S3:E3: Part Timers Vs Full Time? Are You Making The Right Decision?

Thinking about turning your pressure washing side gig into your primary income but worried about losing benefits, stability, or time with family? We dig into the real-world trade-offs with two different journeys—one cold-turkey jump from the car business during the slow season and one gradual exit from a cushy corporate role. Both roads lead to the same destination: a focused, profitable business that serves customers fast, builds brand equity, and frees you from the illusion of security. We get specific about the numbers and the mindset. You’ll hear how weekend earnings can hide a ceiling, why weekday availability drives growth, and how to build a runway that removes panic from the slow months. We talk cash reserves (six to ten months), slow season strategy (think mid-November to mid-February), and the core skill that separates owners from employees: resourcefulness. Expect blunt truths about workload, the myth of instant freedom, and the steps that actually compound—reviews, referrals, response speed, and simple packages that make upsells easy. If you’re stuck between the comfort of benefits and the pull of ownership, this conversation lays out a clear plan. Replicate perks with smart financial tools, price for profit, and decide your lane—stay lean with premium pricing or scale to multiple rigs once demand proves it. We also share where to grab deeper help: our books for zero-to-six-figures foundations and post-truck growth, plus a community with resources, Q&A, and real accountability so you’re not building alone. Ready to turn weekend wins into a real asset? Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook, visit washbrospodcast.com for free resources and to connect, and share a screenshot while you listen—tag us for a chance at a free book. If this helped, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what’s the one fear keeping you from going full time?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

What's up, guys? It's Matt Jackson and Clay Smith, and we are the Watchbrosh. Thanks for tuning in this Sunday, January 18th. We're going to talk about this episode, episode three, season three, of part-time versus full time. And if you are in this industry for an extended amount of time, you'll realize there's a lot of people that do this part-time. And it seems like not so many people do it full-time, but it's it's very possible. And Clay and I are going to talk about the benefits of both and why we suggest that you guys, if you're committed to this thing part-time, you should do it full-time. So you want to kick this thing off, Clay?

Why Pressure Washing Is A Popular Side Gig[_NEWLINE_]

Two Paths: Cold Turkey Vs Gradual Leap[_NEWLINE_]

SPEAKER_01 1:08

As always, we appreciate all of our listeners, appreciate everybody that listened to us each and every week that we're able to put one of these episodes out. Obviously, me and Matt do this just to do it. We don't do it because we get paid big bucks. So we enjoy helping you guys, enjoy uh hearing the feedback that you guys have. We enjoy helping everybody. Uh, appreciate everybody who's got one of our books um and reached out to us for questions. So, like Matt said, uh, we're gonna be talking about part-time versus full-time press washing. Um, it's very press washing is a very popular type industry just because uh I don't know, everybody's talking about it, everybody thinks you can get rich quick off of it. Uh, you can make a lot of money doing it. Um, and there's a lot of people that are stuck doing this with a regular job. They're they're working their regular job and they're hitting a couple houses when they get off of work on their way home to make a little extra money to make ends meet. It's great side money, um, great something great to do as a hobby. Um, but you also have your full-time, you know, you got your people stuck between going part-time and full-time. They they're kind of scared to take the risk to go full-time. Um, Matt's kind of one of those guys that started out part-time, but he wasn't he wasn't part-time for long. There's a lot of guys that do part-time for a very long time. And I'm one of those guys that um I just threw I I quit my regular job and I started brush washing. It was something that I just quit cold turkey and I started and learned into something new right off the right off the rip. It's not something that I did part-time. So you're gonna be able to listen in this episode. You're gonna be listening to a couple of my takes that may be a little different than Matt's. Um, but I think it's something important that we need to cover, especially going into spring, because I feel like there's a lot of guys out there that are still stuck part-time that may be scared to take the leap of faith, that are scared to make the jump into full-time. And maybe in this episode, we can help help cover everything so that you can see what may be the best decision for you.

Corporate Perks Versus Entrepreneur Reality[_NEWLINE_]

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Exactly right. And to Klay's point, we both kind of have different uh origin stories and and upbringings with how we got into fresh washing. Again, if you guys are new and don't know, Clay started in the car business and then he jumped shipped completely into this full-time, like in the middle of uh the slow season. So that was like high risk, and it was like make or break for him, and he was able to make it and grow as opposed to me who started, I had more of the corporate job, like the cushy benefit, yada yada, 40-hour week stuff. And I was doing this because I wasn't making as much money as I wanted to. Clay was making more money than I was, so I needed something to supplement that income. So if you guys are similar to my situation, um, you think, oh, I got the benefits, I got the W-2 job, I got the I got the uh 401k and all that stuff, but I'm just not making that much money doing this. Instead of sitting around in corporate America waiting 10 years to get the promotion to get those accounts if you're in sales, I chose to uh kind of start pressure washing, do my own thing. And I quickly realized that, like, hey, like to Clay's point, you do this on the side, you can book a Saturday, you can do three or four jobs a Saturday, make a thousand bucks, make twelve hundred bucks, however you price it out, and you can make a lot of money. So I was making like two thousand dollars a weekend part-time, and then I was making like sixty thousand dollars a year in my W-2 job. So I quickly realized that I either had to commit fully to pressure washing full-time if I wanted to grow, lean into marketing, lean into doing what I enjoyed doing, and um kind of being able to fulfill all the demand that I had in just like a very early phase of this, that I had to like understand, oh, what am I walking away from? And it's it can be scary, uh, but it took me probably a year or so just to get my full bearings under me. And after like I pretty much started doing this, um, started like say the fall of 2018 with my like free setup, like four-gallon minute machine, maybe did like a thousand bucks. And then that spring got committed, went hardcore into it, got the five-gallon machine, got the trailer set up. I think I did like fifty thousand dollars in revenue. But again, I had to only do this on Saturdays and Sundays. So, due to my uh work schedule, due to my uh like personal schedule, I I wasn't able to run deep into the year. So it was one of those things that I had to commit. I said, Hey, in order for me to grow, I'm going to have to decide full time do I commit to pressure washing or do I pretty much not do this anymore? And I decided in 2020 to go full-time into this. And there's no perfect time, honestly. You could say, Oh, in 2020 it was a much better time, it's before everybody jumped into this. Like, but there's no perfect time to do this. There's always gonna be what-ifs, there's always gonna be something holding you back. And in my situation, I just had to like rip off a band-aid, not as aggressively as Clay did when he first started, but it was an important move, and when you bet on yourself, usually you take care of yourself. And that's kind of my two cents having gone through that path of starting out part-time, having like a decent, whatever, socially credible job, and then um starting pressure washing. Because it's kind of a weird thing when you're like, oh, I'm going from a white-collar space that I went to college for, and I'm surrounded by MBA people, and I'm surrounded by people that are like making money. Why am I gonna walk away to do pressure washing? And it can feel like it's beneath you if you have a good job. If you're like, oh, I'm making a hundred thousand dollars a year, I'm gonna get promoted, I got a 401k, I got all this, I got that. But there's way more that you guys don't know if you haven't walked the walk that Clay and I have and gone full-time into a business. So I'll let Clay chime in because like we both have perspectives here, and um Clay's path was a little different, but we've pretty much ended up at the same end path.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

It's just we we basically have the we both have the same business model at the end of the day. We both operate pretty much the same way. There are a couple of things that are different in between us, but as I've said time and time again, I've said it on this podcast, I've said it to Matt in conversations, and I've said it to other people. Me and Matt could literally switch places and we we would just run our businesses the same way. Like I could be Matt the driveway guy, he could be the owner of C3 WatchPros, and we literally run our businesses the same way, same business model, same, same everything. There's nothing hidden about what we guys what we teach you guys every day. So um Matt had a little different path. My path was, like I said, a little different. We uh I was in the car business. I was as high as you can go on the total pulse, and I wasn't gonna do this for 20 more years. I was just tired of it. I didn't have benefits, I didn't have nothing to stand on. But anyway, if I go into work tomorrow, I don't know if I'm gonna sell a car, right? I was in the car business. I'm like, it's the same thing. I just gotta go out and sell pressure washing. I gotta figure out pressure washing, I gotta figure out how to get pressure washing jobs. So uh we stopped in October and had like five grand saved up, and I took that five grand and I ran with it and I built what I had today. So um from October to the following spring, we didn't uh we kind of struggle. We we had to we had to eat. We had to we had to figure it out. And I work best under pressure. Matt knows that. I mean, everybody that knows me knows that. So that's just my sales background. That's just cutthroat, you know, that type of you gotta go out and get it. If you don't go out and get it, you're gonna sink, sink or swim, right? So anyway, the difference, the whole thing about this episode uh is the difference in the part-time and full-time. Like I said, there's still guys out there that are trying to figure out why, why, why, what can I do to go full time? Why are we scared? You know, why are we still working our regular job? Um, and like Matt brought up, a lot of the stuff has to do with the benefits. A lot of people are scared to leave the 401k, they're scared to leave the the health insurance, they're scared to leave whatever, right? Um, the good news is uh you can do all that on your own. You know, that's that's what a job is telling you. They're brainwashing you that in the corporate world, they're saying that they offer all these things, but you can go out and you can get each and every one of those things on your own. You can do all those things on your own. You don't need anybody to help you with that. You don't have to work in a corporate America world, you don't have to work for anybody to have any of those things. You can literally do each and every one of those things on your own. You can set up your retirement on your own, you can get your medical stuff on your own, you can do whatever you want, you know, and a lot of it just boils down to laziness. Um, and I get that, but as far as being an entrepreneur, um, you have to go and you gotta find solutions to everyday problems, and um, that's just something that you gotta get comfortable with. If you're not comfortable with leaving that job because of the benefits and you're scared to go get them on your own, then you're probably not fit out to be an entrepreneur.

Resourcefulness And Real Job Security[_NEWLINE_]

SPEAKER_00 10:02

I would say that's a hundred percent truth. And to one point, um it's like, hey, if like the resourcefulness of this, like the if you're full-time, if you're like an entrepreneur, you you have to be resourceful. There's no person to escalate to, there's no manager, there's no owner of the company that you report to, there's nothing that you can fall back on besides yourself. And if you're part-time, I don't know if it's a thing that you're trying to uh you're like afraid of, like, oh wait, like I I I don't have to grow this too big because like that's big and scary and that's unknown. And like like Clay's point, what do I do about health insurance? What do I do about 401k? What do I do about um like liability insurance? What do I do about all this stuff? Like what happens when it slows down? I was like, what happens in corporate America when your job's replaced by AI? Like what happens then? What happens when the company has a bad quarter and you get laid off? Like what happens when you haven't gotten a raise in two years because of the issue they're having with profitability? Well, like there's a lot of what-ifs with doing this full time, what if you make it and what if you grow it a lot? What if you're able to control your day, control your life, and build a family for yourself and build everybody up? There's a lot more what-ifs in in business in corporate, they give you this perception of safety, but in reality, it's just you're confined and controlled. They could let you go tomorrow. But when you're in your own business, you could have a bad running with a customer, they could cuss you out, they could give you bad Google reviews. You still own that business. Tomorrow's another day, go out and get another customer.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Absolutely. I mean, it's basically the same way. I mean, either way it's gonna be the same thing, right? Um, and we're not gonna say that just because you work for yourself, you're gonna have a lot of freedom because that is not the case. I'm just gonna go ahead and say that you can make your own schedule, you can pick and choose when you want to do certain things, but I work 24-7. I'm always doing quotes, I'm always answering the phone. And then in my opinion, my path to success, you always gotta keep yourself busy and you always gotta be, no matter if you do turn it off, it's still in your mind 24-7.

The Truth About Freedom And Workload[_NEWLINE_]

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Exactly right, right. And it's very important that you understand that. So you um it's it's like, hey, if I but but again, it's like you and this is my experience in corporate America. Uh, most people are checked out, most people, especially before like COVID, when you had to go to an office, like you see people like dillying around the office, talking with people BSing around like on their phone. Once everybody moved home, it seemed like it got even worse. So all these people are working like 20% of the time uh being employed because that's just how useless you guys are at at jobs. And a lot of these corporate America jobs, you can do it in like five hours a week. So you're either gonna be like a hustler and go after it and try to work multiple jobs or trying to to grow and scale in your organization, or you're just kind of gonna be obsolete. I know I feel I felt this when I was um finishing my term in the corporate game where COVID hit, I was at home. Work was slow because of the the COVID thing. We're in meetings all day long. I could BS through my meetings, nobody would know. I was available on my phone, I could be out pressure washing, and I I realized when I was pressure washing like the entire day, I'd come home from like 10 o'clock to midnight, I'd be able to like catch up on my work emails. I asked myself, like, what am I doing here? And if you guys are anything like us, you you gotta feel like there's there just should be a meaning to what we do. Like, if I'm gonna show up and work, I have pride in myself pride for what I do, so I'm not gonna just like bull crap through life. And I couldn't be in that in-between. I couldn't be like, oh, every weekend I'm pressure washing, or in the summertime every night I'm pressure washing, oh I make so much extra money. I promise you, if you do the math, like you'd make more money if you dedicated yourself fully to pressure washing, and then you can build a business around it. I find it really hard to try to build a business around something if you're working for somebody else. And and then like, yeah, like Clay says, you're in the beginning it's gonna be like 24-7 all-encompassing, and then you can build out a team, you can install people, and then you're building your freedom. You can't do that if you're part-time. If you're part-time, you're pretty much gonna work yourself into full-time in two different jobs. And people think that's a flex. And again, it could be a flex, but then you ruin your relationships, hard to be around uh like your kids or your family, and then the end of the day you're like, if I'm working this hard, what do I have to show for it? Like if I can't enjoy what I actually work for.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

A hundred percent. A lot of people I think they they let the finance thing get to them. Um, I would suggest, I never did the part-time thing, so I don't really know. Um, but I would suggest if you are doing the part-time thing, don't spend any of the part, don't spend any of your money pressure washing. Put it all aside. Put up put six months, six to ten months worth of money up. If if that's what you're worried about, this is just an idea that I'm throwing out there. Put six or ten, put all that money up, put it all aside and then go full-time. Um, and and do what you need to do. Feed that business, do it not as stressful as I did it. I had five grand saved up, that's all I had, and I had to figure out how to make it, right? Uh, but don't go out and be living high on the hog every day just because you can if you're doing part-time and you have your pressure washing business. You know, a lot of people have pressure washing businesses, and then I'd go to digging in our area and find out that they're all part-time, right? So um just be a smart, make make the right financial decisions, do the right things. The best thing that I can tell you is if you do want to make this a full-time thing, put all your money, put all your eggs in one basket, keep keep feeding the business, and and that's what keeps going. Because now, like me and Matt, we're at a point now where we could turn all of our ads off, we could delete all of our social media, we could delete the YouTube and just leave Google without the ads or whatnot. And I mean, it's so easy. We could drum up ten thousand dollars a month of work and and not even have to advertise. I mean, that's coming to the point where we're at. So, and that's the beauty of it. That's how hard we've worked, that's how hard we market ourselves, that's how hard we put our brand out, that's how many customers we've acquired that we can farm every each and every day, each and every month, each and every year. It's just the beauty of business and growing a business and putting in the time and the effort and learning these new things like what we talk about every day, because we didn't just go out and uh this is doomed in our head. I mean, we learn from other people, we learn from our own mistakes, and we learn from talking amongst each other.

Math Of Part-Time Vs Full-Time[_NEWLINE_]

SPEAKER_00 16:44

A hundred percent. And one thing to note is like if you really like pressure washing and you guys are successful at pressure washing and you have the nice skids, you have the nice truck, that's great. But eventually, like you might want to lean a little bit harder into this and say, hey, how can how can I make this work instead of me work at a job? But some guys I get it, you work in places there's a lot of benefits, and I like that's cool, but there's so much more out there than just being tied to a job and then having a nice truck that you uh pay for via like what you make on the weekends. Like the the beauty of building a business is you're building an asset, and by doing so, that's worth more than yourself. You're not just trading your time more hours a day. And I find this a lot of times, like you see, like to Clay's point, everybody in our area seems to be part-time. You'll you'll see on a Facebook page there's like 50 people saying I I pressure wash or 100 people saying I have a pressure washing business. And then customers like, cool, I'm gonna I want I want my house done like Tuesday around two o'clock in the afternoon. Sorry, I only can do it on Fridays because I work four tens, or I only can do it on the weekends, or I'm six months out. A lot of times when people are saying, Oh, I'm this much backed up, it's because they're only working two days a week. And it's not a real business. Nothing wrong with that. But if you're putting yourself out there year over year and you're like seeing the fruits of your labor, you should commit full time to it. Because like Clay said, instead of stacking money into like buying a boat or buying something to look all pretty and play the game of hustler and entrepreneur and business bath, if you put that into like a safety net that you had or a runway, that way you could go full time into this and say, okay, I need$30,000 for the slow season. Okay, I got plenty of money to survive the slow season. I'm ready to hit the the full season. I'm ready to hit the 10-month season that we have here in South Carolina, make all the money and have that buffer for the next year. But then you don't have to worry about that. The problem we see is people are financing everything, trying to live in the fast lane, not reinvesting in their business, not saving money, and then not putting stuff aside. So at year five or year six, you're able to really benefit from what you build.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Yeah, and I know these might sound like big numbers to a lot of people, but once you get to a certain point, like me or Matt, you got to figure out which which which road you're gonna go. Um are you gonna stay those the low operator guy? Are you gonna build multiple trucks, or are you gonna, you know, you got to figure out at when you get to that point which way you want to go, which road you want to take, because overhead can get a little pricey. And that's why Matt's saying 30, 40 grand, sometimes even the 50 grand, if you want to keep living high on the hog and a good life, that's what you need for the mid-November to mid-February type thing. Because my according to my data, after mid-February, you kick off and it's your your balls to the walls to about October, end of October. So um I've I hope that this has helped helped you guys a little bit uh hearing both of our perspectives on this. I think me and Matt are kind of on the same page with it. We just had different paths to it. Um, and I encourage any of you guys to get out of your comfort zone at some point this week or some point this spring or some point this year. And uh, because that's what it's going to take. That's every day being an entrepreneur, that's every day uh The life of me. I know Matt gets uncomfortable at times too. You gotta get comfortable being uncomfortable if you want to do this, if you want to do this for a living, if you want to grow and be successful.

Cash Reserves And Slow Season Strategy[_NEWLINE_]

SPEAKER_00 20:11

100%. And you will feel like imposter syndrome, which is where you feel like you're not good enough, or you feel like you're a fraud, or like the name imposter, and you will feel like you're gonna run out of money and go bankrupt and die. And this cold season and this this bad batch of weather, or your Google's not working, or this or that, you will feel that a lot. And that's perfectly normal because usually if you just keep your head down, you come out of that storm. And I've experienced a lot of storms, Klay's experienced a lot of storms. Every time we get pushed through them, they become less of an issue and it gets easier and easier. And then you start stacking money, and then those storms are no longer storms. Like Clay says, You're going into the slow season, anticipate having like$30,000 or$40,000 set aside. Because if your business is not making the money it's making, you got payments uh of like insurance, you got cost of business, you got employees if you still got employees, and then you got Christmas time. So like your family's like, oh, you worked so hard during the year. Let's have Christmas, let's do this fun stuff. You want to have money aside so you're not just cash flow like week to week. And it's hard to do that when you're only able to then make like$2,000 a weekend doing this part-time. Like you got great money in the spring and summer, but then you're back to being broke with your W-2 salary in the winter in the slow season. So it's it's really hard to get ahead.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

So absolutely. Financial game, I think, is one of the biggest keys um to learning, um, especially with cash flow, trying to figure out how much I can spend here, how much I can spend on marketing. Can I afford another truck? Can I afford this$20,000 skid? Can I, you know, that's the biggest thing. I would definitely get your numbers in check and know what you're know what you're looking at per between your personal and your business and uh just kind of go from there and see what you can do. But definitely recommend putting all your money aside if you're a part-timer, um, just to uh make it a little easier when you do make that jump for sure. Um I'm not saying uh not to take your wife out to a fancy dinner every once in a while, or uh I'm just saying don't go out and buy those nice pretty trucks just to flash it. Don't go buy stupid crap if you're really trying to do this on a serious note. And uh I think that's pretty much all I got for this episode, Matt. Um, I do want to tell everybody to go to YouTube, follow our podcast, um, go to my personal page, uh Clay Smith, and follow me, C3WatchPros L L C. That's my business page. Um go to Matt Jackson, Matthew Jackson on Facebook and Matt the Driveway guy as well. And I'm gonna let Matt tell you about a couple more things, all the new stuff we got going on.

Building An Asset, Not Just A Hustle[_NEWLINE_]

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Yeah, exactly. And uh it's funny, I got this powerwashing coach.com here on the screen. I actually got another domain too. That's easy. Uh, in the process of transferring domains, I don't know where the power washing coach domain went, but it'll it'll come back to us, don't worry. Uh, but going you can go to the go to washbrospodcast.com, and that's gonna be our new website where pretty much has a lot of stuff. We got some free resources on there. Um, it's gonna be a a form that you can fill out if you want to like be a guest, if you want to ask us questions, and it's got links to resources in our book, and then we also have a school community. So this is something that we're really pushing in 2026. Like uh we've been doing this game for a while, and it's like, hey, let's let's push it forward, let's get tangible, let's let's actively like help other people make money and win because a lot of times we get it just in our DMs and it's hard to follow up. So we we have a school community, uh the Washbros on school. Find us on our Facebook group. So if you're on the Facebook, uh go to the Washbros podcast on Facebook. We got like 800 something members, we got a private group in there, but we really want to draw people over to the school community where it's easier to manage discussions, we've got resources and stuff like that. And Clay's point, too, we got some books, depending on whatever tier level you're at. So if you're on Amazon at all, or if you like Kindle books, or if you like audiobooks or even paperbacks, uh you can check them out. There's links on our Facebook and on that Washbros podcast website. So no pressure pressure washing. Uh, we dropped this one a few years back, kind of season one of the Washbros. I think we got like 300 something uh reviews on there, so it's a pretty established book. That's gonna be a book for the like zero to six figures. You're how to go from like starting out, what to know, pretty much to become an owner operator. Make that hundred, hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Do what we're talking about on this episode, get out of that oh um that that zone of like I'm not a business owner, I don't know anything about business, I know how to pressure wash. It's gonna kind of hone you in on what's important, 22 steps to really get ahead and get off the truck, or excuse me, not get off the truck, get on the truck, and then get out of your job. And then the one we just dropped is going to be the Washbros blueprint. It's gonna be more about Clay and I's story and the steps that we have taken and what we have learned and our lessons after doing this and getting off the truck and running businesses. So if you want to read this one, it's great, it's great insight, but it's really for those people that were on the truck making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, struggling, overwhelmed, and uh overly busy. So both of these are available on Amazon and you can get an Audible version of it, you can get Kindle version of it, or you can get the paperback or the hardcover. But to Klay's point, we're really pushing this year to go hard on uh like a school community and Facebook. So if you guys stay tuned and follow our pages, you might get a free book handout. I got about 50 books coming in this next week. So if you guys are listening, make sure to go to our Facebook page. And um, like Clay was saying, how what we should do is like just take a screenshot what listening to it in your truck with with the album and then share it on your page and tag us, and we might reach out to you and give you a free book.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Absolutely. Yeah, just uh take a picture saying enjoying enjoying the Washbros podcast, tag us in it, tag us both in it, and uh one of us will reach out and get your address, and we'll get you a book sent over to you.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Exactly. We we got to figure out like a marketing platform for this because our our goal is to grow this and help as many people out, and there's countless people, and we we hear stories all the time, and we've spoken with a lot of you guys. So we're gonna make this a lot easier to have discussions back and forth, and that way, if you want to, 2026 is gonna be your year to grow from part-time to full time.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

So absolutely, and we'll uh we'll see you in the next episode. We appreciate everybody listening. Make sure you give us a follow at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook. We'll see you there. See you guys.