S3: E12: Residential Pays The Bills While Commercial Builds Capital

Big commercial pressure washing jobs can look like the fastest way to “level up” until you’re floating payroll, burning diesel, and waiting weeks to get paid. We’re Matt Jackson and Clay Smith, the Wash Bros, and we get real about what’s working for us right now in peak spring season, what’s not, and how we decide between residential pressure washing and commercial pressure washing when the schedule is packed.

We break down why residential is still the bread and butter: same-day cash flow, stronger loyalty, repeat business you can farm, and a smoother production rhythm when you’re doing multiple jobs per truck. Then we contrast that with the commercial reality: three-bid situations, price-first decisions, extra insurance requirements, city licensing, strict deadlines, and net-30 to net-90 payment terms that can wreck your cash flow if you don’t have reserves. We share what it looks like on the ground with post-construction cleanup work and why “big checks” often come with big delays and bigger operating costs.

From there, we zoom out into the business side: marketing costs rising on Google Ads and Facebook Ads, why knowing your numbers matters more than collecting new gear, and how SOPs, hiring, and simplified tools like a downstream injector help you build an operation that doesn’t depend on your shoulders and a wand. If you’re trying to scale a pressure washing company, this is the mindset shift from technician to owner.

Subscribe for more practical pressure washing business advice, share this with a contractor friend, and leave a review so more operators can find it. What’s the hardest part of balancing residential and commercial work in your market?

Transcript

Spring Peak Season Game Plan

SPEAKER_00 0:33

What's up guys? It's Matt Jackson and Clay Smith, and we're the Wash Bros. Thanks for tuning in. This is going to be Sunday, April 12th, and uh we're in the peak of our our kind of like startup to the busy season here. So uh we figured we would talk about like what's working for us, what we got going on, uh some residential, some commercial, uh, give you guys an update of of how we're doing here, and uh that way we can give you like okay, yeah, everybody wants to say let's do commercial work, or everybody wants to be all residential. And we'll we'll give you the pros and cons of what we're actively dealing with right now, what's working, what's not working, and what we would recommend to you guys if you're new or if you're at a different phase of business. So this will be episode 12 of season three, and I'll have Clay click Clay kick this one off.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Yeah, I'll go ahead and click it all for us.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Click it off.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Nah, but anyways, um, yeah, so I know we've talked about it briefly here and there, commercial work, residential work, but it's spring season, right? So what are we doing to make the most of our time? Is it worth it to put all your residential aside for your commercial work? Is it, you know, you got to be very careful on how you do things.

Residential As Bread And Butter

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Number one, residential. Um, I always say it's my bread and butter, that's what pays the bills. And you've if you guys have been following us, I always say that commercial builds the capital in your business. So if you are setting aside all your residential because you just landed a say, we'll just say a $8,000 job, you know, good money, especially for somebody just starting out that's a big ticket that can really move the needle uh with your revenue, it could really put some capital, could really put some money in the bank account. But if you're taking that eight thousand dollars, there's a lot, there's a there's the right way of doing things in business, first and foremost. If you're sliding everything that you had scheduled on that residential schedule to the side to get to this commercial job quicker, that's probably not very smart because you're gonna have some guys that are gonna say, Well, uh, we'll just find somebody else that can go ahead and get to us quicker, for one. And for two, you're probably gonna lose that customer. The coolest thing about residential is it's it can be a residual. You know, if it's a first-time customer, you go out, you do a great job, they like you. Uh, you made a you made a good relationship with them, you got a good review. And not only that, is you have their information in your system to where you can farm that customer. You can call them back next year, you can call them back two years from now, or whenever it's time for them to clean their house again. You have that customer versus a

Commercial Bids Payment And Insurance

SPEAKER_01 3:06

commercial. In my experience, commercials not very loyal. They're gonna get three bids every time, and most of the time they're gonna go with a cheaper guy. It doesn't matter how reputable you are, it doesn't matter how many reviews you have, what equipment you have, how educated you look, or if you show up to the job and try to bribe them uh with whatever, you know. Um, at the end of the day, they don't really care. They're gonna get three bids and they're probably gonna go with a cheaper guy. That's just my experience. It's a race to the bottom, and you know, but they're good jobs, they're good capital builders, they're good uh lump sum checks versus you going out three, three jobs a day, uh, like we do. Me and Matt, we do three or four jobs a day per truck, and we're able to knock those out. But the coolest thing about residential is you get paid the same day, commercial, not so much. Sometimes you're waiting 30, 60, 90 days, right? Not only that, sometimes they require the extra uh insurance. You know, I carry a uh million-dollar GL policy. I've had instances to where I've had to get uh uh an acceptance made just so I can work. I'm like, look, a two million dollar uh GL policy is almost unheard of in our business compared to what we make. It's just not worth it to do that ten thousand dollar job, right? So there's just so many things that outweigh, and I think that you have to be set up like me and Matt are, unless you're just not very busy, which you should be this time of year. If you're not, you need to go back and listen to the rest of our episodes. But you need to be set up with at least two or three trucks to be able to tackle these and make the best of the jobs.

How City Accounts Really Grow

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's not like okay, not not swaying anybody against it, but like if you don't have the setups, you're not gonna be able to efficiently get these jobs done in a timely manner, whether it's the requirements to work outside of the working hours, uh, whether it's night jobs, whether it's like, hey, we have a deadline in three days, we need this done. Like, we we have a relationship with the city we're in, so like the city of Greer. And uh, I mean, it's one of those things like Clay was in like he could have been on the stuff too. He was like, Yeah, I don't really want to do it. I let in with relationships doing like grease traps. I was like bringing water doing a grease trap for like $275. Nobody wants to do that nonsense, but I I knew that was like the a way to buy the account, and then so I keep building, building, building. Okay, that grease trap business comes into like a monthly thing, cool. And then next thing you know, it's gonna be hey, the parks and recs department. Okay, that's great. The next thing is like, all right, the athletics fields, awesome, and then it's like city uh facility services, cool. So, like you're not just going into commercial, like, oh, I just landed a $20,000 job. Woo-hoo, look at me. Usually you got to build into it, and so like that that's a long process that took me a year plus. Have to make sure all my licenses with the city are good, have to make sure that I'm paying on the percent of revenue to that city, because obviously I can't say here's my city license, I didn't make any money through them, they know what I made. Have to have like Clay says that two million dollar umbrella, have to have workmen's comp, have to have this. Certain things you have to do just to qualify, and then you have to say, Is this going to wreck my production for the day? Like, I have trucks running today. As you can tell, I got my shirt on, I'm out on a job site back and forth. I got two trucks, two guys. We're uh working on this 7-Eleven uh post-construction cleanup. So uh we're doing everything we can. You know how it is with these types of jobs asphalt, red clay. Uh like we can get as much as we can out, but like usually you gotta take multiple passes, and the GL or the GC, excuse me, is like all right, well, I just need it done now. Like, we're at that the point now where he's got like to sign off from corporate to like turn over, turn over the cleaning. And uh, like I was like, all right, well, here's our day rate, we're gonna do it until we're done. And so that's that's where we're at with that. But again, we're not gonna get paid probably for 20 days. So I'm having to pay out of pocket how many days this week my employees were working on that project, and then two guys working on a Sunday, I give them a little bit more of a premium if they want to work on a weekend, and uh I'm not gonna get paid on that job for probably 20 days.

Cash Reserves Fuel And Payroll Reality

SPEAKER_00 7:14

So if you don't have cash reserves, like Clay says, if you don't have residential cash flow helping you pay your bills, you're gonna be out of pocket like a thousand dollars on a job like this. And we got diesel trucks, we have hot water diesel, we have um big machines. So, like just going to the gas station, you're burning four or five hundred dollars every day, not not factoring your bleach, not factoring this, not factoring that. So with commercial, it's great because it's moving the needle as Klay says, but you gotta build up the cash reserves, you gotta build up the cash flow with residential, and then you almost have to have a secondary truck where you can focus on this and that too. Because like Clay and I joke, like I looked at my PL, and everybody thinks, oh, it's so great. It's like, yeah, I like my PL from January till till like end of March is like negative thirty thousand dollars. Like, if you don't have the money to be able to absorb the ebbs and flows of the season, fund your team, and in improve this, improve that, like you're gonna take a hit. It's like it takes like twenty thousand dollars just to be able to like afford businesses like this a month, and then yeah, once once you're at that point of like, hey, sixty thousand dollars a month, you're making good money, you're making profit. You say after at the end of the day, you're making $150,000 profit in the business. But if you don't have money set aside for that first quarter of the year, if you don't do Christmas lights, if you don't do other things, you don't have that stable work, you're gonna be in the hole. So, like the cash flow, the money management, this is a much different level than I'm out here pressure washing a driveway for 99 bucks and look at me, I put $99 in my pocket and I can go buy a fancy toy one day. That's that's a different game. And and I was even joking with Clay is like how expensive it's gotten with Google ads, with Facebook ads, with how saturated the market is. Like, it is pretty crazy. Like, you have to commit and go full into this in order to be successful, and like nothing against you guys if you're doing it part-time, but just understand the realities of what you're gonna be in. So many guys are selling rigs, so many guys are trying to compete. It's because this game costs money, and more times than not, like people don't understand their numbers and they don't understand how much it costs them to do to work and do jobs.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Yeah, you definitely have to be on top of your numbers, just like you were

Saving For Winter And Offseason

SPEAKER_01 9:28

talking about. The uh the winner this past winter was probably the roughest winter I'd been in, and it really sucks. So just make sure that you're saving. You know, I know a lot of people, especially the first year, you're making a lot more money than your regular job, but put that money back, right? So even if you wanted to give yourself a little bit of pay raise and then whatever extra you have, throw it back, throw it in a shoebox, just side unseen, forget about it. Because I promise you, you're gonna need it come winter time when you can't work, especially you northern guys. I know that you get less time of washing than we do. You guys have to find other things to do, like maybe snow plowing, uh, Christmas lights, as he was talking about. And uh Christmas lights is just not something that I've ever wanted to get into. I've tried to do it on my own house, and I said, screw this, I'm not gonna do it. If I don't like doing it on my own house, I definitely ain't gonna want to do it on somebody else's. So that's the main reason we don't do Christmas lights. I don't do gutter cleaning because I don't want any employees on ladders. Uh, any roof cleaning I do, we I do it personally. I don't allow any of my employees on any ladders, don't want anybody getting hurt just because we're cleaning a roof, right? So been on a lot of them. I can clean them, I can get them done efficiently and safely. So um, anyway, back to what we was talking about commercial residential. We are high volume, um, specifically just because we have to be, right? We have to aggressively market, and that's because we don't do anything in the offseason. We have to kill it for seven or eight months, or we're not gonna make it through the next year. That's just the bottom line, and we know that. We know that in the back of our head. One bad month in the spring and the peak season can definitely mess us up, can definitely uh put us out of commission. You know, we're only one bad bad month away if you don't have the cash reserve, right? Um, that was one of the cool things. I think the pros to being a one-man operation and uh not having many bills, not having much overhead is you can put a lot more money in your pocket sometimes. But the reward with having two or three, four or five trucks, however many you want to have, is you can make a lot more money if it's done uh efficiently. Um, and that's kind of like what we're talking about between the residential and commercial. What are we going towards? So, specifically, if you have that extra truck sitting around, you can put one guy on residential and you can put one guy on uh commercial, or you can put two trucks on residential and you can put one truck on commercial if that job comes afloat. Um, I think that in my business this year, the next couple years, I'm gonna be running off doing trying to do something else along with my pressure washing business, and I can have my truck sitting afloat, and I can have two guys running another truck, right? So uh that's just something you know, we grow, we grow as people, we grow as businesses. Uh you keep doing the same thing consistently, you're gonna grow. But you got to do the same thing consistently, you know, the right way. Don't do it the go in the ass backwards direction.

Trucks Goals And Real Freedom

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Yeah, exactly. And and and and again, like just because if you're like for reference, like I got two guys, and like there's never a shortage of guys that want to work for you. If you have a good brand, if you're fun, if you're a good boss, and you're not like micromanaging and being a dickhead. I give my guys autonomy, they know what to do. I'm not breathing down their necks, they get the tips, they get good pay, and like it's it's a good environment to work in. So there will never be a shortage of somebody who doesn't want to work for you. Think about if you're working in a job right now yourself and the job sucks, you maybe make what like 50,000, 60,000, something like that a year. Uh like you can make that brush washing for somebody if they build a business, and like every like my guys, I know I pay them more money than they're used to making in their other jobs, or if they're like, hey, I I do like Christmas lights or I do this other thing. They're they're in seasonal work as well. They understand hey, I have this weekly target I need to hit. Perfect. Let's let's reverse engineer that, let's make it work for you, make it work for me. So, like, we're building the system up. The business has the repeat customers, we have the SOPs, we have the ways of doing things, pretty much, customer reputation. We got the good Google reviews. Like, you spend so much time building your business up, and then you will get to a point if you're doing everything yourself where you get injured. I had a health issue a couple years ago, it would have destroyed me, took me out. Or you break an arm, you break a leg. You see this happen all the time. Somebody falls off a roof to get hurt, or you have kids, you have a family, and your priorities change. To Klay's point, like you grow, you seek higher, you you you grow in life, you seek higher things, you want to do more things. Don't uh like build yourself into a job, which a lot of times people can do. And if you guys picked up our Wash Bros Blueprint, that book is about uh like how to build the system that Clay and I talk about all the time, like how to put the systems in place, how to build the trucks, how to understand the business more so than just I'm out here pressure washing. We have that no pressure uh pressure washing book. It's that zero to 100,000 guide. So it's one of those things, if you just are starting from scratch and you want to say, How can I make a little bit of money on the side to pay down debt? How can I buy something I want? How can I have a little bit more money for my kids? That's a great way of doing it. But once you do this for a few years, like Clay and I both been in this game like five years plus, it's like, what is the next goal? And we're not thinking in terms of like the next six months, the next busy season, the next year. We're thinking in terms of like, what's what about the next five years? What about the next 10 years? Like, how am I growing forward and like really moving the needle? And like you do so by building an asset. And by building a pressure washing business, that's a great asset. It's a service-based business. There's always a demand and need for it. You're gonna instead of trying to compete with people as a job, like most of these people you're gonna compete with are like, I'm a hustler, I do it on the weekends, I'm posting in a Facebook group. Hey, give me work, I want I want to make my thousand dollars today. That's a job. Build something that's more of an asset where you can put employees in place, like Clay's talking about, and he can focus on bigger and better things while still running that thing and having that asset that's generating him money. And it's a cool game. You gotta you gotta kind of shift, and that's the whole premise of the Wash Bros. Where we're not just trying to figure out how to make a thousand dollars a day, we're not trying to figure out how to pressure wash somebody's driveway, we're not trying to figure out how to do a roof wash. We've all done cool stuff. Like we I've got guys doing commercial work now, and I look at those numbers if I factor this Sunday into the revenue for last last week, and and and Friday through we took Saturday off, but like between all of our trucks, we'll do like 17 grand in this like week stretch. Like, that's not exciting, that's just keeping everything going, keeping people moving, and then like understanding the cash flow of the business, understanding paying everything out. So, like we've built a system, and that's that's where you start evolving past just a pressure washer, evolving past a technician, evolving past somebody who's just like bickering and arguing on a Facebook group. And that's that's the leveling up that's required to really separate yourself and be able to say, Hey, I've been running a business for 10 or 15 or 20 years. I have an asset that makes me money, whether I want to like pretty much hire people, put them into place, and make less money in that, but it's making me money where I can focus on bigger and better things, or I can say, Hey, I'm doing a podcast right now and my guys are banging out 1500 bucks and it's a Sunday and they're happy and I'm happy and we're all making money.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Yeah, it's definitely a give or take. It's all about what your goals are, not what our goals are, not what whoever you else you see on the internet's goals are. It's about, I guess, how much freedom you want. But if you want that freedom, you got to know it comes with headache, right? You're gonna have a guy call you with a busted hose, you're gonna have a guy call you about an O-ring and he doesn't know how to change it, and you're trying to explain it to him over the phone via FaceTime. You're gonna have a guy that uh, I don't know, knocks a bird's nest out of the gutter and the customer's pissed about it, and you didn't you really didn't know there was birds either, right? So that freedom comes along with headache. And uh I just know that from experience. I know Matt knows that from experience. And sometimes when you're trying to get that freedom, it's not really freedom. You're still tied to all of it, you're still um liable for all of it, responsible for all of it. And you're you're really the only one that has all the answers. You can't let them call your receptionist or your wife or whoever just to get away from it. You're never going to be able to get away from it. Um, but it's better than going out there holding a wand and burning your shoulders up because I know I'm 30 something years old and uh my shoulders already killing me, and that's kind of why I'm trying to sockle off the truck. Like it doesn't bother me to go work and uh do a couple of houses uh because I'm still young, but you need to be thinking about the future, just like he was talking about, like Matt was just talking about, because uh you're not gonna be able to move as fast as you are now, especially with our high volume. I know that a lot of guys do not do the volume we do. Um, I mean, we're knocking out sometimes seven, eight, nine houses a day during peak season, um, you know, depending on what the employee can do, what you can do. I know that I can knock out five pretty little jobs or whatever, but uh it's just it's all about your process.

Training Hiring And Employee Proof Work

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Make sure you get the process down. Make sure if you are in the in the growing stage that you are training your guy right, you want to you want to try to clone yourself if possible. Uh, I have found it that the guys that don't have experience in pressure washing are the best guys to hire. I know it sounds stupid, but the but the reason being is you can make them whatever you want them to be. If they don't have bad habits, you know, there's not there's there's nothing that you have to erase out of their brains to not do. Right um, because different people are taught to pressure wash differently. Um, and I see that a lot, especially with new guys. Um, I hear a lot of horror stories of customer calling, and they're scared to hire me because the last guy burned their plants up. Well, we've never had any issues with that, so it's like, okay, and that's just the process that where they were using, they were taught to by these gurus online, um, spray them with a 12 volt. If I sprayed with a 12 volt, I'd have to, I'd probably have to charge about five times as much as I did, and I'm still gonna get the same outcome with a clean house.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Yeah, no matter if I'm gonna use a 12 volt, a lot to all the fancy ARs. It's like we use ARs all the time for the TPO roofs, for big commercial projects, for roofs, but it's a tool, it's not, it's not the one way to do everything. And like Clay was saying, you want to simplify everything so it's employee-proof. You you can control the output of bleach with a downstream injector. It's not sexy, it's 30 bucks for a downstream injector, it'll make you plenty of money. People try to get, oh, like let me let me get into it's a technician mind, and they like brainwash you. Like, it's like I love Grant Cardone, it's like sell or be sold. You're being sold by believing all this nonsense. So, like what we do, we simplify it, and we're like, okay, cool, like the downstream injector, we can do all the house, we can do 90% of our business with a downstream injector. We don't need to be all like, look at me, Mr. Scientist over here, burning plants, messing up hardyboard paint, oxidizing copper gutters, doing stuff that's gonna damage stuff. Like, we we simplify it, we make it employee proof, and then we can send them off because at the end of the day, this job's pretty simple if you just strip it down to what's necessary and allow somebody else to empower, be empowered and and go through with it. Like, I got my main guy, he uh wears my my t-shirts, my work shirts at the gym. So people are like, Oh, I see your shirts at the gym. And it's like, hey, he drives my truck home if need be. Like he's part of the team, and like it's about empowering other people, like building your little army within your business, and then that's how you go out and take on the world, take on the market, and you're not doing it by being a dick or an asshole, you're doing it by like collaborating with people, whether it's like Clay and I with this, or helping each other on commercial work, or like throwing ideas off of each other, you're doing that internally with your team, and then you're making yourself a dangerous force where, like, if you want to step away, you want to do podcast stuff, you want to do whatever Clay wants to do, you want to do whatever my future plans are, you have the option to step away. Not everything is a trade-off in the sense of like your physical time. You may make an obligation trade-off of like, okay, well, I'm not gonna make the same money on this job, but I'm gonna empower two other guys, they're gonna have fun, they have uh friends and family that are gonna use me again. Like, it adds up. You're you'll make more money by including more people into your into your business, into your life, into your journey. So that's that's like the two cents I'd add on to what Klay's talking about.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Oh, yeah,

Stop Chasing Gear Track Numbers

SPEAKER_01 21:16

definitely. I've always said that business is the most important part about this business in the pressure washing industry because if you're getting caught up in equipment, hoses, downstream, remote downstream injectors, guns, whatever. I I see a lot of guys I talk to in the pressure washing industry. That's all that they want to talk about. They want to talk about, oh, I got this, I got this tank, I got this surface cleaner. Like that doesn't really matter. How many customers do you have? How many houses are you washing, and how much money are you bringing in? You know, those are the things that I like to talk about. I'm past the stage where I want to talk about equipment, surface cleaners, guns, whatever. It's not really cool to me because at the end of the day, all that matters is how much money you're making.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Correct. And then, like It's simple. Like we're doing this big 7-Eleven cleanup. We got to do all the clay removal of the curbs, all the uh asphalt. And I'm I'm looking over here like, man, if I just had a uh Club Cadet riding mower with uh rinse bar and 34 gallons a minute, I'd already been done by now. But then on the other side of the coin, I said, like, I'm running out of water at eight gallon a minute machines. I don't want to tap into a fire hydrant. How many times am I going to use this? And then I know what I charge for this job, and I'm like, okay, well, if I'm doing these every day, it might make sense to buy this equipment, but it doesn't make sense for us. And like Klay's point, like, we're making more money doing basic $400 house washes 800 times uh a year for as many years as we've been doing this, or $25,000 TPR roof washes here and there, or $3,000 jobs to clean up like a stadium in a in a in in our school, that it doesn't make sense for me to purchase like this massive rig completely dedicated to trying to be more efficient with pressure washing a parking lot. So it's the flexibility of what we do and what we have, it blends out better than trying to be like, look at me with this obscure tool that's only going to work for this one use case that like isn't as flexible as everything else. Because at the end of the day, business is about flexibility.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Absolutely. And like I said earlier, everybody's got different goals, everybody has different dreams. If you want to go out and make a hundred thousand dollar a year, that's okay. We're just here to help you grow. If you want to get bigger, if you want to uh need the tools to do whatever you want to do, right? Uh, we're just sharing our experiences, our personal experiences, our personal opinions on things that have made us successful. You know, we don't do uh 30 jobs a week for nothing. So um I think this has been a pretty good podcast, especially uh talking about the commercial, talking about the residential.

Closing Advice Resources And Contacts

SPEAKER_01 23:43

It's very important this time of year because of the peak season. Um, you got to know when to say no, you got to know when that job makes sense. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me uh on my on Clay Smith uh Facebook page. I have C3Watch Bros as my business page. You can reach out to Matt Jackson, Matthew Jackson on his Facebook page, uh Matt the Driveway guy, and we have our watch pros page as well. Um, but we appreciate everybody listening, and I'll let Matt close this out.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a great time of year. Uh the pollen hit us a little bit earlier, so we're like full full steam head. I I notice like and then if you guys are like, oh, like all this stuff is like what's going on, like everything's changing, like Facebook ads, Google ads, everything's always shifting. And it's like every year we do this, it's all it all everything works out, it all finishes out how it should be. So like you never know when you even get a call from some general contractor, and they give you a ton of work, they feed you, it works out perfectly. So, like if you guys feel in like down in the dumps, or you're like, oh man, like what we're talking about is like intimidating, or like I'll never get to that level. Like, it just takes time. We're just reflecting on what works for us, what we face, like our current like week-to-week problems. So, like, you may not be on our level, you may be past our level, but at the end of the day, it's like the transparency that we share with you guys helps everybody grow. So, like, there's definitely tidbits of information you can gain from this. If you want more info, like Clay says, follow us personally, message us. And uh, we've got like the school page. I know it's super hectic for everybody, but you can check us out there. Go to our Facebook page, we got links for everything. If you guys like reading or listening to audiobooks, we got the two books. Uh, no pressure pressure washing on Amazon, as well as the pr uh the Wash Rose Blueprint. So lots of resources for everybody. Keep plugging away. Springs here, make your money, and uh let us know in the comments how you guys are doing, and we're happy to help out.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

We'll see you guys next week. See you guys.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Let me let me find my mouse so I can hit the uh outro.