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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 11:From Chaos to Control: Mastering Discipline in Pressure Washing & Beyond
Discipline isn't just a buzzword—it's the foundation of lasting success in pressure washing and every aspect of entrepreneurship. In this Easter episode, Matt and Clay dive deep into how accountability transforms businesses from occasional money-makers into sustainable enterprises generating over $250K annually.
The conversation reveals why disciplined communication creates trust with both customers and family. Through real-world examples, they demonstrate how transparency before beginning jobs prevents headaches later, even if it occasionally means turning down work that doesn't align with their services. This approach sharply contrasts with underbidding competitors who chase quick dollars without building foundations for growth.
Marketing discipline emerges as a particularly powerful insight, with Clay sharing how quotes from January and February resulted in over $1,000 in approvals on Easter Sunday. "You don't just say, 'hey, we're going to grow crops today, it's the middle of the summer and then it's harvest season,'" Clay explains. "You missed the boat." This year-round consistency separates thriving businesses from those that struggle through seasonal cycles.
Perhaps most valuable is their candid discussion about the discipline required at different revenue levels. The jump from $15K to $50K months demands systems, organization, and accountability that many entrepreneurs aren't prepared for—explaining why so many "fizzle out after a couple years." Even physical health becomes a matter of business discipline, with Clay investing $50 weekly in hydration to maintain peak performance during intense summer heat.
Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale beyond six figures, this episode provides actionable wisdom on building discipline as your competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Tune in to discover why consistency outperforms talent every time, and how accountability in every area of life creates the momentum that transforms pressure washing from a job into a thriving enterprise.
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What's up, guys? It's Matt Jackson and Clay Smith and we are the Wash Bros. Welcome to our Easter episode. This is going to be our 11th episode of our second season here and we're going to be talking about discipline and kind of how we hold ourselves accountable to that discipline. So you ready to kick this thing off, clay?
Speaker 2:yes, sir, happy easter. As always, I am excited. I'm glad we're here. We're probably going to keep this a short and sweet episode, obviously because we are recording this on easter, which is cool. Um, I love doing these on sundays because obviously you can you can kind of refresh your mind and get ready for the next day, which is Monday, the biggest day of the week, because that's what sets the tone for your week. So we're going to be talking about how you can make sure you stay disciplined through the course, stay on track, make sure you're doing the things that you can do to be successful track, make sure you're doing the things that you can do to be successful Exactly.
Speaker 1:And there's no better way to build that weekly discipline base by listening to the wash rows as it gets released tonight and that way your mindset's right for the next week, cause you hear people and they're always complaining gripe about oh, I got a case of the Mondays. I got the Sunday scaries. In order to be disciplined and in order to like do what you need to do to get yourself in that right mindset and hold yourself accountable, you got to set that framework the day before that week. So Sundays, clay and I both like to shoot the episode, we like to talk and kind of get our game plan for that week. So this episode would be great for you guys who may feel lost or you're not really dialed in as discipline and having that level of accountability towards your goals and stuff like that. So what are some things that you've done that helps you stay disciplined? I guess we start off with that.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, so. So with me, um, stay in discipline. I always make sure that I have a game plan for the week. I'm like, okay, I have four jobs Monday, However, you know, so on and so forth, however many jobs I have, okay.
Speaker 2:So we're not just talking about business here, we're talking about personal life too. I know we've talked about that in previous episodes of personal life, right? So how are we staying disciplined in our business and also, at the same time, staying disciplined and staying consistent with our life at home as well? So I'm always looking ahead, I'm looking at my schedule, I'm communicating with my family, I'm communicating with my wife and I'm saying, okay, this day is a little heavy. You know, if you need help with the kids, whatever, we need to come up with plan B to maybe get some help so we can, we can go over and whatever needs to be done, right? So there's always something that needs to be done at home. Communication is a huge key with your family, because if you don't communicate, I mean you never know. You've got to have a healthy relationship at home.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great point and it's like you say, being disciplined with communication, whether it be at home, whether it be with your employees or your customers.
Speaker 1:like that, that must be the same across all platforms, otherwise there's going to be inconsistencies there and it's going to creep into your business. So if you don't communicate well with your wife or your family, your kids, et cetera, your employees, you're not going to be communicating well with your customers. And a lot of times stuff happens. You wake up, you got mechanical issues on the truck, you overbooked a job by accident, how well you communicate and how disciplined you are with, instead of dodging around things and issues, you go about it directly, um, kind of professionally, and like grab it by the horns. And I think discipline like you and I both are pretty straight shooters, so that's a thing that works for you and a thing that works for me too, and it's like, hey, if you're not disciplined in that area, you're definitely not going to be disciplined in the areas that are required to grow your business.
Speaker 2:Transparency goes a long way, right? So if I get to a job and I notice a house has a ton of oxidation on the house, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to be able to do this. If this is your end goal to get all this cloudy mess off your house I'm not the one for you more than life, because I don't do oxidation removal. So transparency, it goes a long way. The customer may be a little upset at first, but they're going to thank you for being straight up, honest and transparent with them. Transparency with your wife, transparency with your employees, transparency with anybody. A lot of people can't handle transparency and that's okay. They're not for you. So if a customer can't handle your transparency, then that customer probably wasn't for you.
Speaker 2:But transparency has gotten me so far in business and I've always stayed disciplined with my transparency. I've always stayed consistent with my transparency and I always try to tell people the truth straight up. You know I'm not going to try to hide anything. You know, if there's a black spot on your gutter, if there's tiger striping on your gutter, we don't brush any gutters, we just do salt. You know we do the salt wash. So, ma'am, you paid for a salt wash. You didn't pay me to brush your gutters.
Speaker 1:Exactly right.
Speaker 2:So if I see and that's the first thing we do is we walk on the same page. Before I pull any hose, I make sure that I'm on the same page with the customer, whether, even if the customer is not there, I'm sending the customers pictures, I'm FaceTiming them, I'm sending them a video letting them know before I begin, before I waste any of my time, hey, I just want to make sure we're on the same page. You had this here. This is what my process takes care of. That you're paying for today. This is what my service takes care of. That you're paying for today. This is what my service takes care of, and make sure you're on the same page so they know what they're getting before you start.
Speaker 1:I think that's huge we are running into occasionally when we have our ceiling and stuff like that. We'll run into customers that are a little more anal than pressure washing customers. And this is a it's not an issue that happens a lot, but occasionally it'll happen. And this is a it's not an issue that happens a lot, but occasionally it'll happen. We'll get these like hyper OCD people that are really irrational and if we lapse communicating like you said, full transparency if we lapse communicating with them on the expectation of what they're going to get and there's not a lot of discipline there and us trying to explain our processes and saying, hey, like we will seal this, but it's gonna provide more protection and it's not gonna fix that terrible stain you have that can't come out, or it's not gonna fix that discoloration you have that's not coming out. And I've had a few instances where it's just been nightmare, nightmare, nightmare customers and like you gotta be disciplined, you gotta be hard and you're completely transparent. And I'm probably to give a woman 500 bucks back this week because I'm like you know what. You're no longer going to reach out to us. Here's our service fee of the ceiling project. Do not contact us again.
Speaker 1:And it's like we got to stand our guns and we got to. We got to be disciplined and if we didn't set the like, it's like figure out. Like, like clay says, with transparency, that's like hyper, hyper important. You can try to sell a job, but if the expectations won't be met, you're gonna have a headache on the back end. And that's one thing where, like, if he's going out of his way before the job, just before the job starts, to like really inform the customer on what's going to happen and what it's going to be, you're, you're doing the best you can do to prevent issues, like on the back end, when you're just dealing with these insane customers that occasionally we'll run into.
Speaker 1:When he was talking about transparency and communicating, that's kind of was like I'm dealing with this crazy Karen from February and they're just nonsensical. But we need to figure out how, when we're explaining the processes on the ceiling and we're not overselling things, we're more sending expectations. It's like anybody can sell anything, but can you deliver the results they expect? And if you can't, you're doing yourself a disservice, and I see that happen a lot in this business. People think, oh, I can do this, I can sell this, I can, I can sell them this, and then they got a $1,200 ticket.
Speaker 2:The customer's like.
Speaker 1:Well, this is not what I asked for and then you have a bad customer. So, yeah, I mean those reviews mean a lot, yeah, or or you're just dealing with somebody who's just a massive asshole that you don't want to deal with.
Speaker 2:Correct, correct. I always like to. A lot of customers don't know this, but when they call me and I, I'm basically doing a customer interview, so I can pretty much. I pretty much just from being in sales. I kind of know what I'm dealing with before I ever get to somebody's house.
Speaker 1:So I try to do my customer interview and I price accordingly exactly, and that's kind of staying disciplined with yourself and not allowing your emotions to take over and and say oh man, this is an extra, I could, I could, I could figure out how to do this service and make an extra thousand bucks on an upsell like no, we you and I are both disciplined. We stay in what we know, we can excel at and we replicate that and that's how our businesses work.
Speaker 2:We're not over here trying to guess our way through things yeah, you can't get caught chasing the wrong things, because that's when you get sidetracked and things start going South. You always got to be disciplined and stay on track. So that's one of the things that I have wrote down here. I always make sure I stay on track, stay on the right path, stay consistent with what I'm doing. Like we were talking about before we actually went live here, matt, we were talking about how, just today, easter Sunday, I had actually had two leads. I had quoted them back in January, february, and both of them approved today and okay, so it's April the 20th, right, and these were back in mid-February and late January, where these two quotes come from. And I also had another one this past week. They approved in a quote from last August.
Speaker 2:So, discipline in our marketing I'm very disciplined in my marketing and if, if I know I know a lot of guys out there, I know that I've talked. I talked to a lot of guys that pressure wash. I talk a lot of guys in our business because they reach out to me. They asked me what I'm doing, all the things, the different things that I'm throwing together to do what you know, the numbers that we do, the volume of work we do, matt, and you've got to be consistent in your marketing, right? A lot of people are like I'm not throwing away that money in January and March or January and February, and I'm not. You know what I mean. You got to be consistent. I never turn my ads off, I'm always advertising, and the guys that are not advertising during the off season are losing money. I mean, I just booked over a thousand dollars today just from quotes that I did in January and February. Right?
Speaker 1:Exactly and, like you were saying and we talked about on other episodes, if a lead cost us 50 or 60 bucks, I mean you're just wasting time and money by not doing that and you got these thousand dollar jobs that just add up because you're fishing and putting yourself out there.
Speaker 2:It's like you want to be the farmer.
Speaker 1:You plant the seed and then you got to take care of it, take care of it and take care of it, and then harvest season comes. You don't just say, hey, we're going to grow crops today, it's the middle of the summer and then it's harvest season. You missed the, you missed the boat there, right.
Speaker 2:And I mean, at the end of the day, marketing should be a daily routine in your business. It should be part of your business. It should be factored into a 12-month budget. Say, okay, I got this amount of money that I'm going to do. This is part of your strategic plan.
Speaker 2:Like I always say, in the winter we get ready for spring. In the spring, we always get ready for winter. So go ahead, map your business out. Say, okay, I want to be successful and this is what I need to do. Be disciplined. That's what this whole episode is about. Just be disciplined. Say, okay, I'm going to be disciplined, I want to be successful in my business and I'm going to go January, february, march I'm going to write. Just get out a sheet of paper and write it down. Say, okay, these are my expenses, this is what I can afford. Whatever you can afford, whatever money you have left over that you can afford to put in marketing. Put it in marketing. I'm telling you I was so scared when I first started to do it, but it is so. I mean it is. It is a hundred times itself. Be consistent with it.
Speaker 1:You're not going to see.
Speaker 2:you're not going to see results tomorrow, you're not going to see results next week, but in the end game you're gonna, you're gonna see it pay off and you be like dang, I'm going to go find that Clay guy and I'm going to go tell him. Thank you.
Speaker 1:No doubt. It's definitely like Clay says with his ads keeping them on consistently. That takes discipline, because you've got to plan for it in the busy season, when you're making all your money and set some money aside, and you've also got to just be disciplined and not blow your money when you've got it rolling in, say got to rolling in, say hey look, I gotta not only live on this money in the off season if I don't have work coming in, but I gotta keep my business running in that season. So like it takes a lot of discipline. We're not just living by the seat of our pants here. Everything's planned out, everything has a purpose and everything has been thought forward yeah, this is not something you could just jump into.
Speaker 2:If you want to be successful, what you know, if you're just trying to, you know work 10 months out of the or 10 days out of the month and do better than you were doing at your regular job, okay, whatever. But if you want to be successful, you want to change your life. You're going to do the things that we're telling you to do there you go.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and very true. Like this is the time of year when it heats up, it's it's almost one of those deals where, like, everybody's started jumping into pressure washing. It's like the pollen's in the air spring's. Here they buy a pressure washer, you post on a Facebook group. You can make $10,000 a month from just showing up, but what's going to carry you further and down the road and making this an actual business? That's a completely different animal than you just posting on Facebook groups and underbidding people and then making 10 grand a month. I mean, that's really not that difficult to do. So that's only what. Like 40 jobs, that $250 job, something like that. So it's very attainable if you're just load balling people and putting yourself out there. But like that's the difference between those like $15,000 a month guys and the $50,000 a month guys is the discipline we're talking about here. Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 2:Anybody can go out and do this. It's not rocket science. At the end of the day, the customer just wants their house washed. But I think where we stand out here is we provide great customer service. We have a great reputation online. We have the best equipment and money can buy and we can wash a house in literally an hour. And they're like we're not taking up much time of the customer's day. I can't tell you how many times I've went to a house, uh, washed it an hour. And I have a conversation with a customer afterwards. They're flabbergasted, they're shocked, they're like, oh my god, how did he do this this quick? Did I just get ripped off? I make sure I do my walk around with the customer, we'll get done. They're very happy. And then they say well, the last guy was here with two guys and took all day. Yep, so what are we?
Speaker 1:doing. It's funny whenever, uh, I see painters out and about and they got their four gallon minute machines and you just see them sitting on their driveway for an entire day trying to take stuff out, it's like, okay, that's not. It's like everybody can do this. But the discipline that we do and the accountability we hold ourselves to, and how we position our brands and how we invest in our equipment and our advertising and like are disciplined in the word that we say to our customers, our family, our employees, like that's how you separate yourself and that's professionalism and that's value add. So, like you could argue that, hey, people say add value. What does that mean? Well, that is just the discipline and applying yourself consistently throughout everything you do in life, and then it's a muscle that you train.
Speaker 1:Clay had a post the other day about like, entrepreneurship isn't all like rainbows and sunshine. It's like you gotta show up on those bad days and I would agree. Yeah, exactly, it's a lifestyle you have to choose of discipline, otherwise you're not going to make it. If you're looking for this to be an easy hack or like, oh, how to make a hundred, a hundred K a year, well, you're better off in a job somewhere than doing this because you got to show up every day, and by showing up every day, that that's the discipline that we're talking about.
Speaker 2:A hundred K, in other words, is the new 50 K, 100k. You're not really doing anything anymore, right? So if you're doing 250k, I would say is the new 100, 100, 000. So once you start doing 250, then you could probably do something. If not, just keep pushing yourself to it. You can do it. Just go back, listen to all our episodes.
Speaker 1:I'll promise you, you'll get somewhere exactly and like this is getting to the time of year where we're starting to like I think we just crossed that 100k mark for the year in our business and then may june, like that's when you start knocking down the 100k month, like not the 100k months, but like between two months you're over a hundred thousand dollars. So it's like that consistency, that discipline, and then that's created all that momentum that we're now able to benefit and reap all of the fruit of our labor. And that's where it gets fun and exciting. But then there's also discipline required.
Speaker 1:In dealing with the lead flow, dealing with the customer service, dealing with the callbacks, dealing with the employees, dealing with the cash flow, you're opening yourself up to needing a lot more discipline to be able to manage the situation. So don't look here and say, oh man, it must be nice if I'm doing $50,000 a month, it must be nice if I'm doing $40,000 a month. It's like you have to be disciplined enough to be able to manage that and to be worth that. Anybody can say, oh, 10 grand a month, like yeah, that's pretty, pretty chill, we did 10 grand last week. But like the consistency and the long season, that's what wears you down and that's where that trained and learned discipline comes in handy and really matters, because, you see it, all the time Guys will get into this business.
Speaker 2:They get really hot and then they fizzle out after a couple of years because they lack discipline. Yeah, it definitely takes a lot of discipline to stay unorganized, and what I need everybody to understand is these numbers that Matt is throwing out are real numbers. These are not just some imaginary numbers that we're throwing out, like a bunch of other gurus that you see online. These are real numbers. These are what we are doing. Now. It's 2025, april the 20th. These are real numbers, these are what we are doing and these are numbers that we can back up.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, it's simple math, again, simple discipline. Break down that monthly goal into how many jobs you want to do in the month and then fill it with trucks business with a pen and paper.
Speaker 2:Your old, older generation, okay, they, they may have been able to do it. I don't know. I don't know how they did it, but our generation.
Speaker 1:The way the world works now, crm is a must yep, and we just we we've taken jobs from older uh like our owner operator type people that oh, I've had this client or I've had this contract with this place, or we're doing a university recently and we took it from an owner operator type guy because we have multiple trucks that we were able to drop in there and in a two and a half day window we banged out like a $7,000, $8,000 project because we had the resources, we had the modern equipment and we had the systems locked down and we were both disciplined and we could bang it out and like like that's, that's what's required to get ahead in today's world.
Speaker 1:It isn't. Oh my, my buddy down the street's got this thing going for him and I'm going to stretch it out over a month and then I'm going to make this much money. Like the there's different levels to this game. And like we were going over over the project beautiful campus and I was like man, you got this limestone that's a hundred years old, 120 years old, and there's wand marks all throughout it. And it's like sometimes the customer doesn't know that there's a better result than just straight pressure blasting to clean stuff up. So like we're in there half the time banging stuff out and it looks 10 times better because, like we, have the discipline to learn.
Speaker 2:And probably half of the uh, and probably half the time than what it took them to do it, if not probably more than half the time.
Speaker 1:It was funny because one of the guys who was watching them last year do it. He's like these guys aren't even working, that they're just spraying water on there, they're not pressure washing. And then I'll say how about you come over here and take a look at it? And and then he was like amazed, it's like, yeah, it's amazing what you can do with a couple of roof pumps and 11 gallons a minute of straight SH.
Speaker 2:Heck yeah, my favorite, kind of like that big building we did a few years back together.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that was fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll have to find another one. But the one last thing I'd like to talk about being disciplined is your health. Make sure you're staying hydrated. Be consistent For me, I'll spend $50 a week on Pedialyte. I like to get a glass of ice and drink a bottle of Pedialyte every night before I go to bed, and you don't feel the heat, believe it or not. It's like it's a shield of the heat. You don't hardly, you know. You just stay hydrated. I've gotten dehydrated one year and I do not ever want to do that again. I drink a bottle of Pedialyte at night and I drink one during the day.
Speaker 1:Yep, and if you're not disciplined in your habits, with your health and yourself and prioritizing whether it be your mental health, your emotional health, your physical health, it's going to, it's going to catch up to you really quickly. And you see tons of guys who aren't taking care of themselves and they, they, they, they become like what was me victims and while, like, I have empathy for these people, if you're not taking care of yourself, you're not displaying discipline in every area of life, like you're setting yourself up for failure.
Speaker 1:So like Clay says you don't want to be in the a hundred degree heat. Everybody works here. Everybody knows the hot summers that we have. The humidity kills you.
Speaker 2:If you want to be successful in these businesses, you got to put yourself first and prioritize yourself. Yeah make sure you're working out, walking a mile. Whatever you need to do, I walk a mile every day at work. We do, I think, on average. My average steps on my iphone are like 15 000 a day.
Speaker 1:So yeah, like that's. We're like 15 to 20 000, depending on how many times I got to walk around in a circle to go behind my guys Biggest thing as long as you're in state, just make sure you stay hydrated.
Speaker 2:It's a very easy thing to do. It's worth the $50 a week. Go to Dollar General, wherever your local pharmacy, your dollar store, whatever Get your drinks, make sure that you stay hydrated and have a cold drink nearby. Don't be drinking the warm drinks that are in the truck. It's going to make it worse.
Speaker 1:No doubt. So we're, yeah, we're, we're at our like 20 minute mark here. So I know it being Easter, we got families and stuff and we're disciplined and we're having our episode, but we were respectful of Easter and respectful of each other's time, so we're going to probably cut this thing a little shorter than normal. Any closing, any closing statements. You got here, clay.
Speaker 2:No man, I'm just excited we got May coming up. We're going to close out April. We're going to have a huge April. We're up from last year, so we're just going to keep growing this thing as always. I know you're growing your thing as always. Hope everybody listening has a great week. Make sure you keep turning us on. Listen, go back and listen to our previous episodes. If you just came across this, go back and start from the beginning. Learn about our journey, learn about where we came from, learn about the things that we've done to grow our business and I promise you you'll be successful. Be disciplined and listen to the wash bros.
Speaker 1:Yep, and make sure to join our Facebook pages the wash, the wash bros. We have our main page, but we also have the Wash Bros group within that page where we got some free resources. I got my Amazon book here that you probably see. If you've ever searched pressure washing book on Amazon, we got over 300 reviews on it. It's free in the section on our Facebook page. So there's also an audio book form if you guys are interested in that. But it's a good kind of.
Speaker 1:I broke it down into like the 22 steps I think are important, from going from zero to 100K a year. So we'll probably be working on another book to that with more equipment, focus, more team building, kind of how to go from, if that book is going from your like zero to six figures, how to go from like 100K to 500K a year, and kind of how, like a continuation of like okay, you started, now it's your business, now, how do you carry that business into scaling and then getting more off the truck? So with with our group, we got a lot of fun stuff in the works, um, and, like clay said, we're hammering it out and trying to kill this spring and grow. So we hope that we can help other people as they listen on and and provide them with resources and inspiration that can carry them forward to hit their goals as well, but that's all I got.
Speaker 2:Anything else? No, just make sure you follow. Like Matt already said, you can follow our personal pages as well. Clay Smith on Facebook. Matt Jackson well, matthew Jackson on Facebook. And then our business pages. You can check out our marketing, maybe get some ideas from us. C3 Watch Pros LLC on Facebook our business pages. You can check out our marketing, maybe get some ideas from us. C3 Watch Pros LLC on Facebook our business page. And then Matt's business page is MattTheDrywayGuy.
Speaker 1:Yep, and feel free to model stuff. You see, that's kind of how it all works. You put your spin on things. So if you have questions, you don't even know where to start. Follow our Facebook pages, see what we're doing and maybe emulate a little bit and then put your own spin on it. But that's everything. We hope everybody has a great week and we'll see you on the next one.
Speaker 2:See ya.
