Austin Gray: [Music] Welcome back to the OWNR OPS Podcast! I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, I will be hosting a special guest, Julius Mary, on the show. Julius is a pressure washing service business owner out of New York. He started his business in college and has since grown it to produce $212,000 in revenue this year just from pressure washing services.

Julius also owns a Christmas light service business, and we'll get into that in a future episode. For this one, we'll be focusing on starting a pressure washing business.

So, for those of you who have had an interest in starting a pressure washing business, you'll want to stay tuned for this one. Let’s dive into the episode! So, why don’t you do a quick introduction for yourself? Um, tell us your name, where you're from, what your business is, and we'll just dive right into it.

Julius Mary: Yeah, for sure! I'm Julius, I'm 23, I'm from New York. We're right above the city here in Westchester County. I started this power washing business with my brother about four years ago. Like I said, I was a sophomore in college when we got sent home from school for the pandemic. It was the second semester, and everyone got sent home. COVID broke out, and no one was really doing anything. I was actually still working at the bike shop that I had been working at for the past three years.

Then, my dad just had us doing all these odd jobs around the house just because, you know, what else are you going to do when the world shuts down? Might as well start painting the basement, power washing the house. So, we were doing these things, and then we're sitting at dinner one day, and my dad says, “You know, you guys could do this for other people and make a decent amount of money.” He was actually referring to painting specifically in that instance, and my brother and I were like, “Yeah, we could do that,” but, you know, painting isn’t what we want to do.

It seemed like it was a little tough. The next day, he asks us to power wash the house, and we're like, “You know, that actually seems like something that’s not too hard. All we really need is a power washer. There are a lot of dirty houses around here. It gets really humid in the summer, so we have a lot of mold, a lot of algae, and a lot of moss.”

We had this idea to start doing it for other people. What we did is we did our house first, tried to figure out how to do it, still had no idea what we were doing, just went up on ladders, blasting the siding as you're not supposed to do. We took some pictures and videos, created a little logo, and then started advertising locally, in local Facebook groups. We were like, “You know what, if we’re going to do this, let’s just invest like $300 or whatever into Home Advisor.” I think that was the startup cost for it.

We paid for leads, so we were doing Home Advisor, started running some Facebook ads, and then from there, we kind of just slowly started getting customers. This is the point where we realized we could actually do this. We had two jobs; it was our first two real jobs, and we did them in one day. In the entire day, it was probably like an eight-hour day, and we made $900. We were just cracking up on our way home thinking, “What the hell?” I'm trying not to curse here, but we were going crazy, like “Holy crap, we just made $900 in one day. That’s more than I would make in two weeks at my other job!”

That kind of set it in concrete for us that we could do this and make some serious money. After that, it was just about keeping growing and figuring out how to do things. At that point, we had no idea what we were doing—like legitimately. We just had a power washer in the shed, grabbed that, and bought another one from Home Depot. We were just mobbing in our little 2007 Honda CRV, driving around doing jobs.

We would pull up to these people's houses, and they’d be like, “Holy crap, these people are about to wash my house!” We got a lot of that question where people asked us, “Oh, did you have insurance when you started?” A few of our clients asked us that, and we’d have to kind of meander around the point a little bit, like, “You know, we don’t have insurance right now. We’re actually in the middle of switching over our plan to another company or whatnot.”

We’d kind of ease them on the tension. We were very careful with everything and took extra precautions; usually that would settle it, but yeah, we didn’t have insurance in the beginning for probably a month or two. I think it was two months, and then that’s when we set up the business, set up the LLC, an S corporation, I think. I left my job like two months into it, and I think we made maybe like four grand our first month. That was enough for me to be like, “All right, I’m done with this,” and quit the job. I put in the two weeks, and we went all in on the power washing.

I didn’t need to make much money; I just wanted enough so I could go out, have some fun when I went to college, drink some beer, and whatnot. Of course, that bar had to get raised higher and higher every year! Here we are now, four years later. My brother left; it’s just me running the business. I’ve got my virtual office manager—she’s amazing—who takes care of pretty much the whole back end of the business now. I’ve been working on finding a reliable field tech to be my right-hand man in the field. I’ve been going through a few this year.

You know how employing is—part of it. It’s an incredible story, and this is why I have enjoyed following you. I can tell from your tweets and from your journey that you’re the type of person who just moves fast. You break things, and you then go back and figure it out. I see that as a necessary trait to starting a successful service business.

I think people who overthink things and just sit there and analyze every little detail put themselves in analysis paralysis. Sometimes you’ve literally just got to get out of the house. You’ve got to get up behind the desk. You’re not going to sit behind the desk and play armchair quarterback in this service game, especially when signing up to be an OWNR OPS in the beginning.

But oh no, if you do this, you can be kind of where you’re at today. I want to go back to the very beginning. So, you started with four grand a month in your first month of revenue. Take us through that first year in business—what did that look like? What did months two through twelve look like?

Julius Mary: Months two through twelve, I think we got into like six K in revenue. I think it was the next month. Then, I think we got to eight. I don’t think we hit a 10K month our first year; I’d have to go back and look at our books. But that whole first summer—from I believe like April is when we had the idea to start; then May is when we actually started doing some jobs—from like May till August, when I went back to college, we did about $35,000 to almost $40,000 in revenue.

So, it was not a substantial amount of money at all, but at the same time, I didn’t really know anything about running a business or marketing. We were running Facebook ads, and this was four years ago, so at that point, Facebook ads were pretty effective and worked pretty easily. You could just throw up decent creative with some decent copy, and you would get leads.

But I didn’t scale that up; I was still only running like $5 to $10 a day, even with the ads that were working. I should have been blowing that up. We could have doubled our revenue just by doing that—putting up door hangers, yard signs. We were pretty lazy, honestly, in the beginning.

I know we could have doubled our revenue. If I was talking to someone who had experience, had some kind of mentor, if I had known what to do, that’s kind of just how it is in the beginning—you’re ignorant; you just got to get started and figure it out. But like talking to people that have experience, my bad, got a little something in my throat here.

If we just did more volume in what we were doing in terms of marketing, we would have doubled our revenue—it’s as simple as that. But we were also too busy figuring out how to actually power wash things. I didn’t even know that you had to turn on the water before you turned on the power washer. We returned like six power washers to Home Depot because we just blew the pumps up.

Oh my gosh. When I tell you we didn’t know anything, I literally did not know anything! I’d never power washed anything in my life before—maybe I had once, but it’s not rocket science, right? There was no experience. It’s not rocket science; it shouldn’t be that hard. I could have just taken a course or something, or I don’t know. But these little nuances are what people don’t talk about, and a lot of people, I guess, don’t understand.

At least I didn’t. We were shot; I didn’t know anything. But hey, we still got started, and we still got out there that first year. Oh my God, that first year set up that foundation for the next year. By then, we had some decent equipment. After a whole year of trial and error, we kind of understood how to quote jobs.

We were still figuring that out in the beginning. There are a lot of things you’ve got to figure out in the beginning that will kind of prevent you from doing what actually matters. Like I said, that would have just been tripling or quadrupling the volume of what we were doing in our marketing—putting out 100 yard signs every month.

I think we put out maybe 30 to 50 our entire first season.

Austin Gray: You’re all good—keep ranting. What was the question? I just kind of went on a rant there. One thing you mentioned was pricing your first job. I get this question a lot because one thing I've been pushing out is that the easiest way to go get your first jobs is literally just to go out and knock on doors. If you know how to do something, you can go out, knock on doors, or hand out flyers.

But then people are asking me, “What if the person actually says yes to me doing their job? How do I price my services?” So, I want to hear your perspective on how you priced your services in the early days. Then, I'm happy to share mine too.

Julius Mary: Yeah, so we pretty much, for decks and surface cleaning, we would kind of just go off of— I think we pretty much just eyeballed it. We’d look at a deck and just be like, “Alright, this is probably going to take us the little machines that we’re using,” and just the completely inefficient systems that we were using. It would probably take us like three hours to wash this deck.

“Alright, how much do we want to make in that time? I think 250 would be reasonable in that amount of time.” So, it was very eyeballed with that kind of stuff. But then, when we quoted houses, where there’s more, you could just look up the square footage online—on Zillow or something. We’d kind of go off that, and if we were in that range of like 18 to 20 cents per square foot, that’s pretty much an industry standard for most areas—18 to 22 cents per square foot.

We would kind of go off of that and see where we were in that range. We’d look at how the job looked. Sometimes, there would be a detached garage or something that we'd have to account for that doesn’t count toward the square footage, or a basement—whatever—that makes the house taller, but also doesn’t count as it.

It could get a little iffy with the square footage, so you can’t go 100% off that, but it’s a good guideline. We would use that, and then we would also just kind of eyeball it based on how much we wanted to make in a certain amount of time.

From there, it was a little tough in the beginning because you don’t know how long it takes you to do things until you start doing it. When you have no experience doing jobs, it’s like you have no idea. It could be four hours or it could be ten hours. Your pricing is just not going to be perfect, and you just have to understand that when you first start out, your pricing is not going to be perfect.

And it never will be perfect! Even now, to this day, we still over-quote jobs or under-quote jobs. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does happen, it’s like, “Alright, whatever, we’ll just make up for it on the next one.” You know, it doesn’t matter too much.

But yeah, pricing for us in the beginning was a lot of eyeballing and just kind of figuring out what the market can take. Then, from there, we started low because we were inexperienced and didn’t have much of a brand or any kind of reputation at that point. We started building it up from there, charging more, and as we started getting more customers, of course, we could price a little bit higher because we could start to pick and choose which jobs we actually wanted to take.

You said something that is really important there—pricing does not have to be perfect. It kind of goes back to that analysis paralysis that a lot of people fall into when they are starting a business. Did you come up with an hourly rate that you and your brother wanted to make?

Julius Mary: We did; I just can’t remember exactly what it was when we started. I think we were going for like an hour—between 75 and 100 an hour for each. We tested that with the market too, and people were willing to pay that. We were operating equipment, so we felt like that was pretty standard, at least for our market for equipment operators.

But yeah, I think you hit on a point that is very important whenever you're starting a business: you're never going to be perfect on your pricing in the beginning. You just have to jump in, start quoting jobs, and that’s why I’m such a believer in being an OWNR OPS, being in the field, and doing the estimating.

I guarantee you that whenever you quoted some of your customers, some of them were like, “Absolutely! Do it right now!” And then also, some of them were like, “I don’t know if I’ve got enough in the budget for that. Call me next year.” Was it like that for you?

Julius Mary: Yeah, for sure! No matter what you're pricing at, you're still going to find people that don't want to pay that. Even if you're the $99 guy, people on the other side of the spectrum will be like, “Yeah, sure. Do it right now!” Absolutely!

I also think there’s a really important piece there. Whenever you’re in the field and quoting and estimating, it’s really important to pay attention to your customers because when you gauge that response, that’s the market telling you what the market is willing to pay for your services. I love the fact that you were willing to just dive in and be like, “You know what? We’re going to start.”

What do you want to make, brother? “I want to make 75.” “You want to make 75? Okay. We think it’s going to take us four hours—boom, let’s give them a quote.” I’m sure you had people who turned you down, and I’m sure you had people who just said, “Yeah, jump right in.”

I love the fact that you’re not hesitant about just going out, quoting, and learning on the fly. One question I wanted to ask: if you could go back and do this again for anybody who wants to start a pressure washing business—you said you didn’t even know that you needed to turn the water on first. I think it’s awesome that you’ve learned on the fly, but what would you tell someone who doesn’t know how to use a pressure washer, has never run one before, but wants to start a pressure washing business in their local service market? What would you tell them on the actual training of using the equipment? Where would you point them?

Julius Mary: I’d point them first to a PDF that I made specifically for idiots like me who had no idea what they were doing. It’s a very transparent, easy-to-read, one- or two-page PDF. It’s free; I just put it out there. Thousands of people have downloaded it, and I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on it just because of how simple and straight to the point it is.

All these other YouTubers or social media guys— all these pressure washers are trying to give you all this information that’s just an overload. They’re like, “Oh, you’ve got to get this trailer or this truck, like a flatbed, and then you’ve got to get a huge tank and an 8-gallon-per-minute machine.” No, you don’t need that. I’d get a minimum 4-gallon-per-minute pressure washer.

You’re going to need a J-rod, which is the tip that goes on the end of it that’ll allow you to switch from soap to rinse with fresh water. You also need a downstream injector that’s going to go in between the pressure hose and between the power washer—it’s going to pull soap from your bucket when you switch those J-rod tips—and then you’re good to go!

Make sure you turn on the water before you turn on the machine, always, so you don’t blow your pump like I did probably six times. After you get that down and you get a 4-gallon-per-minute machine, don’t go anything below that because it’s going to take you forever to do your jobs.

You could spend $500 on a 2.5-gallon-per-minute pressure washer from Home Depot, or you could just get a four-gallon machine for $1,200, and you’re going to make more money in half the time, so the investment's going to be worth it in your first few jobs.

So don’t go anything below 4 gallons per minute. The actual PSI doesn’t matter as much; it’s all about the GPM, which is the gallons per minute, like I just said. It’s the water output; you want to think about spraying like a garden hose in comparison to spraying like a, you know, a fire hose. It’ll be way quicker to wash a house with a fire hose than with a little water gun, you know?

Austin Gray: All right! It sounds like you have some more information in that PDF. Is that right?

Julius Mary: Okay, so let’s put the link in the show notes. If you’re looking to start a pressure washing business, go download that, and it sounds like you break all that stuff down from a high-level perspective.

Austin Gray: All right! You’ve got your pressure washer. Can you get that four gallons per minute at Home Depot, or do you need to go to a specialty store, or more like a tractor supply?

Julius Mary: Yeah, they don’t, I don’t think they stock any 4-gallon-per-minute machines there. We got our first 4 GPM from Harbor Freight. It’s called the Predator; it’s a 4.2-gallon-per-minute machine. That’s also in the PDF—I talk about that machine because it’s the cheapest 4-gallon-per-minute machine you can get, pretty much on the market that I’ve seen. But it doesn’t sacrifice quality at all! The thing is an absolute workhorse!

We had two of them, and we did a ton of jobs. We did, I think, three condo complexes, or two condo complexes, maybe a college campus, hundreds of houses with it, and no issues. Absolute workhorse! If you have a Harbor Freight in your area, definitely pick one of those up. If not, you can get a Simpson or any one of those machines, like a dual, as well online. You’re probably going to have to order it, or you might have a local...

Austin Gray: Okay, and you said that you started in a Honda CRV?

Julius Mary: Yeah! I loved it. Basically, you could fit this stuff in like a car, but if you’ve got any sort of SUV or any pickup truck, you’re probably going to be fine for being able to transport your equipment to and from jobs, right? Even a light-duty pickup truck.

Austin Gray: Yep!

Julius Mary: You could fit these machines into a compact SUV like the CRV; you’re just not going to get them into a sedan. I was trying to stuff a pressure washer one time, and it just wasn’t working!

Austin Gray: I remember a RAM 1500! Did you buy a truck?

Julius Mary: Yeah, we upgraded to a RAM 1500. We were using that year two, and that was also my personal vehicle. I still use it for the business, but we also have the van.

Austin Gray: What year did you buy the van, and how much was the van?

Julius Mary: We bought the van going into year three. It was like $8,000.

Austin Gray: From a reinvestment perspective, talk me through when it made sense for you to make that decision.

Julius Mary: We needed to get out of the CRV as soon as possible. A) It wasn’t a good look. B) The inside was completely destroyed by bleach, so all the carpets were just polka-dotted with bleach stains. It just didn’t look professional.

Also, another thing people are very worried about is starting without a truck—not looking good. It doesn’t matter in the beginning; just start! That’s one thing I want to touch on—just start, and then you can figure out the rest later. You will be able to get customers as long as you have that confidence, are able to sell your service, and you can reinvest later on.

So, we went to the truck, a pickup, because I wanted to get a pickup. Also, we couldn’t have all of our personal cars and another van exclusively for the business in our driveway, so I had to take a car that could be my personal and business truck. I got the pickup so I could use it as my personal vehicle, and then we also used it for the business. We used that for our whole second year.

Then winter going into our third year, we got the van. The reason we got the van is because we wanted somewhere to store all our stuff without having to take it out all the time. The weather is pretty bad here in New York pretty often, so we wanted to keep it all enclosed.

We didn’t want to have to deal with taking it all out every time and storing it somewhere else, like in the shed or whatever. We could have even done like a small box truck or something. A lot of people do like flatbed setups or other pickup setups, or they put a skit in. That could be something for the future because we only had our driveway to store the truck. I wanted to keep everything close, so that’s why we got the van.

I mean, $8,000 for an E250 is a bit expensive. You could get those things for like four or five grand. You can still find good deals on them, but yeah, at the time, the market was crazy. So, we got the truck, then built out that setup, and now we're still rocking it. The truck is an absolute rust bucket, but you know, it does the job. We cranked out over $200K in top revenue, and it’s definitely something you want to...

Austin Gray: Just for washing. Right now, for washing, we’re about...

Julius Mary: Two hundred twelve.

Austin Gray: And when you say just for washing, your truck is dedicated to what specific service?

Julius Mary: Yeah, power washing. The van is for power washing; like house washing, roof washing, gutter cleaning—that kind of stuff. So, we do all of our exterior cleaning out of the van.

Austin Gray: Okay, I see. Whenever you say you generated $212,000 in revenue, that was for your washing business, correct? You’re saying that with that one van and the one setup, you've generated $212K? Then your truck is used for your Christmas light business, which is a separate bucket of revenue. Correct?

Julius Mary: Yeah, exactly. So there you have it! One van, one pressure washer—do you have one or two in there?

Austin Gray: One power washer.

Julius Mary: One van, one power washer—you got multiple six figures of revenue right there as an OWNR OPS, along with one VA in the back office.

Austin Gray: Oh yeah! One thing I’m curious about—Julius, you had to make the decision to invest that $8,800 in the van rather than pay that money to yourself as an owner. This is one thing that continually comes up as I’m building our service business out here. You’ve got cash in the account because you’ve been putting in the work, invoicing people, and collecting checks. You can either pay yourself as an owner or reinvest in the growth of the business and that seems to be a recurring decision that has to be made. What was your cash account like whenever you decided to invest that $8,800?

Julius Mary: Well, first off, did you buy it with cash or did you get a loan?

Austin Gray: Okay, yeah, we bought it with cash, very, very sketchy. Those transactions, just like all my vehicle purchases, always so sketchy. Where were you in your business? Where was the cash account sitting? At what point did you feel like it was healthy enough to go and invest $8,800 in a van?

Julius Mary: That was after we were at—I think if I was to take a guess—our bank account was at like maybe $40K. We had like $30K to $40K in there, and that was in the winter. So, my brother was still in the business, so in the winter, we weren’t really doing any revenue-generating activities.

Thinking about it now as the solo owner, having much more money in the bank account, and still worrying about how I’m going to manage the money over the winter, we weren’t in the hottest position in terms of a safety net. But, you know, I knew we needed the van, and so there was no second-guessing it. I said, “We’re buying this thing.” We met some dude in a very sketchy area, and we actually looked at a few vans. Some guy tried selling us a van with like 800,000 miles on it; he rolled back the odometer. The thing was falling apart, and it said it had like 880,000 miles.

I was about to hand this guy the money right there, and my brother was like, “No, we should—he’s like, ‘I don’t know about this. We should check it out.’” I was like, “You know what? You’re right; we should run the VIN.” We ran it, and the last reported odometer reading was like 400,000 or 500,000 miles! I was like, “Jesus Christ!”

But, yeah, that’s, you know, the oldest time. Do you reinvest? How much do you reinvest? How much do you pay yourself? We didn’t really pay ourselves much, and I still have this issue of how much to pay myself. Now, I’ve been getting my books in order and everything, and the whole back end is tightening up now so I can actually see how much to pay myself, so it’s not worrisome anymore.

But we didn’t really start paying ourselves a lot of money until this year. I could have, but being that it was both of us, we had to split that too. So it was like, “Alright, both of us are not going to make too much money,” and we could just reinvest a lot of it back into the business.

That’s something you just have to come down to knowing your numbers, pretty much. There’s no other way to decipher that.

Austin Gray: I have run a couple of small businesses before, so I had sort of an idea for how to approach this very early on whenever I came in to start a service business. I pay myself a salary, so I’m W2 as an employee of the business, which I do believe is important, especially if you have an interest in buying real estate because one thing that’s hard as a self-employed individual is to get qualified for real estate loans.

I learned in my 20s that if you could declare—I mean, obviously, discuss everything with the CPA—I’m not a CPA. But for me, once we set up the LLC and hired people, we declared as an S-Corp. I put myself on salary for—what they call is like a reasonable salary you, as an owner, have to pay yourself because your salary is taxed differently, and your owner distributions are taxed differently.

So, like I said, consult a CPA on that, but it is important if you have a desire to buy real estate. I just want to mention this for anybody else listening out there who is starting their own business because I made the mistake early on in my 20s of not understanding that, then running into it. It just makes it more challenging whenever you go to apply for a real estate loan.

Also, I’ve fixed and flipped condos; I’ve built my own house here, so I’m consistently every couple of years going to be doing real estate deals on the back end. It’s really important for me to, like, when I started the business, to put myself on salary as soon as I could.

But, you know, every business is different. I mean, you’ve got to get the business going. The first three months of our business was just building the bank account for reserves. So, I could go make that first hire, and then I think month five or six of operating, I put myself on salary.

Julius Mary: Yeah, you definitely do! You’ve got to make money before you can pay yourself. That’s for sure! And the only way to do that is to get out there and start. So for all the people that are just continuing to watch YouTube videos and sitting on their ass, just get out there!

I literally sent my little brother, who’s in college. He’s always asking me, like, you know—he’ll text me randomly, “What do you think about this business?” or, “Have you come across this?” So, I sent him all your tweets recently. I love the pressure washing business, especially if you’re in college. It seems like a very straightforward service that you could offer in pretty much any service area. Am I right on that?

Julius Mary: Yeah!

Austin Gray: Okay, so 100%. There’s not much nuance to it—there are certain little things that, you know, each market has its specific little niche or niche. In the South, there’s a lot of concrete, so surface cleaning is huge down there.

Here, we only have asphalt driveways, so we don’t do a lot of that. It’s mostly decks, patios, that kind of thing, but it’s still pretty much the same process for everything. You’re just blasting something with high pressure. When I'm talking about house washing, it’s all the same stuff too. It’s the same soap, same equipment, same chemicals —it’s standard.

It’s something that anybody could learn on YouTube by watching a few videos, right?

You’ve learned how to dock; you’ve learned how to run a pressure washer. You’ve identified that you want to start a pressure washing business. What is the lowest hanging fruit in any part of the country? Go anywhere, whether it be concrete, asphalt, or houses. What’s the lowest hanging fruit to go get your first job?

Julius Mary: You could literally go knock on someone’s door and ask if you could clean their driveway—$200-$300 bucks, whatever you want to charge. A small driveway is $200. I’ll do it right now—bang it out. It might take you two or three hours because you don’t really have good equipment yet, but hey, you just made $200!

You might make that in a whole day working at some other job. If you know how to wash houses, I mean this is even easier, especially if you’re in an area like me where you’re not going to be surface cleaning like that. You could either be offering to clean people’s decks, or you could just find a house that’s got algae all over the siding and offer to wash it for them.

Everybody wants a clean house, you know? Who doesn’t? People like things clean. The car washing industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. Pressure washing is getting up there; I don’t know about billions yet.

But every single person wants things cleaned—companies pay a lot of money for this, and people do too. You could easily go out there, find a small house that’s got algae all over the siding, that looks green. Knock on their door, offer to wash it for them, and say, “$200-$300 bucks. We’ll wash your house; it’s going to look great!”

You don’t understand how many people want to get their stuff cleaned but just either won’t do it because the opportunity isn’t right in front of them, or they just haven’t thought about it. You go to someone’s house—you’re literally at their front door offering the service. It’s hard for them to say no, especially when their siding is covered in green.

It’s not complicated! You don’t have to get all crazy about how you're getting priced out and how you’re going to send the invoice—that sort of stuff. Just get a CRM, find out what you want to make per hour, guess how long it’s going to take you to do the job, and then figure it out as you go.

Say you quote it at three hours, but it takes you six; okay, so now learn from that and adjust on your next job. Who really cares? If you want to start a business, there are sacrifices that you have to make. One sacrifice is the fact that you’re going to have to sacrifice your time at some point.

And, I mean, you said the pressure washer you need to go buy is $1,200 bucks. Just think about it this way: how many jobs do you need? How many $200 jobs do you need to go pay off your first piece of equipment? Who cares if it takes you five, six, seven, or eight hours—whatever it takes! But you’re going to learn from doing that first driveway.

Then you’re going to start raising your prices a little bit, and next thing you know you’re doing $500-$600 jobs. One of the greatest things about these kinds of service businesses is that you work really hard at just getting the small things going, and you start building up that online presence.

Then, all of a sudden you’ll get a commercial lead for an entire condo complex or a Sam’s Club parking lot or whatever it might be, and you’re like, “Holy crap! Do I even have the capability to do this?” But of course, you want to pursue the opportunity and see what you can do there. Just put on your complete business hat and BS your way into the sale, you know?

I learned this the hard way—we turned down the Sam’s Club parking lot job, and I kick myself in the butt for it all the time because I thought we were unqualified. I thought we couldn’t do it, and that was just like that little mental devil telling me, “You’re not qualified for this. You don’t know anything.”

But we could have figured it out because then we got two other condo complex jobs, a college residence hall job, and I’m like, “Wow! We’re operating lifts now; we’re doing all this crap that I would never have imagined.”

That’s what I’m saying: what’s so great about these kinds of businesses is that you don’t know the opportunities that are going to come to you. You’ve just got to start, put in the work, and keep working hard, and you can bet that you’re going to get some pretty crazy opportunities.

Let’s dive into the commercial side. How did you get those leads, and where do you think those came from?

Julius Mary: Crazy story! One of them we got through a yard sign—a $4 yard sign yielded a $177,000 job. That’s something I like to promote on Twitter because it’s good attention-grabber, but it’s also real. It happened! It was a $4-$450 yard sign. There’s a gutter-cleaning guy—no, not a gutter-cleaning guy; he’s a roofing and gutter install company. He saw one of our yard signs that was right outside his office.

He does work for this big condo complex; he got asked to power wash and wanted to subcontract the job. It was a big building, so he saw one of our signs, gave us a call. My brother picked up and said, “Hey, I’m looking to get a quote on getting this big building over in White Plains cleaned.”

My brother told me, “How big is this building?” He said, “It’s like five stories,” whatever it was—it was huge.

We had never come close to seeing anything this big in our business before, and this was also our second year in business. My brother goes over there to quote the job. He heads on over in the little black bean, the Honda CR-V, meets with the guy, puts on his little businessman hat, and plays it off like we were way bigger than we were and way more experienced than we were. You know, of course you want to sell yourself!

A few months later, after we sent them a quote, went through the condo and all that—we landed the job! We were like, “Alright, now we’ve got to figure out how to actually do this.” We had to rent a lift and figure out all that; it was a very technical job because the land around it was just so uneven with trees.

It was pretty intense, but we got it done in about four days, and we made 17 grand in four days from a $4 yard sign. We netted over 80% on that job—not bad at all!

Then the other jobs we got from college—we got through Google. The property caretaker or whatever his role is called found us on Google and gave us a call. We were one of the first companies to answer our phone, so we got over there as soon as possible, quoted the job, and he had a few other quotes, of course.

It was a state school, and they were required to get a few quotes, but just based on the fact that we were one of the first companies to answer our phone and we were the quickest to get there to quote the job, we got it. He loved that. He saw that we were young and we were hustling and that we knew kind of what we were talking about, even though we didn’t. Then we won that job because of that.

These are all things you’ve got to take into account. You’ve got to be able to answer your phone, do things with speed—people want things done yesterday, especially these days. That’s something you’ve really got to handle with speed.

If people are calling for quotes today, you better get them that quote by the end of the day! You know, that’s one of those things that’s going to put you ahead of many other businesses—all the others!

Austin Gray: The last condo job was also an organic Google lead.

Julius Mary: Okay, so when did you invest in the website?

Austin Gray: We actually got a website in year one; like, right from the start. But it was a horrible website! It was one of these local splash marketing companies that cold-called us. For some reason, I was like, “You know what? This sounds pretty cool—why not?” It was like $150 or something, and it was crap!

It was horrible! It was like a little landing page, almost, with all these stock images, but you know I had our logo on it. We were like, “Yeah, sweet! We got a website now; this is cool!” After a week, I was like, “Wow, this thing really sucks!”

But they also set up a Google listing. I think it was a few weeks or a few months where I was like, “Alright no, this needs to be redone.” I redid the website myself, and we went through many websites to get to the point where we are now.

But if I was just starting out, I’d build yourself a simple Wix, Squarespace, whatever it is—website. You don’t have to pay someone to do it in the beginning; you could do it yourself and make it look really good, and that will go a long way. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on some crazy website in the beginning, and you also don’t want to go with one of the companies that will just make you a little landing page.

Austin Gray: You said the first company set up your Google My Business. Do you think…

Julius Mary: Yeah, they set up the Google thing. Do you think...

Austin Gray: Yeah! That’s so simple to do yourself! What’s the balance of lead flow from your Google My Business, just organic versus like, do you do LSA ads? Do you do Google Ads?

Julius Mary: We do LSA. Yep. This year, we didn’t do any Facebook ads. Last year, after year one, we really didn’t run as many Facebook ads. It wasn’t working out too well. I didn’t put too much time into it year three, and same thing this year. We didn’t really focus at all on Facebook ads.

But we’re hovering around our local organic rankings; that’s our bread and butter right there. We put a lot of money into our SEO. We’re constantly having our website guy building out backlinks, blog posts, and that kind of thing so we could start ranking for other keywords in farther areas.

Our Google listing—you know you want your Google listing, a good website, and your social media—your backlinks and all that kind of stuff! So, our organic rankings and our Google listing bring us most of our jobs. We also get some jobs from yard signs. We put out some yard signs, and we also do a little bit of door hangers—not so much anymore. When I have a guy, I’ll have him go put out the door hangers and stuff.

That’s something you could outsource. But it’s pretty much just organics and referrals. We get a lot of repeat customers, so we’ll send out some email campaigns once spring starts to roll around, and then we get people scheduled in.
Google Ads, we haven't done too much with. That’s something I want to test a little more next year, but it’s all a matter of finding the right companies to do this. I hired one company to run our Facebook Ads, and they were the worst Facebook ads I’d ever seen in my life! The copies were horrible; the creatives were horrible.

I’m paying them tons of money, and they’re supposed to be like crazy professional Facebook advertisers, and their ads were worse. I ran better ads my first year when I knew nothing about advertising. What the hell is this? They gave me all these excuses!

Austin Gray: I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, but yeah, to wrap up your question, this is tough going through subcontractors who don’t pan out or don’t do what they say they’re going to do.

If you do have any recommended contractors for websites or Google, you can send those over to me if you want to add those to the show notes. We have people who we love working with, and I’m happy to add those into the show notes.

The most important thing—and I think you and I are in agreement on this—is that you need Google My Business! In my mind, that’s the most important. But if you don’t have the website to support your Google My Business, I believe you immediately lose credibility with your customer.

Then, third, social is more just for brand awareness. I don’t know if you get jobs from organic social or not, but I really don’t know. I can’t really— I haven’t been able to track any back to it; it’s more so the fact that when people view our socials, they immediately know that we are a legit business, and they can see the operations on our back end.

Julius Mary: Yeah, it’s just reassurance!

Austin Gray: Exactly! But it helps with your website and your rankings because of the backlinks; things like that—if it’s all pointing to your website, you have it linked. That’s good for that. But Facebook—Facebook groups—go into organic posts on Facebook.

Julius Mary: Yeah, organic Facebook—oh yeah! We’ve gotten a few jobs from organic posts on Instagram and Facebook, but not, you know, nothing substantial. Facebook local groups, though, that is pretty much one of the best ways to get customers, especially in the beginning when you have no brand awareness or reputation.

You just hop into these groups. You want to interact with other businesses. There are local networking groups or local business groups, local tag sale groups—like all these different kinds of groups. Most of them don’t allow businesses to post every day; there are certain days.

Like on Tuesday in this group, you can post if you’re a business owner. Post a little brief description of what you do; you do that and stay consistent with that. Interact with other businesses. Create your business page for your business. You do that; you can join them with your personal or business page and start posting your nice before-and-afters too. Start to build a little reputation in there, and people will see that.

A lot of people hang out in these Facebook groups; a lot of our target customers are there. People in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. I know a lot of other owners who get a lot of business from these groups. They just hit them hard, but the key is to not be spammy and to abide by the rules, or you’re going to get kicked out.

That’s just a little tidbit of information there!

Austin Gray: One thing we haven’t touched on is Home Advisor. I know you mentioned you used Home Advisor when you were telling your story in the beginning. I’ve had it on my list to come back to. While we’re on the marketing topic, before we move on, how do you use Home Advisor to go get leads?

Julius Mary: Home Advisor is now Angie’s List. I don’t know how their leads are now, but when we started, there was a whole debate on using these kinds of companies because they send you leads, but you’re paying a lot of money for these leads that just won’t pan out.

But it worked out pretty well for us, where you know they send you a lead, but they also send it to every other contractor in the area for that service. You’ve got to hop on it right away. Call the lead if it’s something you want to do, you accept it, call them, and get out there. You give them a quote, and you’ve got to kind of have your sales process dialed in—or at least be quick and be personable—get there so that you can close them before anybody else does.

Because it’s a race! It’s pretty much like Uber for service businesses. You’ve got to hop on these jobs as quickly as possible, and you will get charged for them even if you don’t get the job. So, that’s why there’s a bit of a gray area there, but you can get refunded for some bad leads; you know?

We did a lot of that. They’re expensive; you’re paying like sometimes $40-$50 per lead, and it might be like a $200 job. But in the beginning, it’s a great way to get some initial customers. I don’t know how it works now; I don’t know if Angie’s List is still decent. I know a lot of people talk about it, but you know, it’s just something to test out. Different things work differently in different areas.

Yelp might work; I know some people that kill it with Yelp ads. They never worked for us; I know a bunch of other people for whom they’ve never worked. But, then of course, like I said, on the opposite side of the spectrum in some areas, it just kills.

You’ve got to really just kind of dial in what works in your area, what doesn’t, and then kind of just run it.

Austin Gray: Okay! Is there anything else you want to touch on from service-based business marketing?

Julius Mary: Oh, how could we miss that one? That is the biggest thing! The biggest thing! Man, I haven’t even... That’s like the one thing we did right from the beginning: we’ve got to get Google reviews! Whenever you buy something, I think it’s like 90% of people that buy something look at the reviews before they do.

That’s also a huge factor in your organic or local organic search ranking. The more reviews you have, the higher you’re going to be up on Google’s list. The more people are going to find you, the more organic calls you’re going to get, and the more money you’re going to make.

It’s just like reviews equal gold! It’s— there’s like nothing…

Austin Gray: Tell me how you get with the marketing. Talk me through the process. People get all worked up about how to get reviews, and it’s as simple as just asking!

It starts with doing a good job. It starts with being a personable person, selling the job, doing it, you know, to a high standard—making the whole process easy. Getting them to quote within, you know, the day by the end of the day—quick quotes—they accept it, great!

Get them scheduled in as soon as possible! Do the job; do a good job. People like speed; people like quality. You do that, you ask them at the end of the job after you show them everything, say, “Everything looks great! All that algae is washed off, the house is now white again and beautiful pearl white!

Would you mind leaving us a review on Google? It helps us out so much, and we’re just trying to build our online presence a little bit.” You don’t even have to say that; you could just say, “It helps us out so much! I'll send you a review link,” and then you know they’ll most people will be more than happy to do it! “Oh yeah, for sure! Send that over.”

But the thing is you’re going to send the review link, and a lot of people aren’t going to write you one. So, what you could do to kind of combat this is either send them the link on the spot right there, which I don’t really like doing this because it’s just kind of like then you’ve got to sit there and wait for them. You could do that, but what we do is follow up with them.

We send them the link with the invoice as soon as possible, right there. If they don’t write the review within a day or two, just follow up and say, “Hey! I just wanted to make sure that review link worked.”

You’re not being pushy; you’re not being annoying. You’re just following up with them to remind them if they haven’t done it or if they forgot or whatever it might be. Just following up to make sure that review link worked, and if not, I could send another one.

“Thank you so much once again—it helps us out so much!” Boom! If they don’t leave a review after that, I don’t know what the deal is. You can follow up again, but they’re just liars.

That will go a long way! Now, we have it set up so we send a review link that gets triggered automatically through our CRM, Jobber. After the invoice is paid, they get a review link sent right to their email.

Austin Gray: That’s not as effective because you still have to follow up most of the time, but it’s definitely something you’ve got to automate.

And I agree, like I’ve tried. I’ve done the whole send the review right on the spot thing, and if you send it, you’ve got to be willing to sit there and literally look them in the eye and say, “Hey, do you mind leaving that review right now?” Then wait for them to do it, which is just...

Yeah, it’s an uncomfortable sit. It’s a weird situation. I’ve done it before; it’s a weird look! I don’t really like it. What I prefer doing is whenever I have the conversation with them, like you do, on the spot before we leave the job, I always give them—so I set the precedence up on the front of the job.

I say, “Hey, our goal is to deliver five-star service on this job. We’re not leaving until you’re 100% satisfied enough for us to leave a five-star review.” I’ve already planted the seed from the beginning, at the front end of the job.

Then when we get to the back end and we’re doing the final walkthrough, I just say, “Hey, is there anything else that you’d like us to do while my equipment is here that would achieve that five-star service level?”

And I love it when people are like, “Nope, it looks great! Send me the invoice.”

What I’ve learned to do at this point is send them the invoice while I’m there because Jobber makes it so easy.

I text it to them. I just tell them, “Hey, it’s going to come straight to your phone.” Give me one second—boom, boom, boom! Text it, and then I email it to them so that they have it in their email inbox as well.

Then I just say, “Hey, I’m going to send you a review link as well.” What I normally like to do is send the review link after they pay the invoice because the most important thing is that you get paid on your job, right?

So, the way I view it is I don’t want to be like double-dipping on following up on my invoice like, “Hey, can you pay the invoice?” and, “Hey, can you pay the review?”

I’m following up on two things at once, so my main focus is to get that invoice paid first. Once they pay it, I mean, you’ve got to think about it.

We’re so distracted in today’s day and age, right? I think people have great intentions, and if you deliver five-star service, they want to leave you a review! Would you agree?

Julius Mary: For sure!

Austin Gray: It’s just that we’re so distracted. So, I try to time that link up, especially when I get that notification from Jobber like, “Oh, they’ve paid the invoice.”

It’s like I’ll send them a personal text: “Hey, thanks so much for paying the invoice! We really appreciate your business! I’m going to send you that review link right now—sound good?”

“Yeah, okay.” Boom! Then I text it to them, and that has been like the highest converting process on my end. It sounds like it’s very similar on your end too!

Julius Mary: That’s brilliant—the timing! Because if you think about it, if you text it to them while you’re on the spot and then you continue having a conversation with them, they’re just going to forget.

I do this all the time if people text me and I read the text, then I continue having a conversation or doing what I’m doing. It’s not that I don’t want to reply to that person; it’s just that I forgot and I don’t have a reminder.

When you're running a business, you've got a million different things and your customers have a million different things on their to-do list!

Austin Gray: Right! So I think that, yeah—exactly! That makes sense. I was just going to say, I think the timing of is very important.

Going back to my questions for both of us: are you considering bringing someone on to take this load from you? Yes, there’s value in being hands-on for sure.

Julius Mary: For sure! You learn all these nuances in the field so that whenever you do go to hire for your next role, you’ve got a clear idea of what you need, based on your experience.

I don’t know of anybody who’s creating these SOPs online right now so you can just say, “Hey, I’m starting a service-based business. What does the process look like for review?” Have you found it?

There are so many processes like this that you do have to create.

Austin Gray: No, the little nuanced details that nobody talks about!

Julius Mary: No!

Austin Gray: That’s why we’re going to change the game here. It’s going to be big; I’m excited.

Julius Mary: There’s a revolution here! There’s so much opportunity in service-based businesses.

We’re a little over an hour here, and my goal was to shoot for right around an hour. Where are you going to go with this business? What are the next big hurdles that you have to get over in the short term?

Julius Mary: Next year, my main goal for the business is to find my right-hand man—my general manager, head field tech—whatever you want to call it. I got to a point this year where I was off the truck for most of the jobs. I had my guy doing pretty well; he didn’t end up working out.

I got another guy who actually quit this past Monday at 8:00 a.m., right when he was supposed to be at work. It was a terrible situation! But it’s what you run into; you’ve got to adapt.

My main goal right now is to get out of the field for at least the majority of the jobs and get a guy that I could trust to run the whole field operation. Then I can just focus on the back end—sales, marketing, stuff like that—actually growing the business and getting more commercial jobs.

We want to start supplementing more commercial revenue in during the slower months to kind of make up for the lack of residential. From there, that’s pretty much it. We’re crushing it in residential right now, so I know that if we sprinkle in a few more commercial jobs every year, that could take our revenue to a whole other level. That would be not too much effort because doing those numbers with residential is a lot harder than doing that with a few commercial jobs.

Right now, it’s just kind of the main goals: finding the next key hire, getting everything tightened up on the back end this winter, and then getting more commercial jobs. We’ll be working on cold outreach, all that kind of stuff.

Austin Gray: How are you going to find that next role?

Julius Mary: We’re going to test a few different things out. I’ve hired from jobs; I’ve hired from a local placement agency to help people find jobs—specifically immigrants. It works out pretty well! These people come here, and they’re looking for jobs, and this company connects them with other businesses, which is cool.

Then, like I said, Indeed; I run some Facebook ads. Facebook ads, you know, they work, but you’ve got to put some effort into that if you want to find quality candidates through there.

It’s pretty much just that—Indeed. We’re talking to people too! Like you said, you found one of your key hires through what? Is that a gas station?

One thing I’ve been challenging myself to do is if I have a gut feeling about somebody or if I see someone who looks like they know what they’re doing—like this dude had a transfer tank in the back of his truck and a snow plow in the front.

Talk to those people! Strike up conversations! “Hey! You know diesel’s expensive.” Whatever! Just be good at talking to people. If you’re uncomfortable, get over it.

Just strike up a conversation—“Hey! My name is Austin. What do you do for work?” and then just ask people about what they do. Get to know them; get to know people in your local community.

Everything is sales! I know a lot of people are like, “I don’t want to be a sleazy salesman,” or whatever, but if you’re signing up to be an entrepreneur, you’ve got to learn to sell. You’re selling every single day—whether you’re selling jobs or selling people to come join your team.

I met one guy at the gym yesterday—a guy my age—doing outdoor services in the summer. I said the same thing: “Hey, I run a business, and I’m looking for great people to join our company. We pay better than our competitors, and we’ve got great benefits!”

If you don’t have benefits right now, tell them that that's your goal: “Hey, my goal is to get to a point where we are an actual company that provides a great place for you to work and allows you to afford your expenses. I want my employees to have a W2 job that allows them to save up to buy a house.”

We all know you make a lot more money in real estate than your day job. If people have that interest, I want that for them: to make a W2 wage that they can go and apply for a mortgage and make that a reality.

But the most important thing is just asking! Just telling people, “Hey! I’m hiring. If whatever you’re doing doesn’t work out, give me a call.” You never know when that could lead to them coming to you in the future.

Julius Mary: Of course! I’ve done the same thing. I haven’t done it as much as I should be, but that’s a great point. In your local market, you don’t have to be using Indeed or any of these crazy job sites.

I’m in a very similar scenario that you are right now. I’ve got a couple of people working with us, but I need to go find—like, I wrote it down yesterday—I need to hire for—well, we have two people in the pipeline that we’re going to make offers to, and then I need to go find two more this next year. So I’m literally putting on the hat of playing recruiter right now.

I’m doing all the research I can! If you have any advice for how to use Indeed, I’ve never done that before. If there are any other websites out there or if anybody listening to this has advice on the best ways to hire for local talent—Julius, I also think—and I tweeted about this the other day! I got a call from a guy from Colorado Springs, which is like three hours away from us. He’s like, “Dude, can I apply for a job with you guys?”

I think Twitter can be a good avenue as well. If you’re active on Twitter, you say, “Hey man, we’re hiring. I’m looking for somebody to grow with us.” Yeah.

I did one thing—I’m kind of ranting now, but I thought about that. I’ve put on this hat of hiring. I watched some of the sweaty startup stuff, and I found it very interesting because I’ve been brainstorming how to incentivize people in this day and age.

One thing he’s saying is the easiest way to do it is to just come up with a base salary and a percentage of revenue share—a small percentage of top line revenue as a bonus at the end of the year. That’s one thing I’m going to test when I go make these next hires.

I like that because there’s got to be some incentive that’s not just the salary or just the hourly wage. People want some kind of performance-based compensation. I was testing that a little bit with my first employee, and it seemed like it definitely motivated him to work a little harder, as opposed to any other creative ideas for how to go find local talent.

That’s one area I am lacking in, and I’m going to need help from you for that, so I’ll be hitting you up!

Julius Mary: I could help you out with the Indeed stuff. I’ve gotten decent at figuring out how to do that, but it’s just putting yourself in the positions where these people are—Home Depot, Ace Hardware, gas stations—and just talking to people like you said.

Have you met Chris Berg (@chrisbergtweets)? His name is Chris; he’s a super cool dude, and I want to have him on the podcast! I met him, and he’s a savvy entrepreneur.

He’s helped me so much as far as thinking about hiring. I want to have him on the podcast.

Austin Gray: I can make a connection too!

Julius Mary: One thing he was saying is, “Dude, just go to your local restaurants! Go to your farm and ranch stores; go to your Ace Hardwares and just post flyers like crazy! Find the bulletin boards and post those flyers, and do that this winter!”

Austin Gray: Good idea!

Julius Mary: I know they allow that! I know for our farm and ranch stores, our hardware stores—they’ve got like job boards, like bulletin boards—local restaurants too!

Austin Gray: Sweet!

Julius Mary: Yeah!

Austin Gray: Is there anything else you want to talk about in this first episode?

What I’d like to do is bring you back on to discuss the Christmas lights episode or excuse me, bring you back on in a different episode to discuss the Christmas light business for sure.

As long as we’re staying on power washing, do you have anything else you’d like to share with the audience here?

Julius Mary: Just start! You know, if you're looking to do something, make a change in your life—just start! Get out there! You’re not going to do...

Austin Gray: You heard it from the man himself.

Thank you guys for listening to the OWNR OPS Podcast, and we will see you guys in the next episode. Thanks for being on Julius!