How To Start a Window Cleaning Business in 7 Easy Steps?

It will be a huge market. Isn’t it?

As the owner of a window cleaning business, you’ll have the flexibility to manage your daily calendar, set priorities that match your objectives, and make decisions about how and when to expand your operations. While starting a business entails financial risks, many entrepreneurs believe that the potential rewards much outweigh the danger of financial loss.

So, are you ready to learn how to start a window cleaning business from scratch? Our guide walks you through step by step, ensuring that you don’t miss anything.

7 Essential Steps for How to Start a Window Cleaning Business

To start a window washing business, you need to have a clear window cleaning business plan to achieve success. So, get a pen and paper ready.

Step 1: Perform a Detailed Market Research

Before starting a new business, you need to deep dive into market research. First of all, you need to identify your target market, prepare for a business budget, look out for financial situations, and even separate your personal and business assets. Let us highlight what such metrics mean.

• Identify your target market

  In general, many window washing businesses typically serve both residential and commercial customers. So, it may be any store, office buildings, city hall, academic offices, malls, restaurants, gyms, apartment or complex buildings, or even homeowners.

  It’s a common fact that the choice of selecting the residential, commercial, or both is a matter of your own. So, it becomes mandatory for you to identify the target market during your business planning.

• Prepare a business budget

  For starting a window-washing business, you need to prepare for the budget in a well-defined way. You need to consider various equipment and window cleaning supplies, licensing requirements, liability insurance, commercial business vehicles for transportation, and even employees’ uniforms.

• Set up for financial conditions

  One of the best recommendations is to start your window washing business from home. It eventually helps you in saving costs on renting office space.

  Once you have decided to enhance your business growth, renting an office space is the best option to include as you need more employees to work. In simple words, you may need a customer service representative and even a dispatch team to operate from one location.

  Whether you start your business with a single person in your team, you need to consider the cost of them. In fact, it becomes mandatory for you to include it in your business budget.

• Separate your business and personal assets

  One of the primary things that window cleaning businesses should follow is separating the personal and business assets.

The best way is to open a business bank account and business credit card that plays a vital role in distinguishing your personal and business assets.

Step 2: Register Your Window Washing Business

The next essential step is to make your business legal. For this, you need to name your business, select a business entity, and most importantly, register as an Employer Identification Number (EIN).

A business name should be unique, catchy, and attractive as it defines your branding. In addition, it should be such that the customer comes to your company by just seeing your name.

Your business name must be recorded in the Small Business Administration. Also, it becomes mandatory for you to check the availability of the local secretary of state.

Along with a business name, having an online presence is also a must for service businesses to be on top of the competition. So, you need to check the availability of a domain name that suits them best.

To market your business and be on top of local search results, you can opt for the best sites like GoDaddy to verify the domain name’s availability.

Next, the business entity is another essential factor that you need to consider. It affects the way to file taxes, liability protection level, and even business structure.

In general, there are three most common business structures:

• Sole proprietorship

  Sole proprietorships do not have any personal liability protection, and your business never stumbles into a legal or financial dispute.

• Limited liability company (LLC)

  Either as an individual or with a partnership, you can opt for an LLC to grab some personal liability protection. When filing your sales tax, you can be taxed as a corporation or pass-through entity.

• Corporation

  It is an independent entity that provides robust liability protections and tax perks but at the cost of more paperwork, like writing bylaws and forming a board of directors. Once your business grows and has included more employees in your business, it’s time to register for an employer identification number (EIN). EIN plays an essential role in filing taxes. You can opt for applying for a business card, credit card, and other financial perspectives along with an EIN.

Step 3: Get Essential Business Licenses, Permits, and Insurance

Business licenses and permits are very much essential for starting a new cleaning business. The owners need to register for a window washing insurance policy, state business permit, window cleaning license, and many other legal formalities.

You need to directly contact your state or country to know the exact documentation requirements as per your business requirements. To start your new window washing business, no business license is required.

For starting a window cleaning business, you must have business insurance. You can easily purchase window cleaning insurance policies from various insurance companies available in the market.

If you have more employees in your window cleaning company, it is beneficial to have workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance.

If you are dealing with private and commercial customers, it becomes mandatory to have general liability insurance. However, if something unusual happens while you or your employee is on the job, you do not need to worry about the overall costs.

Step 4: Purchase Essential Window Cleaning Equipment and Supplies

Without proper and adequate equipment and supplies, it’s pretty impossible to provide window cleaning services to your potential customers. However, no matter whether you provide a cleaning solution to tiny homes or large office buildings, there is some standard equipment that you must have:

• Cloths and towels
• An extension ladder and pole
• T-bar and sleeve
• A scraper
• Basic cleaning solutions like dish soap and buckets to keep water
• Invoicing system software

These tools form the main base for the window cleaning business and enhance the customer base.

Step 5: Price Your Services

One of the most challenging tasks for window cleaning service providers is to define the prices for window cleaning services. By keeping attractive prices, there are more chances of getting new customers.

There are three basic methods that you can use to charge your customers for the window cleaning business.

• Charge per hour

  A simple technique to charge your customers for the period taken to complete the specific job.

• Charge per window pane

  A technique where an employee charges commercial buildings like high-rise window cleaning customers. It is a more efficient way to clean the windowpane in a more high-quality way than a skillful employee.

• Charge per project

  It entirely depends on the type of project your customer possesses, whether small or large. You can charge more if the customers have ample space and so on.

By adopting these standard methods, you can charge the customers for an effective window cleaning solution.

Step 6: Hire Employees for Your Business Expansion

Commonly, small businesses find it challenging to handle the work once their business grows on a large scale. It becomes mandatory to hire more employees in your service business to enhance the workload and profit margins.

For a small business, one or two employees are enough to perform the business expansion job. It is possible by keeping minimum overhead startup costs and serving more customers to a great extent.

One of the best recommendations is to select trustworthy employees and assure them to deliver high-quality services to customers.

Step 7: Include New Services To Your Business

Once your business is set up and you have enough resources to handle your business, you can make an initiative to add new innovative services.

The most challenging task is to retain more customers by including new services and boost business productivity to a great extent. Also, there are more chances of getting massive success in your business.

Provide the best cleaning services to your potential customers and gain customer satisfaction. You can start including new services like carpet cleaning, gutter cleaning, pressure washing, and window screen repair.

These are the standard steps that help small business owners start a new window washing business from scratch.

How To Promote & Market a Window Cleaning Business

You can apply some of the few marketing techniques in your business to increase your customer base and gain more money.

• Cold Calling

  Cold calling is a marketing technique that allows you to interact with your potential customers without waiting for an email response. With the help of this technique, you can quickly generate online reports. To close the sales deal, you need to take up to five follow-ups using the methodology.

• SEO

  For ranking on top of other competitors in local search results, you need a domain name and a responsive website for search engine optimization (SEO). In general, people will search for “window cleaning” in Google, and a list of service-based businesses will display. Therefore, it will be beneficial to you to find more customers for your window cleaning company.

• Social Media Marketing

  At last, you must have accounts on leading social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where you will find more customer lists. Such platforms are also responsible for marketing your business by including the social media pages directly on the company websites. By adopting such marketing strategies in your window cleaning business plan, you can efficiently enhance a customer list to a great extent. You can even design an attractive logo from a web designer and include it on your website.

Still, do you have any queries related to the window cleaning business? Don’t worry. In the next section, we have highlighted some of the frequently asked questions to clear your doubts.

Conclusion

Learning how to start a window cleaning business might feel daunting. Take one step at a time and don’t be scared to spend additional time creating your business plan.

Regardless of the state of the economy, consumers will always want their windows cleaned. As a result, a career in this sector can be extremely profitable if done correctly. The best thing is that you may get started right away with the fundamentals and gradually expand your business.

Congratulations if you’ve completed all of the steps above! You’ve developed a sound business strategy for window washing. The next important step that you need to perform is to streamline and automate your window cleaning business operations.

FieldCamp is a window cleaning scheduling software for the same, making it easy for you to make job schedules for every window cleaner of yours and even helps in generating reports more quickly.