When I was just starting out I found the sweet spots for staff was about 6 - 7 guys or gals. Heres why: You can run 2 full time crews and spend your days soliciting more work, doing quality control and estimates etc.. If you only have 4 - 5 guys and are trying to run 2 full time crews you will constantly get sucked back into the work. With 6 - 7 guys its ok if you have to fire someone or if someone needs a day off. @ less than 6 guys and 2 crews its tough in my opinion, to have things run really smoothly. You end up putting up with stuff you shouldn't, quality can slip, morale can decrease, and you will get sucked back into the physical work of cleaning windows. (Not that there is anything wrong with that ) - It just gets to be counterproductive if your trying to work on it and not in it.

Chris - New Jersey

Employment laws in Spain are quite difficult & penalizing - for this reason I've decided not to pursue employing until I can no longer do the work myself. I know I run the risk of losing the lot if I had an accident, but for now I'll keep the really well paid work & turn down the work that is not beneficial for my time. I rarely work more than a 3 day week anyhow & I'd rather keep the work fun rather than stressful from experience when I've tried out potential employees in the past. The try-out loophole has now disappeared & I need a contract just for using someone for 10 minutes which would still cost me over $300.

Karl - Spain

Ultimately I want to keep growing. How much so is yet to be determined. This season we ran 2 full time crews. I was the crew leader on one crew for most of the summer and it completely burnt me out running the business (phone calls, scheduling, estimates marketing etc). This fall I took a step back from being on every job and saw the results by not working in but working on my business.

Nick Wrong - Massachusetts

I've been having between 5-7 guys for the last 3 years. For me. it works great, I only go out on the real big jobs, and only do labor about 2-3 days a month.

I like 5 for my business, 2 crews and 1 swing man. I'm going to be having an in house staff person in about two weeks to help me catch up on my paperwork, and finally get my database completely up to par. Once I do that, and have her up and running, I'll continue to concentrate on bids, and making every job more profitable.

Charlie - Louisiana

I would go with the non friend route

Chris - New Jersey

The non friend route has always worked best for me. It's hard to discipline a friend or even fire them. It makes life a lot easier where there is no other relationship on the plate other than just manager and employee.

Jeremy - Washington

Be very careful when thinking about hiring friends or family. I had a horrible experience hiring a friend when I first started which turned me sour to the idea if it ever came up again. This guy wasn't just my friend, but my BEST friend for 15 years. I helped pay for him to move down here to help me wash and had visions of us growing big time, expanding and eventually becoming the kings of window washing.

Long story short, he took total advantage of our friendship, didn't take a thing we were doing serious and single handily almost bankrupt my business. This May will be six years since we last spoke.

Of course every situation is different and not all would end up like my example, but just think twice about it if your best bud ever comes calling for a job.

Andrew - Florida

It can definitely work with the right people. Unfortunately, experience shows that the two people involved are too close to the situation to be able to objectively evaluate whether they are the right people. I've had several friends wanting to work with me that I turned down, explaining that I wanted their friendship more than I wanted their help.

I'm an employer like I'm a parent. I don't want to be your friend, I want teach you what it takes to succeed. I can't do both without cheating you of one or the other.

Brian - Georgia

In analyzing some of the sour experiences of friends working for me in the way past, I have noticed some problems stem from the fact that the people who are my friends are mostly different from my personality, like a personality complement type thing

I'm numbers, analysis, structure, organized and I find many of my closest friends are musicians, artistic or that 'free spirit' type and perhaps more than a bit disorganized. If I hire these types, then now instead of being entertained by them and having a non-judgmental friendship, now I am irritated, frustrated, and annoyed because their work truck is disorganized and dirty, the paperwork isn't filled out, a job took forever because they were having a good time visiting extensively with the customer, they got distracted by some nonsense during the day, call incessantly for constant direction etc etc. Lesson learned a long time ago.

Hire for skills and potential to produce specific results, rather than thinking it can shoehorned in later into a friend.

Bruce - California

8 to 10% of gross is what I have read in more than one book.

John - New York

My thinking is you can spend lots and not make much $ even lose money or spend little and make lots of $. It really depends on how effective the piece or method is, my goal is to spend the least amount that produces the best.

Brian - California

For years I did not pay for traditional advertising because Yelp and word of mouth along with return customers kept me so busy that I was turning away work. Now if your planning on expanding and adding on more workers you will probably have to do some advertising that costs you money. I listened to an Internet panel through my leads group a few months ago and their general consensus was.

1. Do all the free stuff online and the best ROI online paid service you can find.

As was stated before you can really loose a lot of money with some advertising that does not even pay for itself.

Randy - California

It was Crabtree the Simple Number guy that said 5% is typical of what he sees and for his own biz, I found that immensely helpful since if that's the pattern he sees with all he has seen, then that implies a good equilibrium point, is how I take it.

Bizminer reports for window cleaning businesses showed for "Advertising":

Small window cleaning biz it hovered at 1.5% over the years ('07-'10)
Large window cleaning biz was in the .75 - 1% range '05 - '08

That seems way to low, one can't even mail to their internal data base with those #'s. Plus the large biz would be about a salesman more than "advertising" so things get skewed a bit.

Naturally, it's going to take more as one hunts and pecks to find something that brings in pretty consistent ROI, even if its about message and overall communication package. Many times the needed development and costs and low ROI is here rather than the medium.

Bruce - California