Nah not really. This is a forum for discussion and part of that is perhaps learning from the journey you have taken and applying new advice along the way. Which would i thought goes to show a learning curve.
But also dont suppose to know all my affairs past or present and try n piece together little tit bits of information ive given in the past.
But since your curious:
From leaving school i did a couple of yrs cleaning windows with various people whilst i went through college. After college did various jobs mostly in sales up untill I fell out with management and had enough of the high pressure selling jobs and left work. So in 2003 and with a wife n 3young kids I needed another job and went back to windows. I was fortunate that a much older friend was cutting down his window cleaning life and wanted to rent out a large round. It was perfect timing.
Less than 6months in however he wanted to sell it and so I took a loan and bought the round or else be unemployed again. Within 2 years I had doubled that round and with good prices through canvassing and word of mouth based on reputation.
Later I got wind that another shiner in an area where some friends lived hadnt been seen for months and so i went and canvassed and eventually made another round, again with good prices.
My problem with prices was that they were good and stood for several years but also collectively from the empire I later trebled in size and rounds in three addition areas all built from scratch were enough for me and my family at the time to run two cars and have 2 - 3 holidays a year (family of five.)
The mistake I made was looking at my income collectively rather than individual jobs and thats when i noticed the price difference between my older work and that of the newer work. Yet i started to do something about that and perhaps lost some work on the way, whilst gaining new work to replace the old. (isnt that what we all do, infact we never stop doing that). So im not blurting any old crap out that ive not apllied myself.
More recently im remarried again with 3 very young kids and my wife has recently become very ill, thats why i work fast n efficiently and finish early so I can get home and look after or school my kids and havent got time to chase up my money by collecting. Hence why all my new work is on GoCardless.
Yes im still building my empire and replacing new work with old...... Who ever stops refining their work??!! Back 15 years ago, the options which we have as sole traders in equipment or payment collections werent there, theres no better time to make great changes in your business and this is what im doing. If I was to start all this again, I would certainly apply all ive learnt and apply this mentality now, ie customers paying online/direct debit or else i wouldnt clean them. Why NOT?? ive not had a single person question it or refuse the idea.
But this is why i get defensive no doubt like others do as well, as i have spent plenty of time, plenty of mistakes as well inorder to perfect either my technique on trad equipment or now with wfp. The amount of money and equipment I went through in the first six months alone was immense, because on trad work i had it down to a fine art and those first six months was trying alot of new ideas, methods and equipment to fine tune this new method to be as good, if not better than how I operated with trad tools.
Then i found this forum and learnt a couple more tricks, one being GoCardless that i would never of heard off without CIU.
So i may be relatively new to wfp compared to many on here, but ive been able to help out quite a number of people get into window cleaning over the many years (some by selling off large chunks of my own work to them) who have never done so before by training them up and getting rounds established for them. Ive also been able to help advice ones to transition from trad to wfp and by the end of this year another friend is upgrading.
The other day I spent a morning with a chap from another forum who due to bad health is thinking of upgrading to wfp and he certainly benefited from my setup, experience and advice.
My vids may be boring but I've learnt and watched many youtube vids before coming onto wfp and its nice to give back and ones subscribing to the channel is slowly increasing
Haha i was gonna put some derogatory comments in, just to see if anybody is still reading but even ive lost interest now
