Profit = money that exceeds your out going expenses. In window cleaning this often means you can profit within your first full week of work since start up is so low. Once you get going you can make $400-500 a day, never mind a week. Two small to medium size houses a day should net you at least that.

Mark – Toronto

Another angle: If one wants make a personal income of $500 a week and be building a sound foundation for their business for the future, $500 would be the wages and divided by the typical wage at 30% formula, one would strive to at least have a gross revenue of $1,667 per week

Bruce – California

Yes, most new 1 man shows do not understand this; they claim to have a 60-70% profit margin when they are not even including their own wages into these numbers. If they ran the numbers correctly they would be lucky to have a 10% profit margin. Not to mention some of them use their own personal vehicles, cell phones, homes as office spaces, garages for storage, and all types of other things they do not factor into their business expenses.

Trevor – California

We do P&L on every job, every day. We record all expense/income info on our daily sheets in the trucks. Our database updates every day. I can run labor, mileage, chemical usage and even tools and rubbers reports. If you do it every day, it is much easier. That is what I really like about Access and Excel. I have written instructions that will flow info from every cell on our daily entry sheets into other folders and ledgers and they update with each entry. It took years to get it where it is, but in less than 5 minutes with each sheet, I know exactly where we are.

John - Florida

Yes, you will certainly need hundreds of clients to maintain and grow your business. This freaked me out in the beginning too, so I focused on commercial during my first year and only did 35 homes. (Virtually all of them found from me doing commercial work) The second year I saw the light and we did 396 residential cleanings. (Some of those were 3/6mo routines).

My third year. (As in this year, we've already done over 400 residential properties and still have a couple months to break 500 units. Realistically, it has not taken that much effort.

Example: Start with a goal of 100 homes over 3 months. You should be able to easily land a 100 jobs with 15k pieces of marketing materials. Flyers/Postcards...whatever.

1000 pieces a week for 15 weeks and your (sic) well on your way to building a solid business. (You can get out 350-500 a day in less than 5 hours by yourself Its daunting, but the numbers everyone posting are very realistic. You just have to put a minimal amount of effort in.

Ryan – Texas

We are planning to call all the way through our list 3 times (obviously if we talk to someone the first time, we won't call again, unless they ask us to).

The first time, didn't leave a voicemail (that was Monday). The second time (today) we did leave a voicemail. We will call again on March 19 -- the first week of spring. Calling through the list takes the better part of an afternoon, so I don't really stress what time of day I call.

Michael - Georgia

We rarely ever leave messages, unless they have previously asked us too (sic). We also split our list in 4; serviced 6-9 mo ago, 9-12 ago over a year ago as well as people who have had some other service such as power wash, gutter cleaning, holiday lights and the like.

PhotoCheff – California

I opt to send all of my existing customers and potential customers (those who we have given estimates to and not booked yet) a postcard as a reminder with our specials on it and a call by deadline. It has worked very well for us for 33 years. Quite honestly I just don't have the time to call 3400 people to try to schedule service. I like it much better when they are calling me because its (sic) money in the bank!

Linda – Boston

My opinion - not contacting the customer more than once could be leaving money on the table.I call some of them more than 3 times. Many however have thanked me for staying on top of it pointing out they had totally forgot. We all do things different and some things work that don't work for others. I agree Linda, you're customer base of 3400 would be pretty difficult to contact more than once, especially on the phone. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't work or come across to the customer in a negative way.

Justin - Washington

I also like Michael's system. I have my part time office help complete outbound calls every spring and fall. In the spring we do not leave messages the first time around. The second time we will. And if we have not heard from them by the third time we call but do not bother leaving a message again.

In the fall we typically only call once. The ones we call more than once are the ones we haven't serviced yet that year.

I'm with Michael; I have many clients that thank me for staying persistent. Last summer I landed a $1,000 residential job because I called the client 4 months after giving her an estimate.

She was very thankful, happy to write the check, and wrote me an awesome referral. Why wouldn't I continue this way of checking in? Look at the results...

Kyle – Wisconsin

We have always called people especially the people that like to get their windows done early to help jump start the season. Everyone gets mailed with everyone else 6-7 times a year. When the phone start going ballistic we don't have time to keep calling past clients.

I love when clients expect to have us drop everything to get to them last minute when they're 4-5 postcards deep and haven't returned our forewarning calls. We tried the reminder postcard thing - I think we had 10 people call. Everyone gets mailed with everyone else.

Matt – Boston

We send out a letter in Spring and Fall as a reminder of services and current promotions. We call every client in Spring and Fall, yes with roughly 1000 that has gotten more time consuming (and my least favorite thing)

From there we call anyone who did work in April 2011, in March 2012 as a reminder. The clients we love, love us or pay really well we stay on top of.

From there, book a job and start calling people close to them, "we are going to be in your area and would love to help your family if needed"

Normally our Spring starts slow, so by April 15 we are busy. Letter has always gone out first week of April. Sent it out last Friday and it hit yesterday. Got 4 calls today from it.

Also, I find that customers appreciate the calls. They get use to it and don't call you, but they like the reminders and offer to do work the following day/week. They call it customer service

Dave – Washington

As an update, my wife started calling mid-morning last Tuesday. Got about halfway through the list. We also emailed people who seem to communicate more with email. She says everyone was cool, and she left messages for those that didn't answer. I HATE it when numbers I don't know don't leave messages, so we're leaving messages letting them know what's up and saying we'll be calling again in a week or so. First mail out will drop next week as well. The snowball starts rolling...

Tyler - Iowa