then they like follow you as a person and they say, oh well, I want this guy to clean my house and like I run a lot of my business stuff through my math the driveway guy page and I run a lot of paid ads behind it, but I'm finding kind of following what you do by like trying to implement my personal page and like me personally into my math the driveway guy and tie it all together there like I'm getting more reach and engagement from that than I was just like oh, I can put X amount of money a day into these ads and everybody's seeing my business page constantly, but it's not as meaningful and important as like oh, this is like me as a person and that's what I see you've done recently, especially this past year, and I'm like you're doing really good in the area for the personal branding.
Speaker 2:And the best thing about it is they already feel like they know you and they trust you before you ever come out, so they're just like whatever you know. You don't have to negotiate price or none of that. I don't negotiate to begin with, but you know they ask about a veteran's discount or senior citizen discount and all that stuff. But if you build your brand good enough and they've done their research and they know the good work you do, then they're not going to ask for a discount.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think they're like, hey, if you're doing a good job and you're fair, like, hey, profit, there's nothing bad about profit. And I think people are like, oh, I need, I can't be expensive. I'm like you price yourself. You and I, both are priced similarly and we're not discounting and we don't have to drop our drawers to get business. It's like, hey, this is the price, come and take it. And a lot of times you say, oh, this person's trying to negotiate with me. And you're like, hey, look, man, I don't negotiate. I got availability on Tuesday of this week if you're interested. And a lot of times they'll be like, okay, put me down. People ask for 20 bucks off. I mean, it's like are you gonna pay 20 bucks?
Speaker 2:of gas for me to drive to your house, because I'll do that, right, right. Yeah, if you want to call the car cup at the gas station, tell them you got my gas bill yeah, it's like, yeah, dinner tab, we'll do it for 20 bucks off I know that's right, yeah, but I feel like we've had a good, successful uh episode back here.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's awesome. I'm excited to be uh talking about a couple of things. I'm excited to get this back going. Hope a lot of people are watching. Hope a lot of people are staying in touch. We're going to try to keep this consistent. Probably see us out on some job sites a little bit, kind of see us out in action. See that we're real people, we actually do work. We're not just selling a dream and a blueprint online.
Speaker 2:Um, because what may work for me may not work for matt or it may not work for you, but all we can do is try to help you and give you the best advice that we can and be honest. Be honest with you versus just trying to sell you something that just worked for us exactly, yeah, and it's.
Speaker 1:It's not like, hey, we made this much money and we're selling you on what we did one year, three years ago.
Speaker 2:It's like, hey, this is the same exact thing that you need to do or you're not gonna succeed. Well, that's very false.
Speaker 1:So yeah, anybody can make five hundred thousand dollars a year and go out of business because they're spending six hundred thousand dollars to do it I mean we kind of teach each other stuff every every day.
Speaker 2:I know me and you talk a lot and we kind of feed off each other, we kind of learn from each other and I think that's what makes us both successful as business owners and pressure washers. So if we can use what we've learned to inspire and help other people and maybe get them into our business models because me and you have about the same business model and about the same pricing or whatnot I mean we're pretty much we could probably swap trucks and still do the same thing and make the same money, just about, I'd say.
Speaker 1:There's countless times where I feel like they've hired me thinking I'm you, and they've hired you thinking they're me. I had a guy. He's like yeah, you do such great work, you have a blue truck. I was like I don't think I have a blue truck, but I think I know who you're talking about yeah, I just go with the flow.
Speaker 2:I had something like that happen, but it was with another company the other day. Yeah, but yeah man it was awesome to be back on here for the first episode of season two. Just glad to do kickoff season two. I'm excited. Hopefully we can kick off some good stuff and share some good knowledge for the next people for episode two.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, we're going for the more hybrid approach with this one. So we're going to be like, hey, we're in the field today, we're on a big job, like we can showcase this, we can showcase that, just something that's different than what everybody else is doing. Like we're not in our home studio at like 9pm every night saying like, hey, look, this is what I said I'm doing. I'm like, no, this is live from the action.
Speaker 2:So yeah, we can do a Q&A, hopefully as well, pearson.
Speaker 1:That way? Yeah, exactly, we can be more interactive and throw comments on the screen and all that, so it'll be fun man, I'm excited we'll. Uh, I'll see you in the next one yep, but yeah, we'll kick this thing off and then the next time you guys see us, we'll probably have some fancy overlays and some cool intro and outros.
Speaker 2:So it'll work in progress, but, as always, everything, check us out. Yeah, check us out on facebook, spotify, all the platforms for podcasting.
Speaker 1:We're there absolutely all right, clay, I'll see you see you later.
Speaker 2:Bye.
