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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 27: Scaling Your Pressure Washing Business: From Residential to Commercial
Ever wondered how the pros handle the seasonal dip in residential pressure washing? Matt Jackson and Clay Smith, known as the Wash Bros, reveal their game-changing approach to commercial pressure washing that's keeping their business thriving as residential leads slow down.
The duo shares a refreshingly honest perspective on pricing commercial jobs that contradicts conventional wisdom. Forget square footage calculations—they're focused on what their time is worth and how to land jobs that generate significant revenue in compressed timeframes. "I have lost many, many jobs trying to price by the square foot," Matt confesses, explaining how their aggressive pricing strategy recently secured a $7,500 two-day project. Clay echoes this success, having just completed a $10,000 job in less than three nights—roughly $400 per hour of work.
What makes their approach particularly powerful is their use of multiple trucks and crews to maximize efficiency. This capacity allows them to underbid competitors while still maintaining healthy profit margins. They view commercial relationships not as one-off opportunities but as partnerships that can generate recurring revenue—transforming a single successful job into a $20,000 annual contract through regular maintenance cleaning.
The Wash Bros offer practical advice for finding commercial opportunities, from researching property management portfolios to leveraging LinkedIn for connecting with decision-makers. They emphasize how residential work often leads to commercial opportunities when satisfied homeowners recommend their services to employers. As Clay succinctly puts it: "Residential pays the bills, commercial builds the capital."
Ready to transform your pressure washing business with commercial work? This episode delivers the veteran insights you need to price confidently, build lasting client relationships, and create sustainable growth as the seasons change. Subscribe now and turn this fall into your most profitable season yet!
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What's up, guys? It's Matt Jackson and Clay Smith and we are the Wash Bros. We are coming to you or at least I'm coming to you live from a commercial job, which is something relevant and what we're probably going to talk about on this episode. But thanks for tuning in. It's Sunday, august 10th. It seems like kids are back in school and our season is slowly getting back into the fall regulation of like the normal stuff, but we want to kick off episode 27, talk about where we're at now commercial work and what our plans are for the fall. So you want to kick this thing off, clay.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's been a great year. It was a great busy season. We definitely took advantage of our numbers. A lot of different ebb and flow this year compared to last year. We're definitely ahead of our numbers. However, it's been more of a grind to get work. I don't really understand that. I know Matt has been more of a grind than last year and then I'm starting to feel it, considering we only started scaling in May. So pretty cool year, pretty cool commercial projects. As you see Matt's on site, he's knocking one out now. Yeah, I mean it's been a great year.
Speaker 2:Commercial jobs how are we landing our jobs? What do you need to know going into commercial jobs? How are we learning our jobs? What do you need to know going into commercial jobs? How are we scheduling our jobs, planning for these jobs, because it's not just a residential job. There are many things that you need to go over when scheduling the job. You need to go over your numbers, your labor. I mean, as far as your labor, you need to know when to schedule it. So if it's a per se like matt, he's working on a sunday because it's a very busy complex during the week. So you got to figure all that out. Know how to communicate with these people and know how to be professional.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And you also have to know your costs and stuff like this. People all the time they're like, oh, what should I quote for this, what should I quote for that? Well, how would I know if I don't know what your costs are? I got two guys running two trucks for me and then I'm out here and it's a Sunday. So it's one of those deals you got to understand. All right, how fast can I get the job done? What is it gonna take? Is it gonna take just bleach or is it gonna take acid? You guys can see back here. I got some efflorescence treatment that I have to schedule and do coming next week, just because I don't have any of that with me. So you got to figure out like what needs to be clean, how can I clean it, and then break that down into like how can I be as cost effective as possible? Do I want to establish a relationship with people such as in this situation and go in kind of aggressive and again, that's kind of been our mantra all year long as we've grown our commercial side of things and honestly I think you gotta be aggressive. Everybody's pressure washing, everybody's into stuff.
Speaker 1:Now we got two trucks. We're pricing this building. We got two buildings right next to each other. Super, I mean, it's big, simple stuff sidewalks, make sure we're rinsing all the dirt off the asphalt and then soft washing these two warehouse buildings. So, two days, $7,500500 ticket. It's a lot of work, but we didn't price that based upon square footage. We're pricing it based upon like, what are, what the market value is, what's our time worth and how bad do we want the job? So I know Clay just did a dealership and, uh, he has kind of a similar mindset of that too. And again, don't don't these new guys. They get caught up in square footage. Or they get caught up in square footage or they get caught up in how to price things. Hey, if you're an owner operator with one truck and one rig, you're limited to what you can do. But when you got multiple setups like clay and I both do, we can be aggressive and we can make money at the end of the day, it all boils down to what your time's worth.
Speaker 2:You don't want to do the square footage stuff. I have lost many, many, many and many jobs trying to price by the square foot. It's the wrong way. I don't want to say it's the wrong way of doing things. You want to use it as a baseline. But at the end of the day, it all boils down to what your times were.
Speaker 2:When you go to a job interview, you have that like as a regular, you know if you're going into a regular job, you have that mindset of okay, I want to be paid X amount of money per hour. It's the same thing that that boils down to your business. How much does your business need to make per hour? So go, sit down, figure out what your time's worth per hour as a business, with residential, with commercial and go and basically that's how. That's how we do things. It's. It's very simple. There's no way of uh, uh, I know a lot of guys they do. Okay, I want to be 25 cents a square foot for red clay removal. I want to be 17 cents a square foot for soft washing. Just stop over complicating it exactly.
Speaker 1:A lot of times, people over complicate things because they don't know what they're doing and it seems as if they have like a definitive answer for something. If they're like like, oh, this is my heart and truth, this is the science that I came to it, that's just feeding your ego, that's not understanding. Like what's your closing rate? How many jobs are you booking? How much capacity do you have? We talk a lot about capacity. Like how many trucks do you have? We have two trucks right now working and then me, so there's three people. Because I got soft wash setups on my truck. I'm using a 12 volt to hit some of these dark spots while my guys are both renting the parking lot. So we have three guys working on three different pieces of equipment banging out this project. And my employees I have here are my college kids in the summer so I can bake it in affordable. They make money, I make money. We're all winning here.
Speaker 1:Here, and it's simple. We're not sitting here and saying, oh, I'm going to quote this building at 12 cents a square, because I didn't quote this thing anywhere close to 12 cents a square. I was able to quote this thing probably close to eight cents a square, but the sheer volume and the proximity of everything to it allowed me to get the job and then bang out $7,500 in two days. Now, if I was sickler and said, oh no, I know what my time's worth, my time's worth 15 cents a square, we would never even gotten this job, we wouldn't get any properties of theirs in the future and we wouldn't have made that 7,500 bucks for this weekend. So you see guys online they get all this high tech equipment, they get the high gallon machines or they're just running multiple trucks like Clay and I and we're able to come in and get these jobs and stay busy, especially when residential season is taking a dip.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know about everybody else who's listening, but definitely residential has slowed down tremendously. I know I spend a pretty penny in our market. I soak up a lot of our market just in the money that I spend on local search engines. But the commercial thing when you do have an opportunity, you need to make the most of it, not only because you want to land a job but because you're spending that money and trying to get these jobs right. So the commercial leads are sometimes a little more expensive and they are very rare. So you only get them every so often, or at least that's with me. I don't get as many commercial leads as I do residential leads. So when I get them I want to make the most of them. And, like Matt says, you can use multiple trucks and get the jobs done a lot quicker. Like we just knocked out 10 grand in three nights two and a half nights, really. Like we just knocked out 10 grand in three nights two and a half nights, really. So a lot of people would have been probably 20 to $25,000 on that job that I just did.
Speaker 2:Will I get some hate because I just told you that? Probably. But who's not going to be happy with making 10 grand. In two and a half nights of work. I think I totaled up 18 hours of hard work is what we had in it. So you do the math on that, I think it comes down to around $400 an hour, which who's not going to be happy with making $400 an hour. So you can hate on that all you want, but if you want to win these jobs, you want to get these jobs. That's the key to it. I know that on a job like Matt's home I probably could have priced it around that, starting out with just a four gallon a minute, and I would have been there all week and my costs were a lot lower back then. So I would have made great money even at that number exactly right.
Speaker 1:And the biggest thing is just kind of looking at a situation like we do a local college, we, we, we go in kind of affordable, do a great job, and that relationship pretty much turned into going from making I don't know like one job say, if I was trying to take advantage of the guy, say I make seven grand off of one but it's going to turn into a relationship where we kind of do like a monthly reoccurring cleaning or like a maintenance clean and it's going to be like a $20,000 a year contract pretty much, because we just show up every so often and we do like a segmented area on their property. And that's kind of the model that I'm looking to do. And when I get in into relationships with people like this, my objective is to I don't know just grow that way. Hey look, I'm affordable, we do volume, we have the capacity, we have the trucks. Let's partner here.
Speaker 1:And that's the mindset shift I think that's important with. I think that that mindset shift is important when it comes to a commercial side as opposed to residential. Like Clay and I have done so many jobs, we've probably done like 4,000 or 5,000 jobs each other like individually. We're trying to get out of that. We're trying to move the needle and by doing a week's worth of productivity for a truck on one job on Saturday and Sunday, and then the ability to go back to Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday and bang out a regular week, there, you're making a ton of money. Essentially, you're picking up a week of productivity in your normal day-to-day 100%.
Speaker 2:You've got to look at the bigger picture, not the little. I can get rich off of one job type person. Me and Matt do a lot of volume. As he said, we probably serve 4,000 or 5,000 customers, but we have also served a lot of the same customers. Me and him are tossing back and forth and I'm sure we've tossed them back and forth with a couple other people in our area.
Speaker 2:Nobody is going to be loyal in your market. No matter how good that you send your emails out, no matter how good you send your text blasts, whatever your postcards, no matter how good you farm your customer, you're not going to be able to keep all of them. Unfortunately, that's just how it goes. That's just the way it works. But if you can keep consistently doing the same things over and over and over and do the things that you're supposed to do, you will continuously grow your business and you'll be able to pick up bigger jobs. Just in time, being in the game with our branding and I know it's the same for Matt we have gotten a lot of opportunities for bigger jobs and some some of the bigger jobs we just I don't have any interest in doing, I won't even quote them, just because it's not worth my time.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and that's another. Understand your business model too. You see guys online, the owner operator guy. They have a huge setups with like 36 gallons a minute, they hook up to hydrants and they're chasing humongous jobs all day long. Understand if you're going after the same jobs that those guys go after, you have to price yourself extremely thin just because that's how you got to compete. You got to compete with guys like that and the same logic of us having multiple trucks like you want to compete with people and what your strengths are. You don't want to say, oh, I can do everything, I'm a jack of all trades, because that guy's probably turning down a lot of residential work. That guy's focusing more on how can I clean with a lot of volume, how can I clean with all gallons a minute? He's not hooking up to somebody in a in a subdivision off of normal water pressure and then saying, oh yeah, I'll clean your house in 25 minutes. So like, figure out how you're set up and how you're wanting to run your business.
Speaker 1:Commercial is great, but there's also net terms with this stuff. You can say, oh, that's a $10,000 job, but do they pay same day, do they pay in a week, or are they paying you in a month. So you got to understand that, like your business may not be at a level where you can allow that to happen, it works with us because we have residential that pays the bills and residential to Clay's point we're talking about like marketing for commercial. A lot of times commercial comes from doing somebody's house residentially and they see you in the community, they see you with the volume of residential or, like Clay and I both have that voted best in the upstate trophy, that came from residential, that doesn't come from commercial. So it's one of those things where, hey, if 5,000 homeowners can use you and think you're, you're great, you're going to be able to get some commercial jobs. And then you can either decide, hey, do I go all in on this? Do I kind of create more of a division where I go in on this, like, say, I have a crew on the weekends that rocks and rolls, so I'm not messing up my regular nine to five schedule, or am I just trying to go completely into the commercial space and partner with builders and partner with property management companies and try to chase higher tickets like that? So the most important thing is just understanding, like we say, understanding your numbers, understanding your business and what you can do.
Speaker 1:Not everybody has the privilege to say I'm going to buy a $70,000 skid set up and I'm going to go chase these massive jobs across the country. That's great if you can go for it, but if you guys are trying to model people and it's not congruent with where you are or what you're good at, there's just different steps and levels to go. So I think, biggest thing, look in the mirror, figure out what you want. Are you wanting to be that residential guy? Do you want to do that? But you also have to know the downsides of just residential the, the swings of the ups and downs. That hurts us just like it hurts you guys. So these big commercial jobs help us stay afloat. If we can make ten thousand dollars, we can have a slower week and still be ahead on the week than if we were just completely in residential.
Speaker 2:Well, not only that. I've always kind of said that residential pays the bills and commercial builds the capital. So all that commercial work that I normally get, we're always putting it aside as much as we can anyway, or we're buying new equipment with it or investing it in new marketing. We're always using that money to build the business pretty much, and then obviously in the slower months that helps pay the bills. But residential pays the bills. Commercial builds capital in the business and helps the business grow. And to Matt's point, he's always he was talking about the residential and how many we've done. Those people also work somewhere. So there's a good chance that those people if they're they hear that their place of business ever needs anybody to wash their business nine times out of ten, their supervisor, their boss, whoever their owner, is going to say, hey, do you guys know a good pressure washer? And if somebody on their team can recommend a good pressure washer and if you probably clean their building or their house or whatever, they're probably going to recommend you.
Speaker 1:Yeah absolutely right. I know I quoted a guy who's running point on this job, who's like um, a broker in charge, so it's a commercial property management company. So I've quoted this guy. He's like oh, I see you're advertising all the time, like, and then I've done another building for them and he didn't know. So once they make a connection they're like oh, of course this is a no-brainer and then you can clean other buildings for them because the people that own this own that southern culture building that we did off of cherrydale not charity, I guess, yeah, off of cherrydale, or something pleasantberg like years and years ago. So, like, I made the connection and they're like hey, we actually cleaned your other building in your portfolio and it's cool.
Speaker 1:You can look on these people's websites, like the property management companies, and you can say, and a lot of times, like, if you pull into a big sub or a big commercial park, you'll be able to tell like there's a sign that says like managed by this company. You can find out who owns these companies or who manages these properties and then what you can do is reach out to them and then usually their website shows a portfolio of all their other properties. So you can say I like that property. I noticed they have four other properties in town. This is a worthwhile person to pursue.
Speaker 1:You can use something like LinkedIn and try to figure out if the company has people's names associated with positions, like somebody over procurement or somebody who's like a broker, and just work your way in that way so you don't have to just wait until they come to you. There's plenty of ways that you can go to them. But like also understand like hey, if they got all these other properties, be like hey, we're interested in like making a partnership with you. I don't want to just clean one building and then you call clay the next time. I want to make sure that we can get as much as we can and work together.
Speaker 2:So yeah, then you build those accounts and then you have 10 of them at three grand a month.
Speaker 1:You're doing three thousand dollars worth of work, like we always talk about matt, then uh, that's 30 grand a month, just off of commercial work exactly, and then you can essentially build out a skid or a truck, and then you can have a truck that focuses on serving those clients as a paramount to your residential ones, and then residential, like we always say, pays the bills and you don't have to be like one or the other.
Speaker 1:You can simply add on another truck and scale. As long as your revenue is in place, you can build out another truck. So that's what we'll do. I mean, in the slower season we'll run one truck, but we're back hammering away uh, two trucks year round, up until probably that slow dip we have in december and january and um, but again, the beauty of these commercial projects is we can pull two trucks and I can call all my help and then we can put people on the books for the weekend and then, and then we can make money and even like, uh, I was talking to my, my, uh, college guys the kids who help out in the summer and they were saying how, hey look, if you can land these jobs on a weekend and we're just down in columbia we're more than welcome to like drive up and make some money on a weekend. So it's one of those games.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like hey, hey, if you can give me 500 bucks to work for you in the weekend, I'll I'll drive up columbia as a college kid make 500 bucks that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean, who wants to work on weekends? So as long as you pay them good, take care of them and feed them they'll.
Speaker 1:They'll do whatever you want them to yeah, or like places like this. There's a pizza place here and the guys like gave them pizza and all that so they just walk out.
Speaker 2:They're like hey, thanks for cleaning our building, here's pizza oh yeah that's awesome, yeah they always take care of you if you take care of them exactly but. But yeah, I don't know what we're looking like on time. Matt, I know you're kind of in a rush. Um, I know we wanted to get on here and talk about a little bit of commercial work and how our season's going. Yeah, we're out at that 20-minute mark.
Speaker 1:We're at that 20-minute mark so I got guys on the other side. We're fighting to rinse dirt. Everybody knows it's like the sidewalk's the easy part. Make sure, when you're quoting sidewalks, that you factor in the amount of time it's going to take you to rinse it all down the asphalt nobody thinks about that.
Speaker 1:I had my fair share of it this past week yep, you're like, oh yeah, that's not that bad, and then you realize it's going to take five hours to push all the dirt yeah, you're pushing all the dirt that's been sitting there for years before that, before you ever clean the sidewalls too exactly and just when.
Speaker 1:And then and then again, like we say, we don't quote on square footage, because if I just looked at the square foot and said I'll quote on the square footage of the hero, I would have completely missed the time it would have taken to do all this stuff. And that's that veteran advice you don't know until you know.
Speaker 2:Yep, until you do it for you.
Speaker 1:Or like curbs and stuff like that. You don't know until you know.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right, but appreciate everybody listening today. Make, that's right, but appreciate everybody listening today. Make sure you go follow my personal page, clay Smith. You can follow my TikTok, the Pressure Wash Guru. You can find a bunch of cool videos, a bunch of cool things you can buy for pressure washing on there. Follow Matt Jackson Matthew Jackson on Facebook this is his personal profile, matt the driveway guy, his business page and join the Wash Bros group. Follow the Wash Bros podcast page on Facebook and that's pretty much all I got.
Speaker 1:Yep sounds great. Thanks for tuning in, guys, and I hope everybody has a great beginning of summer, uh, school, I guess beginning of school season and uh and get prepared for the fall and if you guys can get into commercial work, now's the time. So see you guys.
