As someone who has worked with hundreds of window cleaning business owners, one of the questions I get hit with on occasion is how the current economy will affect their current window cleaning businesses or a brand new window cleaning business just getting started.

I’m of the belief that overall you should see very little or no disruption of your window cleaning business at all. Sure…there may be “some” prospects who decide to hold off on getting their windows cleaned until they have more confidence in the economy. But will that directly effect us? No.

For example…let’s say you currently distribute 1000 flyers at any one time. The normal response is 1% if we remain conservative. So that’s 10 calls leading to 7 or 8 jobs. Ok…now let’s say in the back of your mind you’re thinking: “The economy is bad and a recession is coming”. Well, we can sit around and mope about it. Or we can get to work and distribute 1250 flyers instead of 1000 flyers to compensate for perhaps a less than 1% response due to a weak economy. No biggie.

So a .75% response on 1250 flyers leads to just about 10 calls which will once again lead to 7 or 8 jobs. Pretty elementary stuff here. Did we lose any business? Nope. We simply had to invest a few extra bucks to see the same returns, but there is NO dropoff in customers and jobs.

A couple of side notes:

-Your window cleaning business more than likely WILL be affected by the economy if most of your marketing is passive. I mean if you just rely on the yellow pages to generate callers, then you’ll be feeling the affects more than someone taking a more proactive marketing approach. But this would apply regardless whether the economy is bad or not.

-Do an evaluation of your target market. If you’re spending most of your time in middle income neighborhoods, then up the ante and go after the higher end upper income people. Of course you should be doing that anyway. Middle income folks usually don’t pay for a professional window cleaner to come in and clean their windows. They’re more the “do it yourself” type with some exceptions of course.

So again focus on the prospective customers with money. Sorry to be so blunt here, but as a publication recently stated, the people with high incomes are not letting the economy affect their overall lifestyle. They continue to act like consumers which means they will continue to “buy”. This means they’ll continue to seek out professional window cleaning companies to make their lives better.

And finally…I know it’s hard to avoid the constant bad news coming from the media as far as them saying “the economy is tanking”, “the U.S. Dollar is falling”, “we are in a recession”, blah, blah, blah. But you can’t let this affect what you do and how you market your business.

Because what it will do is paralyze you into doing nothing. You’ll buy into what everyone is saying so therefore the bad times WILL come true for you.

Ex: Back when I sold insurance, the common refrain was “nobody will buy insurance during the Christmas season”. So what did most insurance agents do? They stopped marketing. They bought into the negativity. Well…it happened to be false. I proved it because what I did during the holiday season was close my ears to this talk and turned on the heat when it came to marketing for new clients. Consequently November and December were traditionally my best months. And it set me up to start the new year in great shape. Other agents had to dust off their marketing cobwebs and start in January at ground zero because they were too busy moping around in November and December.

So give this some thought. Don’t buy into what the majority of the people believe. I’m sure there is a motivational phrase somewhere out there about this. But don’t ever follow the majority. Because if you do, you’ll end up with what the majority has which is a life without a lot of hopes, dreams, or success. Be different. Think “out of the box” and do/think the opposite of what most people doclick to read.

And as an added plus to you and your window cleaning business, since most window cleaners will in fact buy into the constant negativity and end up going at a slow place or no pace, this’ll open up the door even more for you to enter. While other insurance agents were sitting around waiting for the new year to begin, I was continuing to build my client base during what they said were “hard times”. Yeah…right. So it’s imperative that you not let outside influences of which we have no control over, get in the way of building, running, and growing successful window cleaning businesses.

All we have to do is make adjustments as mentioned in the above flyer example where I talk about bumping up your usual flyer distribution from 1000 to 1250. Boom. Problem solved and your business continues to grow.