Paul's great marketing blog

Paul McQuillan, a lively,passionate, and great contributing forum member, of Window Cleaning Resource and National Window Cleaning Directory, has turned his passion and ability in marketing into a book:

Onslaught Marketing "How You Can Survive the Economic Crisis and Emerge 10x Stronger Than Your Competition"

His website address is: http://onslaughtmarketing.com

And he authours a very interesting and informative marketing blog - http://jointheonslaught.blogspot.com

He has brought up an important missed opportunity. Forced Continuity, or putting customers on a schedule. It has inspired me, and led me to share and agree with his point about forced continuity. Here is the blog posting:

http://jointheonslaught.blogspot.com/2009/02/window-cleaners-take-heed.html

Forced continuity is regularly scheduled window cleaning on a indefinte frequency. Whether that is every two weeks, four weeks, eight weeks, or twice a year.

As Paul goes on to say, many residential window cleaners fail to offer regularly scheduled cleans for their residential customers.

This has inspired me to think of offering this service to residential customers I will attain this spring. The only issue would be to make sure that one can make enough money to drive there, stop, get equipment off truck and clean windows. So an important factor is setting the price at a reasonable level. His suggestion of $80 sounds reasonable.

If you could get many customers to go for this service, a route could be made, causing certain efficiencies to develop and lowering your costs (gas, marketing, etc) per customer.

As an example, Mr Squeegee, aka Tony Evans, anewviewia.com has a winter route, where he cleans some of the windows on certain houses once a month, and has a regular route, which enables him to make some money during a hard time for many residential window cleaners - winter.

Having forced continuity, or putting residential customers on a regular schedule would enable you to make more money per customer. would enable you to get through slow seasons better, and enable you to have a little more of a predictable income.

This is why I enjoy cleaning commercial glass. Everything I do is on a schedule. I can predict how much my company will gross per year, I can schedule my customers for the most efficient way of cleaning them to minimize wasted driving time. I'm cleaning relatively clean glass, and I'm not always forced to market like crazy, since one customer will gross me thousands of dollars a year, for an indefinite period of time, perhaps years. Instead of just making a few hundred bucks, and then trying to get another customer.

Putting customers on a schedule makes a lot of sense. So think about ways you can implement that for your business.

And check out Paul's blog for other great marketing ideas.