John Wilson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.
Let's get into it.
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Hey, today on Owned and Operated, we're doing a flashback episode. So we had Johnny Squeegee God on a couple years ago at this point, back in 2021 but the episode was good and it was relevant because now we're talking about a lot of different services and we just had Aaron Harper on to talk about power washing and this felt like a great follow up.
So enjoy the flashback. It's a great episode and Johnny was a great guest.
Welcome, Johnny.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Hey, what's going on, guys? Thanks for having me.
John Wilson: Yeah, this will be fun. This will be a good time. Johnny, how about you give us a little bit of an intro into what you do here.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Sure. So I clean windows for a living, mostly residential. So I own and operate Orange Window Cleaning.
We're based in the city of Orange, in Orange County, California. Beautiful area. Started this business when I was 19. That was four years ago, 23 now. Started with my partner, Sergio, with 150. We started with a bucket, a squeegee, and my RAV4, and we've since grown that to three trucks on pace to do about 700k this year.
We'll see how it goes depending on how bad the rainy season is, but that's where we're at right now.
John Wilson: That is pretty cool. How'd you and Sergio meet?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So me and Sergio go way back, actually. We had every single class together in seventh grade, and we were the both the shortest guys in the class and had the same Hurley sweater from Costco.
So it was just like, boom, instant connection there. So we've been best friends ever since seventh grade. So graduating high school, we went our separate ways to different colleges. And reconvened late freshman year. And that's when we decided he couldn't get a job. He like interviewed McDonald's, Donald's would even hire him.
And that's not a joke. Like McDonald's would not hire him.
John Wilson: I feel like there's like that's a cool bad ass story. You guys should fully pivot to commercial and then just clean McDonald's windows.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We've actually bid some, I don't think we've got to.
John Wilson: Send them that invoice once a week and be like, I got turned down by a job.
You could pay this thousand dollar invoice.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. That'd be a great revenge story.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. It'd be pretty vindictive. That's nice. All right. So yeah, it's been run together for a while and you guys launched four years ago.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: June 17th. 28 2017.
John Wilson: That's awesome. For some reason, I thought you guys were only a year or two into this.
So four years is a pretty good.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, we've been grinding at it, but the first two years was just, we weren't taking it seriously. It was just a summer thing. We would literally only work in the summer and then go to school. And not do it at all focus on school and it's just like a beer money type of thing.
And we weren't even orange window cleaning at the time we were JNS window cleaning. So Johnny and Sergio window cleaning, and we had just a 5 fiber logo and, running out of my raft for no wrapped trucks. No, we didn't even have like the right equipment to do two story windows. Like we were hanging out of windows, squeegeeing and stuff like windows looking like crap.
Wasn't taking it serious at all.
John Wilson: When did you start taking it seriously? And maybe why?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So that 2019, we both took internships because we weren't sure we wanted to do. He searched a civil engineering degree on business. He stayed in Orange County for her summer internship. I took one out in Dallas.
It was Inside or inside outside sales. Like it was like a hybrid internship for an industrial distribution company. And so I flew out to Dallas lasted two and a half weeks, or maybe it was three before I quit. And I was like, I will never, I'll never work a job again. I drove back. I texted, sir, called Sergio.
I was like, Hey, I'm going to keep orange window cleaning going. And then he probably lasted another two weeks after that, before he quit and joined me. And we were all in just, we're making this work. And that's when we started to take it serious. And we got our first truck, but our first truck that summer and our first employee.
John Wilson: That is cool. That's funny. You guys were both doing internships. Were you in college and did you end up finishing or did you just dive straight into the business?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So Sergio just graduated in May. I'm in my last semester of college right now.
John Wilson: Oh, so you're doing this as a full time college student
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah it's my last semester. I failed classes during COVID. Zoom. And that's coincidentally when the business also started to take off. So a little tough to manage, but hey, no excuses.
John Wilson: Yeah,
Brandon: I don't even credit. They got the cojones to do what I backed out of. That's the exact situation I was in.
So you either sell it or do something, and you guys stuck it out and actually made it through it.
John Wilson: So that's awesome. Brandon's a total wimp. It's nice.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, it helps. It helps having a partner. Especially cause he's graduated, he can just do full time orange window cleaning and that takes a lot of load off of me. You also find a way to get shit done faster though in school. I feel like when you're running a business school easy mode, I can, get done a whole semester long project in like a day.
So it's not a big deal.
John Wilson: Okay. I think I want to dive in to this section of your life a lot because I think, I just think it's interesting. So I don't know if you're familiar with Brandon's backstory, but he launched a landscaping company in high school, ran it into college and then sold it when he was a junior or sophomore.
And then he ran the acquirees company for a while. And then when I was 23 or 24 or something like that, I was going to school full time at night and it was the same thing. Like you had a live, I was running the company at that point, eight employees and you had a live test subject every day.
It was really cool. Go to class, you'd learn a bunch of stuff. And then like the next morning you got to practice. Yeah, have you found the same thing? Like, have you been able to just take direct lessons from school and be like, yes we should be doing this.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Not really school. I go to a, what's called in California, you have the research based institution.
So you have the UC system and you have the Cal state system, which is the public, like cheap school, really low cost tuition. So you don't get the same quality almost of professors and types of curriculum and resources. found that the curriculum I'm learning, it's not applicable.
It's just a funnel for corporate companies, basically. So corporate companies come there and recruit when kids are seniors and they go get jobs. So it's really not meant for someone on our path, but it's just I stuck it out for so long. I'm going to finish it. I don't want to quit. Yeah, I will say the biggest thing that taught me a lot was EO.
So I almost treat that as like my MBA, Entrepreneurs Organization. And I'll give some background for anybody who doesn't know what that is. It's basically a huge organization, like master peer group, I would say. There's 17, 000 members and you have to own a business, 50 percent or more of a business that does generates over a million dollars of revenue.
They have accelerator for companies between 250, 000, 999, 000. We ended up winning the speech competition, Sergio and I, and they gave us a free accelerator membership after that summer of 2019. And so we went through the accelerator for the first year for free. And then once our renewal came up, we were actually in the threshold and had enough.
Money to renew it. And we just learned so much. They would break everything down into four categories, cash, strategy, execution, and people. And it just really opened my eyes to scaling a company, turning a startup into a scale up. And if you implement those four things, you can really scale any business.
But that taught me a shit load about business.
John Wilson: Yeah. Can we dive? I've never dove far into this specifically, is EO different than EOS?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So EOS is, it's like scaling up, right? So the guy who created scaling up, there's a student who left scaling up and dumbed it down into EOS. But those are just two, operating systems.
Whereas EO teaches both in a way. But it's more so just like a peer group to discuss like, Hey, I'm having this problem, John. I can't, I don't know how to hire. And then you would say, okay this is what worked for me. I'm not saying you should do that, but that's what worked for me type of thing.
So it's not necessarily an operating system.
John Wilson: Okay. So it's not really based off of those, but it takes a little bit of both. And, but it's the peer group, and I can get behind that. That's cool. What were the four things again? It was cash, strategy
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: People, and execution.
John Wilson: That's cool. You want to dive into each one a little bit? I'm curious, like, what you took away from them.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, so it's cool because what EO does is they have learning days every quarter. And each learning day is about one of those four different ones. So cash, they teach a lot of profit first. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar. Profit first is just in basically an accounting system that says, Hey, take your profit first and divide up your pie.
Treat your bank accounts like a pie. You have one pie for taxes, one pie for operating expenses, one for taxes, et cetera. I don't want to get too deep into it because it's a whole book on it. You can read it.
John Wilson: The author was Michael something or other. Yeah. But
the book's called Profit First. It is good for the listener.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Yeah. So it teaches a lot of that. That's cool. People, they really talk about the core values and living your core values and using your core values to make decisions and basically decide who you're going to hire, who you're going to work with, who you're going to sell to, things like that and culture.
And then you've got execution, which is not too much to talk about there. It's just. Which is more systems to help you make decisions and then put things into place and then strategy they have this whole like one pager you do where you fill out your quarterly priorities and you do quarterly themes.
For example, like our January through March quarterly theme was well oiled machine and we wanted to basically get all our systems perfected and all our technicians. Flowing smoothly with like our inventory management and so we didn't have to do, we have to deal with callbacks because January through March, you've got your really slow season and window cleaning and then gearing up into summer and spring is when it gets really busy.
So we wanted to make sure the business ran like, oiled machine. And then when you're shoving that down your employee's throats, hey, oiled machine, they can get behind it and You know, align with your goals, if that makes sense.
John Wilson: Yeah, it does. We're a part of a couple of these is the average business in this group around your size? Is there a really big spread?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, I would say so. I think the average accelerators may be 600 K solar company, but I think our group's got like this 80 percent graduation rate.
John Wilson: So they graduate to a million. Is that right? Oh, that's cool, man. That's sweet.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, it's awesome. And I think the biggest thing is surrounding yourself with people who are, driven like you are and on the same mission. That really fires me up.
John Wilson: So do you guys talk or have a Facebook group or something like that outside of just the quarterly?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So we do accountability groups. So you're in, I want to say there's maybe like 20 to 25 people in our group and it's split up into groups of three to four. And then you have a coach who is an EO member. You meet every month and you basically say, Hey, like. These are my wins for the past month. This is what I'm going through and everybody kind of experience shares.
And then the coach basically is like, Hey, this is what I've done. Like I said before, I'm never going to tell you what you should do, but she's basically, Hey, this is my experience. Do what you want with that.
John Wilson: That is really cool. I'm just glad for you that you got into that as early as you did. Our business started taking off when we joined something similar. It's industry specific. And then I think we're about to join Vistage, which is like a CEO thing for me.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, Vistage is super similar. We've had people come from Vistage, EO, and same thing, leave EO to go to Vistage. What's the industry specific one, if you don't mind me asking?
John Wilson: Ours is called SGI, but there's one called Nexstar as well, and Quality Service Roundtable, I think those are the big three.
But they cover plumbing, HVAC, and electric.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: There's also Breakthrough Academy. I don't know if you heard of that one. I was at the window cleaning convention in Atlanta a couple weeks or a few weeks ago. And there's Breakthrough Academy there. They're all home service. Same thing.
John Wilson: So like tell us more about it. And I'm just curious.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So basically, like I just explained to you, but for specifically for home service and they're really focused on like retreats. So they do a few retreats a year and it's things like five or six grand a year. But you go into the mountains with a bunch of other HVAC plumbers or I think there's some painters in there and you just have masterminds and talks and stuff like that.
John Wilson: I think that would be fun. That'd be a fun next iteration of our company. Like what comes next? And like selling some type of, even just a retreat, we almost did one this fall, but then like we started buying all these companies, but it would be cool to have like a thing, bring 30 or 40 guys out to Akron.
They can walk through our five companies. They can help us do better and give us authentic feedback, but then they can usually see how larger companies are run. And I think it'd be sweet.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: You make a killing doing that, especially at your size. There's levels to it. So you're at like, level five, you can get all those level one, two, three, four dudes in there.
John Wilson: Come on out guys. Yeah, exactly. That'd be pretty cool.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. I really like things like that because for Sergio and I. We grew up really broke and none of our family's entrepreneurs. I had no idea you could even start a business. When I graduated high school, I just found out because I was pissed off at a manager and I was like, how do I like make money on my own basically?
And then, Google just start a business. I thought you needed a degree. I thought you needed a four year degree to start a business. I was so unaware of the possibilities that there are. So that's why I love EO because it taught me a lot of things that I wouldn't normally have access to because I don't have that resource available to me because, no entrepreneurs in the family.
John Wilson: Yeah, I get that. So you guys have been going for four years, two years ago, you started taking it seriously. What those were the first year look like? How'd you guys? How do you handle that? Like, we're going to do this.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: The first year was a lot of, we didn't even do residential. I don't know if I mentioned, but we're like 90, 90 percent residential right now.
And we would just pitch storefronts all day. Me and Sergio just going out on the street and pitching little donut shops, liquor stores.
John Wilson: You started commercial.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: In window cleaning, we don't label storefronts as commercial. We label them, we just call them storefronts.
John Wilson: Oh, got it.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Because commercial buildings, you can bust them out for a thousand, 2, 000.
You're never going to get that for a storefront. You could charge 20 to 40 bucks max for a little storefront, but the good thing about it is you can build routes and so you can get some nice recurring revenue there, but yeah, we were just pitching storefronts all day, like donut shops, five bucks here, 10 there to dry cleaner for like 12 took us an hour and a half.
The first customer with the first customer we got was a donut shop and they decided that Our work was good, but not good enough to pay us in cash. So they paid us in a box of donuts. Two in the afternoon though. So they were all old. They're trying to get rid of them at that point.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's pretty terrible.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, that's all it was the first year, dude, is just really building a callous of just getting rejected. And then we were like, okay if we want to make some money, let's go knock some doors and residential started doing that a little bit. It's a little bit of success, but our sales pitch was just terrible.
We did not know how to sell.
John Wilson: What was it like? What was the sales pitch?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So for the storefronts, we would come in and I would say, Hey, I'm Johnny. This is my partner, Sergio. We're just in the area cleaning windows. Do you want to quote? And then if they said yes, then I'd look, I don't know, 10, 10.
How's that sound? And they either say yes or no, but if they said no, my go to line, then I thought it was just killer for some reason was, are you sure? You sure you don't want your windows to clean? And they just tell me, yeah, I'm sure. And then I would just, I would be silent. I didn't know what to say. So then we'd get kicked out.
John Wilson: What's the new sales pitch?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We don't do storefronts anymore. I never, we don't do door to door.
John Wilson: Okay, now I'm diving into like the sales funnel, but I want my windows.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: That's fine. Can you do that?
John Wilson: What happens next?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So you can do one of two things. The preferred method is go to our website.
We're the only company in the county right now doing completely online booking. You don't even have to talk to us. So you can go in, you can say, okay, I have either my house is a thousand square feet or I have 10 windows whatever you want to do. Say you have 10 windows that's below our minimum.
So you'd pump in 10 windows. We'd give you a price that displays three options. You have basic, deluxe, and premium. The reason for that is studies show when you have three options, they're always going to pick the middle. So the middle is inside and out track screens and sills. When I say inside and out, that's inside and out cleaning on the glass.
And so okay, two 50 inside now on all my windows, not bad. You'd click book and then you would see the schedule and the different crews that we have available for that schedule. So let's say you will, you see Jacob, Victor and Jacob, we have another Jacob and you're okay. I want Victor boom.
You'd book Victor for Monday and then it shows all the different time slots. You have three different time slots available. You say, I want between eight and 10 arrival window. Boom. You'd click that. That gets pinged into our CRM. And then notifies our technicians. Hey, I have a job for Monday. We'll be ready to go and you get a confirmation text three days before and then that job will get completed.
You'll get an on my way text when the technicians on its way. He'll take payment. He'll say, Hey, if you like the job, could you leave a review? Click finish on our CRM. They get the invoice and receipt. We get the payment. And then they get a follow up, a series of follow ups with different review links, and then they're also imported to our DRIP system where we follow up with them every three months to remind them, hey, it's been three months since your last service.
Does that make sense? I feel like I was rambling a lot, but
John Wilson: No, that all made sense to me. I'm just thinking through It's more robust than I thought it would be.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Like I said, we're the only company doing stuff like that.
John Wilson: That's pretty interesting. Okay. So the online booking is that through like jobber?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: No, we use a company called response to bid. It's like a window cleaning specific response to bid.
John Wilson: Response to bid.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. So we use response a bit and it's integrated with a couple other softwares. Our CRM is house call. So we don't use jobber. We use house call pro. Other than that's integrated with review management software called nice job.
So they're all ported together.
John Wilson: Yeah. That's awesome. I know house call pro that one's owned by home advisor, right?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: I don't think they've sold. Maybe they did, but yeah, I don't think
John Wilson: I think my point was they do a good job with integrating. I have a buddy that uses them with like a four person company and yeah, it does like really good stuff for them.
I think house call pro jobber, like those are good.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. You guys use service site and I assume,
John Wilson: Yeah, unfortunately we're a little too large to use those other platforms just because the reporting functionality normally,
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: But it makes sense.
John Wilson: Yeah. So that's pretty robust. So you can book online completely, you get a price before you come out. So you're guys just at that point, is there a chance for them to upsell when they're out?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: There is we do most for upsells over through our receptionist or admin, because when we have a packed schedule, we have three appointments. So we have three appointments in a day and the customer wants to add on a house wash when we're there.
it's a little difficult to fit that in because now we're going to be late for that next job because the house wash is going to take an extra couple hours. Yeah, so we have the technician do all the upselling over the phone if they call if they book online That's maybe something we should look at actually, but don't really upsell Functionality in the complete online booking.
John Wilson: Yeah, how far ahead do people book?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We've been booked as far as six weeks
John Wilson: Oh, really? So maybe that would be another drip campaign where like the moment they book like 24 hours later you get a If you want to add a house wash,
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: That's not a bad idea to write that down.
John Wilson: I'm digging this though.
Okay, so what is average ticket in this industry?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Depends who you ask. If you ask a bucket, Bob, probably 250 bucks.
John Wilson: Bucket. Bob .
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah.
John Wilson: That's cool. Our version of that is Chuck and a truck from Chuck A truck. Nice. Bucket, bob. It's pretty good.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. So we call them bucket of bobs. Our average ticket is 6. 50. Yeah. And that's across a mix of services. So we do a window cleaning and house washing. So pressure washing the house, getting all the dirt and stuff off the siding. So we're at 6. 50.
John Wilson: Yeah. And two or three calls a day.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: About, yeah so each truck can produce with one guy, max of 1, 000, about 100 an hour.
A two man crew can produce about 150 an hour. So they can produce about 1250 a day.
Brandon: Do you have any kind of recurring services or like, we call it memberships, but anything like that for repeat customers.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We called maintenance plans, but what we do is we just add everybody onto the maintenance plan.
And like I said, we have the receptionist calling them every three months saying, Hey, it's been three months. You want to get on the schedule. Typically people will always do every six months, maybe 10 percent of our customers are on a quarterly, but we don't have any locked in contract with them
It's so dependent on the weather. You just never know. Like you don't want to book something three months out if it's, maybe it's going to rain, and we don't have to worry about that too much in California, but you just never know.
Brandon: You did mention something about that before we started the rainy season.
How does that kind of play into all this?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. So I'm a little blessed living in California where we don't deal with it too much, but still January through March, mostly January and February, but January through March, we see about one fourth of our actual revenue. So when we're doing our projections and stuff at the beginning of the year, we always just account for a nine month, nine month revenue goal.
Brandon: Forgive my lack of geography of California, but do the wildfires and all that stuff affect you guys or does that make things more busy for you?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, if there are wildfires, like for example, last year, big fire right behind a city that we do a lot of work in. And you have all that ash falling all over the house and stuff.
And we were just super bit slammed with work, getting all that, washing all that ash off the houses and cleaning the ash off the windows. It's good for us. I mean, I don't wish any wildfires, don't get me wrong, but every time it does happen, we always see an uptick in work.
John Wilson: What happens with your staff during the down season?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: That's something we've struggled with every year. We always lose at least a few employees, but we've done unemployment, partial unemployment. And then we give priority work to guys who've been with us the longest. It's just so tough. It just feels like there's nothing we can do because, Hey, we've got 1500 customers in our system and you can call all of them, but they're going to say, Oh, wait till April, wait till May.
John Wilson: I'm impressed. I think that there was a lot more here. It's just pretty robust. Like this is cool. This is really cool. So what's the big barrier to growth then aside from the seasonality? Cause that one I can totally get behind. You lose a bunch of staff every year, but what else?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: For us, it's been trucks. The trucks are our business units.
We know if we have one truck out there, it's going to make us 20 K for the month. We have It's going to make us 40. So on and so forth, the truck can produce 20. But when we're both, trying to grow at 21, 22, 23 years old, and the bank's asking for five years, established credit with them to finance these trucks and get better rates.
It's tough to put that cash, all that cash down to start buying trucks, all that equipment starts to add up and it really messes up our cashflow.
John Wilson: So what is one, like, what does it take to bring on one truck now?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We just added our 3rd truck in, I want to say July. Yeah, July, because we had a record month in August.
July, we put down like 3, 000 for the truck at a high interest rate. I can't remember what it was, but 3, 000. And then you're looking at another, you got to buy a pressure washer, water fed poles. Each water fed pole is a 1, 000. Their tank rental, it's another 150 a month. You've got all your squeegees, belts.
Tank is what connects to a water fed pool. It's a pure water system. It's just a deionized water system to take all the minerals out of the water and make it completely pure. So when you spray the water on the window, it'll dry completely spot free. And then you've got ladders, I'm just trying to think of everything that goes on the truck right now.
It comes out to about 10K additionally. So you want to get a truck fully set up with everything you're looking at close to 15K.
John Wilson: And then the high interest rate part is the remainder of the note on that vehicle. So I think Furcon was dealing with some similar stuff in that episode.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, furcon talked about it briefly on a Spaces call.
Actually, he's like, Oh, I'm in the same boat, man. Yeah. They won't finance me.
John Wilson: We had a similar issue. We were fortunate because we were able to like become corporatized basically, but there was, we launched a new business unit last year. That had obviously no established credit history. And we had an issue all the way up until like a month ago, getting stuff for it.
And the only way we got stuff forward is because we got them to underwrite the entire portfolio, but that's a problem up and down somebody out there. Someone out there should solve that for home service companies trying to start up because I think that is a real pain.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's a billion dollar idea.
John Wilson: Yeah. Okay. So you have three trucks and you think trucks are the biggest barrier right now. So you currently have enough work that you could put another crew or two.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We could be a million dollar company right now if we could figure that out.
John Wilson: And that's four trucks.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Because our marketing and our system, our engine is just so dialed in, we can generate as much work as we want to.
John Wilson: Dive a little bit further into that. What's the marketing that goes into this.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So this is my favorite part. You're not going to expect this, but we built a company completely on the back of Yelp.
John Wilson: So I really didn't. So you're right.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So you guys are thinking like what Yelp only works in California. It's so location dependent, but for home service, businesses in California make up a majority of Yelp's revenue.
So if you look at Yelp, it's a public company. They're over doing over a billion dollars a year. And most of that is from home service advertising. I don't know why it only works in Yelp. Unaware to us, we were just translating our reputation onto Yelp every time we got done with the job. So we're just saying, Hey, can you leave us a review on Yelp?
Yelp is just what we picked. And we became the top. We're like, Number one you search up window cleaning in Orange County. We're going to show up number one or number two every single time. And then we started pumping ad dollars. And so we started messing around with the keywords and optimizing our Yelp page on the ad platform.
And we got it so down where it's like, okay, now I know if I put two grand into Yelp advertising for the month, it's going to generate us 40 grand worth of new customers. So we're getting 20 X ROI on Yelp.
John Wilson: Is that currently the only advertising platform?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: That's the only advertising we do.
John Wilson: I wonder how that, like, can you take the same thing over to HomeAdvisor and just list these other lead platforms?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We've tried them. It just doesn't. It doesn't work because you can really convey your brand on Yelp and set up your ad a certain way to where you know. But Yelp is bottom of the funnel advertising, meaning they're going to Yelp to buy.
So if you can show up there one or two and your company looks really professional, they know they're not going to get a cheap price. They're expecting a good price, not a good price, but a higher price. And so with Angie's list, it's really tough to build your reputation and HomeAdvisor.
It's really tough. So you get a lot of bargain hunters. And that's a lot of the people's misconception with Yelp is they think a lot of bargain hunters go to Yelp, that's not the case because our average ticket is consistently higher from Yelp than it is any other lead source except for referral. You can't really beat referral.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's cool. I think you said this right when you went into it. Yelp only works in California, and that must be the case because I don't think Yelp here is even a thing at all for home services.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, I've never heard of Yelp working anywhere in the Midwest or it's like some results in New York.
Yeah, restaurants, maybe, but Arizona has some success too. The closer you are to the West coast, the better, but California just dominates.
John Wilson: That's kind of sweet.
Brandon: And that's the only one too, that kind of goes across. Cause like the home advice and all that still is the same for pretty much everywhere.
So it's bargaining because
s, you're getting. Indicted. As soon as you ask for something, it's everybody on there is going out for quotes. So you're just a race to the bottom. But that's a good point about Yelp. That would be interesting if it's actually utilized more here, what that would look like for home services, but I've only ever seen it used for restaurants.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: It might be a good test to maybe get a couple of reviews on there. Spend three, 400 bucks on advertising and see if it works. Maybe you could capture all the leads that are coming there because nobody's playing there.
John Wilson: Yeah, that'd be interesting. Yelp is always one of the funny ones. I think, so we have like 60 or 70 reviews on Yelp, but only five of them show up because we don't advertise.
So Yelp, they do play a bit dirty. They only put like a few of the two stars and then anything that was a five star, the message underneath it was like, this is not a reliable review or something.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Yeah. What we found is. The better the reviewer, the more likely it is to stay.
So like you'll see people review who have Yelp elite, like 2021 or whatever, that little tag, those reviews will always stay. But when you have someone who is just coming to Yelp to review you, they always remove those because they think it's fake or spam or something or a family member. But yeah, man, we have like 60 not shown right now, 60 not recommended.
And then they're showing. 90, we've been stuck at 92 or 93 for a while because they just keep removing them.
John Wilson: Yeah, they don't want you to cross 100. You'd get too much power.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, I don't know.
John Wilson: Have you guys looked into, I'm trying to think of how the, mainly power washers, because I don't think window washing is as much of a thing here, but. It's a lot of what radio. Oh, as far as around here, how do they advertise around here?
Brandon: Perfect power wash is like the one around here. They're plastered everywhere. it's really their trucks is what you always see. It's an extremely recognizable wrap, but they're a lot on TV, a lot on the news stations.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah radio is huge in the Midwest. I know a guy out there runs a big one in Minnesota, Minnesota is considered the Midwest, right?
John Wilson: I have no idea.
Brandon: Something like that. Probably.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, probably. Okay, so he runs one in Minnesota. His biggest thing is radio. His number one lead source is radio.
John Wilson: Yeah, it's becoming that for us too. Radio broadcast is like taking over.
That's sweet. So Yelp. Okay. All right, so you've got the marketing machine dialed in. You think you could gain a little bit more through Yelp, throw another truck or two on the road and cross a million.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: I know we can because so we have an agency with Yelp to helping other home service businesses growing in Yelp.
And so we have access to, we can see like our competitors ad spend, we can see inventory fulfillment. So for example, if I say I'm spending five grand on Yelp, I can see if that shows 99 to a hundred percent, I know we're getting the maximum leads we can. And I can realistically up the budget to 10K ad spend a month and get even more leads in if I wanted to.
So it's cool. And I can also see search volume in the area. So like last month, there was 20, 000 people searching for window cleaning within 20 miles of me just on Yelp.
John Wilson: I'm really into the 650 average ticket thing, though. That's pretty dope. So what is a normal job that goes into that average ticket?
650 sounds high.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: You have a lot of big houses over here. We try to stay in a few high ticket areas like Newport beach, Anaheim hills, Laguna beach, and they're just naturally like 4, 000 plus square foot homes. So we're able to charge, a higher price for window cleaning.
Most of the time, it's just window cleaning. We'll get the one off. Maybe like one to two a week house wash plus window cleaning could definitely do a better job upselling, but it's just charging a high price per window.
John Wilson: When you sign up with Service Titan, for your business, you want to make sure you get the most out of your subscription for Service Titan. We pay multiple six figures a year for our Service Titan subscription and because of that we train our people extensively to make sure that we're getting the absolute most out of that investment as possible.
Now, if you can't afford that in house, that's okay, because there are consultants out there that can help you get the most out of your service titan. So the one that we've partnered with recently is Home Service Engine, and they're awesome. So you can think of them as like an external outsource CTO.
They're there to help drive real performance out titan, subscription. So you can get the most. Out of what you're paying. So you can understand your performance, you can get your revenue dialed in, and you can become better operators by working with folks like Home Service Engine. So check them out, homeserviceengine. com, it's a great group.
John Wilson: Window cleaning like residentially is sweet I realized it was earlier this summer.
This is embarrassing that I'm admitting this to as many people that listen to this, but I had never thought of cleaning my windows like at all. And we've lived in this house for like three years or something embarrassing. So it was like, I know. Yeah, I know. It was like a month ago. I looked at the windows and I was like, Oh my God, these things look insane.
So yeah, I cleaned it and after doing it once I was like, yeah, never again. I'm going to hire a window cleaning company. So that's like a pretty easy value proposition is I don't want to do that. That was crazy.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: How long did it take you?
John Wilson: Like an hour and a half, two hours. I have a very small home. I think my home is like 13 or 1400 square feet. It's tiny. So Yeah, it was quick, but it was a pain in the ass,
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Dude, you think, right? Hey, just cleaning windows. How hard can it be? But there's a lot that goes into it. Oh yeah. It's underrated.
John Wilson: Yeah, for sure.
Brandon: No, like I'm messing the homeowner, like hanging out the second story of a window, trying to wash the outside of it.
John Wilson: I didn't even touch my second story windows. Like it was an hour and a half on the first floor, right? And after that, I was like, I'm good.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, I'm not sure if you guys have seen like window cleaning equipment, but we don't get on any ladders 99 percent of the time to clean the second story.
So we just have these big carbon fiber poles. They can go up to like 70. We have one that's a 70 footer.
John Wilson: Oh my gosh.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So you can go like six stories and clean windows without ever having to get out a lift or scale that building.
John Wilson: And that's like a retractable pole or how does it work?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Yeah. It's a carbon fiber pole. It's in different sets. So you have like eight pieces to it. You just spin up one pole and then do it eight times. And you're up there 70 feet. It's carbon fiber. So obviously when it's extended out 70 feet, it's going to be a little heavy, but you just grip it on the window and you're good to go.
It doesn't streak or anything.
John Wilson: That's hilarious. What's up next for you guys? You're about to graduate college. You're about to be out there ready to devote full focus.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So what's next? I've been having a lot of fun on Twitter. Actually, Twitter is very powerful from what I've learned. I've been able to connect with a ton of people like you guys, for example, Liam and Bryant.
I don't know if you guys know Liam and Bryant, but we just spun up a discord for young entrepreneurs. So we have a little community there. It's free. The podcast, we spent like 2 grand putting the studio together.
So it's really YouTube focused, like impulsive JRE style interviews with entrepreneurs. So we're really focused on the production and the video it's called. You do what for a living, but like you do what for a living.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's it. And then, like I mentioned briefly, Orange Window Cleaning is really kind of
running on its own. This is basically what I do. You guys can't see the camera, but I'm just, I'm sitting here in our office, and that allowed us to focus a lot more on the agency business, so helping other companies grow in Yelp.
That's been a lot of fun. Sergio has been the operator. For orange window cleaning. So I've stepped away and I'm focusing on the agency business now, just focusing on home service businesses growing up.
John Wilson: Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. So this is to clarify. So you own the agency business that helps home services.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. So Sergio and I still own it. We own it together.
John Wilson: I didn't understand that when we talked about that 10 minutes ago. So that's actually your guy's business.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yes.
John Wilson: Okay.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So we're using the agency have so much data.
John Wilson: Yeah, you were like bribing me with some of this data.
And I was like, dude, are you bribing to get that information? That is wild.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, so it's an unfair advantage in the market where we have all that data because we're an agency partner. So we just have Orange Window Cleaning as a client for Tuffy Agency. That's the name of the agency. And we're able to see all that data.
John Wilson: Yeah. Like, if I wanted to go grow my home service company on Yelp, what would that cost?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We just charge 9. 99, psychological pricing, 1, 000. I don't know, it's a little scary. But you say 9. 99, it sounds a little bit better. But we do the same thing, like I explained. For Orange Windows Cleaning pricing, we have three different packages, gold, platinum, and diamond.
And the platinum is what we push, and that's where we have an autoresponder.
John Wilson: Is it 9. 99 a month or 9. 99?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: 999 a month on top of whatever you spend on ads too. And the cool thing is we get a kickback on any ad spend too. So we get anywhere up to 25 percent depending on how much our clients are spending on you.
John Wilson: That's cool.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: But that 999 you get, we're going to set up your profile, optimize it. But the real value there is Autoresponder. So when you're looking for companies to pick on you, you're going to see the response time. You want your response time always to be at 10 minutes because time kills on Yelp.
So if you're even three minutes late to respond to a quote, that next guy is going to get it. If you can fire off a price or at least a Hey, thank you for reaching out within 60 seconds of someone messaging you your odds of winning that job. Go way up. So we're one of two agencies that have that autoresponder and so we could implement that into your Yelp profile and anyone that comes in even after hours is going to get a follow up immediately when they get or when someone reaches out to your profile on Yelp.
John Wilson: That's pretty sweet. So how many clients do you guys have?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We have 4 right now. We just started it like a month ago. So it's still new, but I'm really excited about it.
John Wilson: So yeah So that's definitely what's up next for you guys. So and you and Sergio are partners in that too.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yep. That's right
John Wilson: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I always love multiple businesses
Brandon: You don't say yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah It's the way to live. That is fun.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, it's a cool niche too because it's like solving our own pain point. Not solving our own pain point, but using our expertise that we learned through trial and error. And then, I really feel like I'm handing out lottery tickets to these companies because we just know it like the back of our hands.
Brandon: Are they all on similar industries or home service industries or
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We have a list of 25 industries. We target all home services. So anywhere from plumbing, HVAC, pools, window cleaning, real estate agents is in there. We've got restorations, big, yeah, I could keep going roofing.
Brandon: Are you seeing those same keys to success that you guys used to work in those other industries as well?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Pretty much. There's little things you edit on like the ad design from different industries, but it's mostly the same thing. It's time. It's response time.
Brandon: There's always one that killed us. Every time we tried to attempt any platform like that was response time.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Especially for guys like you, you probably have admin answering phone calls, right? If you want your admin doing that, you're not going to hire someone just to respond to Yelp. At least I wouldn't think you would.
Maybe you would. I don't know. I don't know. When you have the auto responder, you just respond instantly and you don't have to worry about your admin. If they're on a call, having to respond to Yelp while meanwhile trying to talk, it's not going to, it's not going to work.
Brandon: All right. You sold us. We'll be your test pilot for Ohio. We'll bring you over to the east Coast.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: You guys want to spin something up in California, let me know.
John Wilson: Sounds good. Let's do that. I'm getting worried.
Brandon: I see the gears turning over there.
John Wilson: Actually, California, maybe not. But like, an adjacent state, I'm down for.
California might just have a little, a few too many rules for me. I don't know if I'm a good fit for what they're trying to do.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, arizona. Yelp works too. That's where the headquarters is at, actually. There's another idea for you.
John Wilson: Yeah, Arizona. I could do \ it seems to be cool. Relatively easy.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. I know California is a pain in the ass to deal with.
John Wilson: All right. So you've got
the agency. You said Twitter was powerful and then I totally interrupted you with understanding that you own the agency. So what else is up next for you guys?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Agency, Twitter. And yeah, that, that community with Liam and Bryant, Liam Kirchherr, you had Liam on.
John Wilson: Yeah, he was cool.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: And then, I'm not sure if Bryant's been on, are you guys planning to have him on, but.
John Wilson: Bryant Sollentrop?
Yeah. Yeah, we had him on, he was one of our first couple of guests.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Those are my boys.
John Wilson: And you guys are like launch buddies, like young dudes dropping home service cleaning, cleaning stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. You guys are. Yeah.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. We have a group chat on Twitter. It's called like young cleaning bros or something.
John Wilson: Yeah. That sounds about right.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: But yeah, we, so we just launched a discord community called young bootstrappers and it's just people. And anyone under 40 who wants to, be with or talk with like minded individuals, come join.
It's free and you learn a ton.
John Wilson: Yeah, man. That's, yeah, that's cool. So Twitter is pretty powerful. What else do you think you're going to do with it? Are you dropping a course?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: No, not, I don't have any plans for a course yet, but I just feel there's something about making a course. They just feel slimy about it. It's tough. I've always looked at gurus like, okay, if he's selling a course, he's probably not making money in his actual business. So I don't want to buy it. And so I just, it's hard to get that frame of thought out if I'm making a course. But no, I mean, just keep pumping out, threads and content in my story.
Because I think a lot of people can get inspired. You can make money doing anything in this country. And it's amazing. Like I clean glass off of, or clean dirt off of windows. It's like, come on, if I can make a lot of money doing that, you can, you make money doing anything.
John Wilson: Yeah. I'm ready to go buy a power washing company now.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: You gotta give me a call if you do that. Yeah. Oh, that's another thing I didn't even talk about. We've acquired another business that was like 270k a year. Bought it for 1, 000 down. So you can do some creative things with acquiring companies in this space.
John Wilson: You gotta walk us through the deal now.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Okay, so there's this guy. So I'm in like a little networking group, like a B& I. Do you guys know what B& I is? So it's called Bluetip. One of the insurance agents in that group referred me to his Medicare client, where he was like 65 retiring, like your classic story. No one wants to buy his business.
He's moving to Idaho. And we looked, he didn't have any, he didn't have a profit and loss. He just had tax returns and his business bank statements. And that was it. Actually his bank statements were his personal, he didn't have a bank account for his business. But he had these university contracts, not contracts, relationships, and we really wanted those because there's some big, some big jobs.
And so we basically said, Hey, look, we'll give you 1, 000 in goodwill, your pricing isn't market rate. So if we pay you, a lump sum of cash, like you're asking for, then. We're not even going to convert probably 50 percent of your customers to ours just because your pricing isn't right.
And so that took a little bit of selling and negotiation, but finally we got through him. He took the deal 1, 000 and then we give him a 20 percent kickback on any customer that converts to an orange window cleaning customer. And then that percentage drops to 10 percent in year two. So let's say I think we bought the business June 1 or May 1, I have to look back.
So then June 1, 2022. That 15 or 20 percent kickback drops a 10 percent kickback and then going into year three, that'll drop to five. And then after year three, no kickback.
John Wilson: So is it a monthly kick?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. So I just pay a monthly generator report on house call pro because any customer that we clean of his has his company's name tagged on it.
So we just generate a report, send him that report and say, Hey, these are the jobs. And then we do an Excel spreadsheet attached to that, multiplying it out for him. And then we just send him a check.
John Wilson: That's awesome. So you've had it for four months, three and a half months. How's it going?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, we just finished up in July.
We did two universities for like 60 grand. So that was good.
John Wilson: That sounds like a lot.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Yeah. It's going great. It's going great. Not so much on the residential, like I predicted. We've maybe done four or five residential customers in total, but those universities are what I really wanted and it's worked out.
John Wilson: Is that like every window in a university?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: It's usually the dorms. We can only clean them in the summer when the students are gone. And so for one, for example, we clean like 13 dorm buildings. So we had the guys going in every dorm. They'd have to go check in at the front office, get the keys, unlock all the doors.
And then they all have screens on them too. So it's not like a traditional commercial building. They've all got screens. That was a pain in the ass, but it wasn't bad.
John Wilson: Have you landed more of those schools since then?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So I'm actually, we're bidding on the school I go to right now because I was able to set, go in and say, Hey, we do these other ones.
And we do these other ones. And so they're like, Oh, it's a no brainer. Of course you're a student and you do. Yeah.
Yeah. I feel like we're bidding on you. And yeah we're bidding on that next year. And that was what we're, me and Sergio were thinking like, this is a good avenue to basically there's like 10 or 11 universities just in, in our area.
So we can go to all of them and say, Hey, we already do these.
John Wilson: I just think that sounds like a really sweet project. Do you think you could throw those into spring break or like Christmas break or thanks somewhere where you guys are already slowed down because that's your natural slow season, but throw a 60, 000 project
in there.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: That'd be the dream, but you've got students coming back in, in January and February. So there's really no time.
John Wilson: So it's not like a week project. It's like a month, right?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. So like one of them took us six weeks.
John Wilson: Oh, okay. All right. I'm sitting here like imagining like a week,
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Unless we threw like three, four crews on that, then it would take us maybe like two, three weeks.
John Wilson: But I wonder if you couldn't, I don't know. I'm just like totally thinking. Cause if you pretty much stopped working and you had a two week gap, you could like full bore it.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. And just throw everyone on there. That's not a bad idea.
John Wilson: But one of the things that always limited our growth still does is nailing seasonality and what to do with staff because it's hard to grow. It's hard to grow 10 people if you lose 5 people every year because then you're like you're constantly replacing the churn of technicians. So if you're able to nail your seasonality and you're able to do stuff in your downtime, so you keep all your staff and you only have to grow by 5 people.
It's just like, that's like half the game for these home service companies. It's just figuring out how to retain during downtime. Absolutely. It only gets worse as you get bigger, unfortunately.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, I can't imagine. It's already a pain in the ass right now. So someone can figure that out. Yeah.
John Wilson: Where do you think you guys are going to take the window company?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: We want to get it to over a million next year. We've doubled every year. So at the rate we're on next year five should be our million dollar year. That's the goal right now.
John Wilson: We'll be cheering you on from Ohio. Like, arm pumping the whole year, like it's going to be exhausting.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: I appreciate it, dude. That's awesome. I'll keep you guys posted. Definitely. Yeah. That's sweet. I think we're going to hit it.
John Wilson: What do you think you could have done? Like looking back, what could you have done to shorten the timeline to two years to hit a million?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Urgency. It's something that's starting to click in my head now as I get older, is stop putting off tomorrow what you can do today. Just pull the trigger already that we could have put our third truck out, beginning of summer. Had we just Bit the bullet and went straight to the dealership instead of trying to, fuck around with bank financing.
Just pull the trigger to do what you have to do. Cause you know, if you're going to put that money down, that truck is going to produce an extra 20 K. So we could have had an extra 60, 000 of revenue for the summer. Had we just moved faster and had a little bit of urgency. So that's something we've been working on.
It's just a sense of urgency. You can move a lot faster than you think.
John Wilson: Yeah, I wonder what we were thinking about this or I was thinking about this and so I bought my first company in 2016 and It was already doing like about a million dollars and then obviously we buy companies So like this isn't the same comparison, we're about to hit the fifth anniversary This year in like a week two weeks.
It was October 1st, and I was like, okay, so five years And the first four years were basically spent building the platform and the fifth year was spent exploding in growth. And then if I had to do it again, how could I do all that in two? Because what does the next 20 million look like? Yeah, interesting exercise to flush it out.
But you guys have just such a killer base on top, like the marketing dialed in, down to trucks, good CRM, good lead flow. Like I'm into this. This is for sure the platform.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Definitely. If I had to go back to do it in two years, knowing what we know now, it'd be a lot different because it took us like, same thing, like it took us four years to figure out what works on the marketing and to get leads in constantly and to build our reputation that takes time to build your reputation, because the more years you're in business, the cool thing about home services, as long as you stay in business, you grow naturally if you can retain your customers.
So we would definitely grow a hell of a lot faster knowing what we know now, just because we can, throw our marketing engine on there and just explode.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's pretty cool. We're starting this serve startup thing. Which I don't think we've talked very much about on the pod.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: What is that?
John Wilson: We're incubating, and we're doing it with a guy named Isaac. He's on Twitter, I should plug his Twitter, but he's cool. We're incubating home service entrepreneurs that want to start up. And we are, like, basically funding them and giving them the model to launch and get to success as quick as they can.
So obviously that looks like a lot of different things. It really depends on the industry. And we're going to be targeting Asset heavy companies to give us a little bit more of a moat and competitive edge because we don't want to be competing against the guys that could start a cleaning company for 500 bucks, rather have to compete against guys who have to drop 200, 000 to even walk in the door.
But that's a lot of this now is like, okay, so how do we take a entrepreneur who just wants to start a home service company? And get them to a million dollars in two years in revenue or several million dollars in two years. So that's the thought experiment. What
do you think?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: That's exciting. That's really cool. I'd love to hear more about that. But I think as long as you have marketing down that's the number one thing. I think about it like, like a stool, right? A four legged stool, like a bar stool. And you each leg is growing. So you have to make sure each leg's growing and around the same length, because if your marketing is, all the way down here, but you haven't supplemented that with your hiring and you're buying your trucks then there's, you're going to fail. You're going to get too much work, you're wasting money on ads and you're leaving money on the table because you can't fulfill that work.
So it's definitely interesting thought experiment. A little more difficult the more you think about it, but I think marketing is the most important thing and then we've always been to figure it out as you go. So we'll get the work and then we'll figure out how to fulfill it type of thing.
And obviously, at scale, that's probably not what you want to do. But yeah, that's my thoughts on it.
John Wilson: Yeah I think scrappiness gets you pretty close to scale and then it becomes way more about like org building and then creating a machine that is more of like placing components
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So hey, that's another thing too.
I think performance base pays huge So if you can figure out a good system off the rip just so you know employees are like wow this is awesome. And then you can get those referrals and employee referrals are the best and you know pay those employees when they do refer someone that stays for a certain amount of time.
John Wilson: What does your current comp system look like?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: When we were W2, it was commission based. So basically lead techs would get up to 16 percent to 16 percent on a two man truck. Whereas the regular tech would get 12, 13. So we were trying to keep it below 30 percent labor. And then if you're a one man lead tech, you max out at 25%.
Sometimes if we really, we had a lead tech that was crushing it, we would bend that and give them 26, 27, but your normal tech would probably get around 20%.
John Wilson: Is that the same with subcontractors?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Subcontractors are a little different. We don't do commission because we have to, we're essentially a broker.
We have to be labeled as a broker so we don't get in trouble, California, but we just pay them 60 percent of the job. But the good thing is we charge really high prices, so they're cool with that. And we're essentially their Yelp or their marketing. They don't have to pay for the customer acquisition or anything like that.
We do the booking, we do the pricing, we're doing spending our money, maintaining that customer relationship, and they're just servicing the customer.
John Wilson: You've become almost more of a lead gen completely.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yes and no. We still keep the customer service. Their customer service is still our big thing.
We think you can have subs and still have a great customer service, but we don't think we've, we're proving it right now. But like I said, our reviews are still going up, still getting five stars. And a big thing is honestly who answers the phone. As long as you sound bubbly and you answer the phone with a smile, people are going to be happy
and then vetting the subs, right? So you're not going to send, you're not going to, I'm not going to meet with the sub if he's, used your bullshit detector a little bit or like your judgment of character. And you can tell if you want to send that guy out to jobs or not. The good thing about Orange County is people have been getting their windows clean for 30, 40 years.
So like we're able to get lists from our window cleaning suppliers of all their window cleaners because we told them, Hey, we're subbing work. And so they give us a list and we've got hundreds of. Window cleaning companies we can use because there's so much demand here.
John Wilson: So then i'm just going to go backwards here You said your biggest problem was vehicles that no longer becomes a problem if you're something
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Right exactly So that's why we made the switch so I know we skipped all over the place here, but we switched from w2s to subs last month.
So our last w2 month was last month. And so that whole time of August, we were doing hybrid where we would have, a few trucks that we do a few truck subs. We saw no difference jobs are still getting done, but we're just making more money on the subs.
John Wilson: You're making more money.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Make more money because we don't have to pay workers comp anymore. So window cleaning workers comp for window cleaning, we're paying like 20, almost 23%. So workers comp is killing us every month for W 2s you know, and then think about it as an insurance agent, you hear. Oh, you're a window cleaner.
Oh my God. I'm going to make so much money off you because you're getting on ladders and you're cleaning three, four, five story buildings. When that's not the case, you're using a water foot pole 99 percent of the time.
John Wilson: That's pretty wild. Okay. So 60%. So maybe 30 percent was out of your SG percent cogs.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So it's actually a range of 50 to 60. So we have a thing where the more jobs you complete successfully with us, we'll raise your rates. So you start at 50 after a certain amount of jobs you complete, you can go to 55 and then you cap out at 60. We'll never pay you more than 60%.
John Wilson: I'm into that. Are you able to keep your overhead to 10 percent or 20 percent so you guys can still do 20 percent net or 30 percent net.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Yeah. Keep in mind when you switch to subs, you don't have to worry about truck maintenance, buying equipment, workers comp, payroll taxes.
You just, you pay your sub and that's it. And then we have overhead for, okay, we have our ad spend. Not a big deal. We have, our ad spend is probably 5 percent and then we have, our software CRMs or CRM and then nice job, responsive bid and then you've got our VAs and our admin.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's awesome. That's cool. I think there's guys that do sub inside, like the trades we play in, but they're way too specialized. You end up getting beat up.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: I don't think subs would work in, something like that. I don't think you can build a long term business off of subs and plumbing or HVAC.
I just don't think that would work.
John Wilson: I know guys who do it for cons one, but I know guys just around here that do subs. In carpeting like flooring and that's a very real way to scale those up. That's a pretty cool setup.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Janitorial has been subbing things for years and they've there's billion dollar companies. I know a guy who lives in Vegas and operates to junk calling companies in San Diego and L. A. And he's got tons of trucks moving. I talked to him and he's who helped us work through a lot of this. And he told me, he's like, yeah, I haven't been on a truck in six years and he just subs everything from Las Vegas, multiple companies, junk removal.
John Wilson: Yeah. Junk removal is an industry. I'd do that.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. Lots of interesting ones. Cleaning of course is huge. You guys had Liam on, he does that. Yeah. I'm trying to think where else you can get away with it. Uh, I know guys doing it with pavers too. Guys are killing it with pavers, like driveways.
Yeah. There's a guy doing that and he's got like six crews.
John Wilson: I always wonder what that looks like at like 10, 20 million in sales. How does it change? Is it maintainable? Or do you need so many subs at that point that it's really hard to maintain quality because it feels like the smaller, the better you can like tightly control that.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. I guess we'll find out right as we grow, but I've seen there's a paper company doing, I want to say they're doing eight figures and they just have sales teams. That's all their employees is just. Inside sales. And they've got like 10 sales reps just selling paper jobs.
John Wilson: That's dope. God, I always do these.
And then I'm like, we need to go do this.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: I love that feeling though. It's a double edged sword though, because I think every entrepreneur deals with that, chasing the shiny object syndrome and it's tough to deal with for sure.
John Wilson: Yeah. I can talk myself down now just because I'm so busy, but if there's more time, like next year, I'm suspecting that there's going to be a lull in between deals. That's never good. It means John's going to go start something.
Brace. Yeah. Everybody brace yourself. Yeah. Oh man. That's funny. I think we've pretty much hit our time here. This has been freaking awesome. I'm pumped to listen back through this. This is going to be really cool. If people want to follow you, where can they find you?
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: So number one place to follow me is Twitter. Like I mentioned, at squeegeegod. That's my handle. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's branded myself. Really good there. I'm really proud of it. Yeah. Yes. That you got on Twitter.
John Wilson: That is pretty direct. That's awesome. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing your story.
This was really cool.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah, guys. Thanks. Thanks for having me, man.
John Wilson: And your podcast
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Yeah. You do what for a living?
John Wilson: Awesome. Yeah. I'm going to check that out. Sweet. Cool. All right.
Johnny SqueeqeeGod: Thanks. If you guys are ever in California, I'll have you jump on.
Yeah. Thank you.
Brandon: All right, guys.
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John Wilson: Thanks for tuning in to Owned and Operated, the podcast for home service entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Twitter at at Wilson companies.
I'll see you next time.