S3: E14: The Growth Flywheel (Deep Dive)

Your pressure washing business can look “busy” and still feel fragile. When the calendar dips, leads get lumpy, revenue gets hard to forecast, and you start wondering where the next chunk of cash is coming from. We get real about that stress, then map out a growth flywheel designed to create predictable revenue without breaking the systems that protect your brand, your crews, and your reviews.

We walk through why we’re leaning harder into commercial pressure washing and recurring contract work, even while residential stays strong. Think property management groups, retail and strip centers, universities, and city work. The goal is fewer relationships that produce bigger, repeatable scopes instead of nonstop $300 one-offs. We also share practical ways to get in the door, including partnering with janitorial companies and other vendors who already have trust with the client and can subcontract exterior cleaning.

Capacity is a big theme here: when you add a third truck, your entire strategy changes. We talk numbers, busy-season planning, day-rate commercial jobs, and how having more production capacity lets you be aggressively priced while still protecting margin. You’ll also hear how to approach bids like a pro: move fast, have your COI and W9 ready, build a clean portfolio, use vendor portals and LinkedIn to find decision makers, and price based on your real business costs instead of guessing per square foot.

If you’re trying to scale a service business the right way, this is a clear blueprint for stacking relationships, compounding work over time, and building a brand that attracts customers to you. Subscribe for more, share this with a contractor friend, and leave a review that tells us what part of the commercial strategy you want to try first.

Transcript

Welcome And Deep Dive Format

SPEAKER_00 0:33

What's up, guys? It's Matt Jackson and Clay Smith. This will be a deep dive episode this week since uh Clay's out. So I'll be running it just as I did a couple episodes ago. Remember, I was saying I like the deep dives. This is something I want to implement where I go kind of 25, 30 minutes deep into a topic that I find really important to our growth and help you guys grow as well. So this will be airing on Sunday, April 26th. We're in the heart of busy season, and it'll be season three, episode 14. I'm gonna talk I'm gonna talk about the growth flywheel here. So we're in a period of growth again, and it seems like every few years, like whether it be every two or three years, uh, we really strive to like add 30 or 50% to our business. It's like we do a huge growth, and then it takes one year to plateau out, and then one year to get back in stability, and then that next year we're trying to go for a huge growth again. I don't know if that's the best for everybody, but that's what works for us. Helps me get my cash stabilized, helps me get um maintain that level. That way we can keep our systems in place, our Google reviews still look good. We're not breaking the system. So that's one thing that's important. As you

Growth Without Breaking The System

SPEAKER_00 1:50

grow, you don't want to break the system. You see guys all the time. They are going really hard, really fast, and then five years into business, they are out of money, they got bad reputations, nobody wants to work with them. There's more important things than just hitting a revenue target. And that's uh one thing if you're new, and you probably see in groups, guys mention this all the time like revenue really is irrelevant because it's all about your profitability, your sustainability, and what kind of legacy and impact you're leaving on your community. So let's kick this thing off. All right, so here's gonna be the growth OS, the engine, the moves, the scoreboard. Here's here is my pretty slideshow demonstration. If you guys are just listening to this on podcast, you can check it out live, or you can go to our YouTube page, you can check it out on Facebook. It's got all the boil downs and everything like that. And if you guys want more information, make sure to go to the washbrospodcast.com. We got two books there. Whether you're a brand newbie, you can get no power no pressure pressure washing, or you can get the most recent one where it's talking about scaling and growing. What do you do when you hit that sales number? What do you do when you need to get off the truck? What do you do when you have a team and you're stressed out? Instead of going through burnout, buy the book, The Washbros Blueprint. It'll probably help you out. Worst case scenario, it'll make you laugh. It'll it'll teach you that we're human too, and we make a lot of mistakes. So, my objective with this is going to be I'm trying to build a business where I don't have to wake up every week and wonder where the next chunk of revenue is coming from. The play is simple: stack recurring current commercial work until the rest of the company gets stronger. And if you guys are big into commercial, or if you're not big into commercial, as we've been shifting into commercial, it really helps us move capital, grow the business. And it's easier to close,

Recurring Commercial Work As The Engine

SPEAKER_00 3:30

in my opinion. I can close a $5,000 or $10,000 or $25,000 or a $30,000 ticket, or have a relationship that's going to pay me $1,500 a month for the whole year. It's way easier to manage a couple of relationships like that to come up with $150,000, $200,000, or more stable cash flow and predictable revenue than it is just to go down the street and try to chase every residential homeowner with a yard sign. So as you grow in business, you level up your skills, you level up your branding, you level up your insurance, you level up your skill set, you get some employees, think about getting more into commercial work. There's no hate on commercial. And if you listen to our show a few times, Clay and I will talk about like, hey, commercial is not always the answer. Correct, because a lot of times people are chasing the $99 dumpster cleanings or they're chasing these super tiny jobs where they're getting undercut by a guy who's an in-house person. That's not what we want. We're going for like property management, we're going for big government contracts, we're going for commercial work, we're going for universities, we're going for stuff like that. We're going where you have a professional buyer, the job needs to be done, and you do a fair price, and then they feed you with work. That's what we go for. So this way we can book ahead. And um, that's the big thing. Like the busy season's here for us. We we did $60,000 in April, and um, like we could fit more on the books, but with the two truck capacity, we're kind of pushing the limit there. Like uh, so uh, and then and then we're we're getting heavier into commercial. And as you guys know, like May is here. That's when the residential people, the pollen is starting to be done. That's our busy season. We're putting up like $70,000 months in May without our commercial push that we've had recently. So just looking at growth trajectories and looking at May, we already got $25,000 on the books for May. And that's pretty much just a few commercial jobs. We've got a ton of fill-in with residential that's gonna have to force us to buy a third truck. So um, within the week or so, I'm probably gonna go down to Georgia and try to get a third truck, have it more of a commercial vehicle, have a good floater in our business. We bring some college helpers in the summertime, which is great because we can really get May, June, July, a little bit of August. That big chunk of time, they can help us knock down bigger, knock down bigger projects, knock down some revenue, and move the needle forward for everything. So, one thing about residential, it's really difficult. We are six years into business full time or going into our six year business full time, it's the seasonality. So, like when the calendar dips, lead flow gets lumpier, revenue gets harder to forecast. Like, it's hard. Like, we're going into these seasons where it's it's difficult if you don't have predictive revenue. I got into some commercial opportunities last fall that really helped us. We were able to do $50,000 in November with good accounts receivable and all that stuff. So that kind of fed us through the winter time. Whereas if I was leaning purely on residential, it would have hurt. So bigger projects, bigger jobs, the capacity. If you've noticed or follow our social media, we've been shifting our branding to really position ourselves more as a commercial leader. We've we're going to have three trucks. So by the time you guys probably listen to this episode, we'll have three trucks. We've got all the tools needed. We've got, I'm trying to think, with this third truck, we'll have like 40 something gallons a minute just pressure washing, and then we got another 30 gallons a minute of soft wash machines. So we have capacity out the wazoo. Our goal is to show up, make it easy for you, and and be aggressively priced on jobs because we have capacity that the owner operator that we're going up against can't meet and uh can't match. So we can deliver high quality service at a nice price point for whoever the decision maker is while we're there for six hours. So here's the the actual strategy. I'm going more for contract work. Uh, we're going for property management groups. Uh, we've done a couple gas stations recently. I don't know if you guys have done gas stations. Start off usually doing something like a dumpster cleanup. They're easy, they're small. Um, and then we've had to do some like emergency cleanups where we charge like seven, eight hundred bucks for stuff and uh get it on the uh

Capacity Planning And The Third Truck

SPEAKER_00 7:45

recurring work. And another thing is like uh patio cleaning, concrete cleaning for restaurants. We we've got some bi-weekly cleanings, which is awesome because we partnered with some uh janitorial companies and they sell it to their customer, and uh we kind of come in as a subcontractor. So that's an angle if you want to try to get into um uh say like commercial work. Who's cleaning janitorial or like who's doing interior cleanouts? Partner with people like that, partner with window cleanings. Like they can manage that relationship with a customer and then they sub you that work, and then it's a win-win for everybody. And say instead of you having to go into all these different restaurants or stores and develop a client relationship from scratch, you have a trusted vendor already in there, and then you kind of connect with them, make it a deal for everybody, and everybody wins. And then retail and strip centers that kind of goes into uh like our property management group. We've got a few property management companies that we are working on growing a relationship with. Again, it's one of those things you go in strong, good pricing, work relationship, maybe do their house for a deal, give them a free house wash, make them feel special. And then before you know it, you got a $10,000 a year, $15,000, $20,000 a year relationship. And that is nice when it pops up, and then it's reoccurring as long as you don't mess it up. So one of those deals, we are going for high branding, all that stuff, and then like your recurring customers are really important. So, all this so far is going to be talking about like our commercial outreach. We still do residential very strong and very heavily. So, like we have the capacity for big commercial, but we're still doing like $40,000 to $50,000 a month plus in residential work and 130 jobs a month. So, like that is almost cruise control now with having 630 Google reviews, having good SEO, having a really strong brand in the area, word of mouth, repeat business, that pretty much keeps two trucks full for a good chunk of the year. My objective here is to step in and to say, how can I strategically grow a commercial truck $250,000 a year? Stack that on top of the $350,000, and uh that just gives us more space for everything. Because, like you got three trucks, you can get close to probably a million dollars in revenue uh if you do everything correctly. I'm more so am not too worried about that as much as I'm worried about freeing up space so we can aggressively grow. And uh it's it's cool. You get a couple of accounts, you get some universities, you're working with the cities, and the the strategy shifts. So you're not necessarily going for like, let me run Google ads all day, let me run Facebook ads all day, let me try to go to Facebook neighborhood groups. You're going heavier into these vendor portals, you're going into um finding information online of a decision maker, find them on LinkedIn, connect with them there. With AI, you can literally scrape lists for free, which is pretty crazy. And like it's it's pretty simple because the things that you gotta do of like to grow this stuff, like it's it's it's it's easier for me on the commercial end because I come from like the B2B the sales world, but you gotta you gotta be quick on the uh contact with these people. You gotta have all your documentations, make sure you have your COI, your W9, create a portfolio where you can send them something pretty with all of all of your uh cleaning jobs and projects, and you you almost have to l deliver it as a professional. Like if you guys in the residential space is a race to the bottom, you're dealing with a homeowner, it's a $300 job. Hard to scale those. You're always gonna have issues. We've literally run into a couple issues recently this year with Karen's. Unfortunately, they've used us a few years in a row. Unfortunately, it's not anything we really done. I've even gone back and showed up, and it and it's just like they can't be pleased. I don't know if they're just mad because they just want to be mad and they're tired of spending money, but it's just like this is nonsense. We don't want to deal with this as much as

Outreach Channels And Partner Strategies

SPEAKER_00 11:55

we can. So, like, we're shifting more towards like commercial focus, raising our residential ticket, and residential is just kind of coming in, cruise control, it keeps my crews busy, it pays the bills, it pays my employees, it keeps everybody happy. Let's see. So let's go into how I would land more commercial deals. I know it is one of those things like you gotta understand where you fit in the marketplace, understand your branding, understand your capacity, understand how to price certain things too. You can't just go in and say, I'm gonna price this the same as residential. And I talk to Klay about this all the time because I can all and I and a lot of opportunities, me being hungrier, me having a little bit more capacity with an added truck, and uh I I'm more aggressive than Klay. So, like again, if if Klay is going in with like residential heavy, he's slammed, he's busy, he doesn't want to take some of this lower ticket work, but I'm doing it because I'm building my my uh my portfolio, growing more into opportunities. And uh so like say you get a an opportunity to clean something, of course. You know, like okay, if I'd land a thousand bucks on this job, maybe maybe throw 750 because there's a relationship there. There's a property management group around here, they manage, I'd say, like, a hundred or so different locations. I honestly knew that, and they gave me a uh a bid for like an HOA pool deck. Wasn't that fun, boring, took us about three hours. I think I personally did it with like an eight-gallon machine, charged like $750, somebody else would probably be a thousand bucks. If I didn't want to get more into it, I'd probably have been a thousand bucks. And uh so got that opportunity, and then she hits me up about another opportunity like a week later. Another thousand dollars, and it just compounds out. So you you almost have to think future value of things. Is a relationship worth trying to grow? You gotta have to lead with being aggressive in pricing because it, like you said, it's usually one of three. So if somebody is reaching out to you, a lot of times they probably just need three bids, and you're not gonna come in because they probably already have a preferred vendor, but they need three bids to submit to their board. So you can work your way in by being aggressive. And also know that like the relationships follow you around. I had another commercial property we did for a different group, a huge management group in our area, and uh it was a townhome community we did in 2023. Decent sized project, like $6,000, townhomes, basic softwashing stuff. Of course, uh come back again and then they're like, hey, look, uh, we want to redo the bid. And I pretty much redid it, and it just marked up maybe like four or five hundred bucks. Something basic, something simple. Boom, collected that. And you can't look at it like an individual ticket. You you got to view this more as stacking. So, like that third truck I was talking about bringing in. I've got a university that we do all the time, Presbyterian at Clinton. So we have like five or six thousand dollars for that. We have six thousand dollars for this townhome community, and then we have uh these like one-off uh bigger ticket, day rate, $2,500 commercial jobs, which we try to like book a day rate for a commercial work of like $2,500. And it's one of it's one of those things that you got to think in compounding. If you're solo on the truck, you're almost gonna think of it individually because you're doing all the work and it's not worth your time. But when I have two trucks doing residential that are making me almost $3,000 a day, and then one truck can run on a weekend, you're doing $15,000 a week off the bat. So you're almost doing $60,000 a month off of that residential routes if you're optimized efficiently. You're growing, you're adding that other third truck in. I can be a little bit more aggressive on some of these uh some of these opportunities to grow my commercial work because hey, if two trucks is bringing me to like $55,000, $60,000 uh without killing my guys or without doing a lot of night stuff, I'm able to comfortably bring on another $15,000 a month with that third truck. And I don't finance stuff, so I buy it kind of a cash truck,

Pricing Aggressively For Future Value

SPEAKER_00 16:10

it gets me by. And and then then you're stacking how can I do $75,000? How can I corrow this to like $100,000 a month off of these setups? So, like the ability of having the flexibility with three vehicles and three trucks and guys that know how to clean is I can I can pull them around everywhere and they know what to do. So I I'm I'm using that as my selling point going up against competition because uh one thing I've noticed is it's like the objective I want to have. It's like, hey, how can you have the systems of a big business, but with the personal touch of an owner operator? Everybody acts like, oh, like nobody wants to be a big business, but you can be a big business because you have teams in place, you have systems in place, and you can also deliver like an owner operator. I have guys who work with me that were owner operators. My main guy has washed 2,000-something houses. So, like, don't view it like as you grow your business, like nobody's gonna care about it like you. While that is true, you just need to hire the right guys, pay them well, and treat them right, and you will over-deliver and you'll able to be able to multiply your time out. So, as I was saying, residential is kind of taking care of itself. Sure, I could push a little harder, sure I could raise my prices really high there. I'll cut out a lot of work, I might grow my revenue, uh, I might grow profitability, but I I I know our market. And if I start going like six, seven hundred dollars a ticket, eight hundred dollars a ticket, I'm gonna really start dropping revenue. We don't want to do that, we want to stay moving and growing. So that's why we're being strategic and hunting commercial. So here are three things I'll look at if you're trying to grow your commercial. It's like property managers, like I was saying, shopping centers, multi-tenant, retail, you can have one point of contact. They do HOA management, they could have a hundred different locations. So if you're getting a quote request for somebody like this and you think, oh, I'm gonna charge this much money, maybe think if I charged 200 bucks less than I should charge, and my business is in a position of growth, and I'm hungry for work and I do a great job and I have great communication. And I ask her, hey, look, I'm after every time I send an invoice, what's the what's another property I can help you with? What's another property I can help you with? Let me get you, let me get let me let me be one of your three quotes. You're not doing this to like devalue yourself. You're doing this to get yourself in front of a decision maker who has the ability to really move the needle and give you tens of thousands of dollars of work. And don't put all your eggs in one basket either. You don't want to say, oh, I'm doing this for this one person. Go through and research different companies. My goal is to have like 50 to 100 decision makers that I'm doing I'm in the mix of. And that's how you gotta do it. You have to keep the conversation going, you have to talk to everybody and be active about it. Because if you're passive about it, all the eggs are in their basket. And they they have everything they can walk away. You gotta understand you're constantly negotiating back and forth with probably two or three other companies. So you have to build that portfolio up. So if they do walk away, take your business, you're not out of luck because you just lost $20,000 of business. So that's kind of my my two cents for everything. Yeah, you just need to be active, proactive, and uh just keep killing it. And like we don't quote stuff like per square foot. That's one thing that I see people get off get on us all the time. Like, we we kind of have more of a uh uh like we understand our business costs, we understand how fast we can get the jobs done, and we quote jobs based upon how our business runs, what do we need to make per day, and we also understand the market rate. So, like if we have three trucks, we can bang out a ton of work in one day. I know I can undercut somebody and I know I can make a lot of profit. That's our game,

Systems Hiring And How We Quote

SPEAKER_00 19:55

and that's kind of how you how you do it. So, like, think about this. If if I have anything to say to you, build your setup, go after what's right for you. You don't want to be a solo operator with an eight-gallon machine and a trailer trying to compete with somebody with three trucks who's who's wanting to be aggressive. Now, but if you're in a phase of business where you have the the liberty, like I do, of having two trucks doing residential, and I'm bringing in a third truck, and that third truck is specifically hunting commercial growth. I've got my college kid in the summertime that helps me out. He makes his money, I go out and hunt. The business is running itself with the residential work. So, kind of the Washburros model, Clay and I both have it. Our business is like really heavy with residential. We both do like 800 jobs a year. That keeps us floating, that cash flows our commercial growth, that allows us to go in, be aggressive, be hungry, so we can say instead of us going through a ton of residential to make 200,000, how can we strategically network and partner with people, property management companies, cities, or uh get on some big projects and do six huge projects and make $150,000? That's my two cents and kind of the future of the growth flywheel with what I'm doing with Mount the Driveway Guy. Now, if you guys are just getting started or you're going into like a your second or third business year, you you probably don't need to be as aggressive as as this, but it just kind of gives you a different perspective of a different layer of business. We've got resources out there. Make sure to check out our Facebook page, the Wash Bros Podcast on Facebook. We're growing that group, as you can tell. We want to connect with everybody, help

Resources Community And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_00 21:40

everybody grow, share your stories. We got a school community, we're trying to get that active. And uh, you guys have bought these in total. I think we've sold like 600 books. Uh, so I've got the Washbros uh excuse this is no pressure pressure washing. This will be the first book. If you are just starting out and say you don't have any business skills or knowledge or marketing. Get this book. It'll tell you everything you need to know to make your first $150,000. This book, The Washbros Blueprint, is the one that Clay and I put out this year. It's kind of a combination of both of our stories and our growth as we've gone from this level of owner-operator to business owner. So thanks for tuning in, guys. Drop a comment. We'd love to engage with you guys. I know this, these kind of solo episodes, I feel like I'm just rambling, talking to myself, but our goal this year is big, heavy commercial growth. We're not trying to undercut the market. We're trying to grow capacity. We're trying to get efficient and we understand our numbers and what it takes for us to make money. We're going after these $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 relationships. We're not looking at an individual ticket. We want to do jobs that are kind of big jobs that are known in the community. And then we repurpose that marketing on all of our social media platforms, run ads behind them. And that's how you build your brand, build your business, and then you start attracting people to you. And that's the ultimate goal. You don't want to hustle forever. You want to build something that people come to you. And that is what I can leave you guys with. So that's it for me. I'm going to uh tune out, and uh next week you will catch me and Clay, and we'll see you on the next one.