A Business You Can Start with $153

imagine going from $153 in the bank to $58,000 a month in Revenue well that's what these two guys did Carter Brandon running Pink's cleaning service and started a business right here in Austin Texas let's steal all their homework and get into how you can do it too let's break this down so you started selling boots and you did Live Events naturally you guys started a cleaning company what happened that's right so we got laid off during Co and Carter and I went on a walk once day and we observed you know who's not laid off

all these service people we saw 15 trucks in a half mile radius of my house and so we were like let's start a service company and they were Recession Proof we're watching these guys crush it in a time when supposedly unemployment was at an all-time high and we're like well these guys definitely didn't get hit and we just saw Hey Nobody's showing up on time nobody's doing what they say they're going to do what a low barrier to entry to just be the top guy by doing those simple things I love that because basically you

guys went from your first first year you did $200,000 in Revenue then you did about $400 $500,000 then this year you'll do somewhere between $700,000 and up is that right be a million yeah should be should be over a million Yeah so basically you've more than doubled every single year you started this business and you got some pretty crazy margins what like 37% yeah about 40 that's after paying our salaries yeah two salaries which maybe not every window cleaner would need now when you came into the business you also didn't need that much I think

you guys started it with less than a Grand Am I right yeah I I found a receipt the other day from Home Depot that was like $150 she got buckets soap squeegee super simple and we said man 150 bucks we got a business yeah that's all you needed let's go from there first of all I own part of this company got to tell you that the second is you're not going to have the same experience and results as anybody it's probably not typical it's going to depend on your background education effort application and the probability

of any business winning or losing this is the be an adult section I think we should talk about the sexiest part of a service business in cleaning which is revenue that keeps coming back to you the recurring Revenue model we call it the magic of Pinks the magic of the cleaning business but essentially we do restaurants weekly where they're every Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. cleaning we have a card on file so our guys in the field click done it dings their card and sends a receipt to them but the beauty about this it's residential and

Commercial so we're saying the same thing to residential clients it's like hey I can save you money because your windows are going to get dirty again and we probably be back here maybe one more time this year maybe quarterly as the seasons change let's get you on the calendar we'll cut you a little bit of discount and then we can plan for what's coming up so Brandon likes to always say your past self will thank your future self what makes it really great is for your teams you gain amazing operational efficiency your teams they know

where to park they know where the water source is they know the customer your margin gets better cuz you're doing them quicker you know what to expect yeah you're saving time saving money that's the really sexy stuff Mar sexy stuff while speaking of those uniforms this is not what the guys who clean my windows look like what's the deal this was the first thing we did was like Hey if we're going to be doing this outside we need to stand out people are going to see us we are our own Billboards we got to look

our best so if we dress the part our work is going to reflect that so if we get together put on nice clean stuff our work's going to be nice and clean so basically the the rule here is like you make the money that people think that you're worth and you have reoccurring clients because they trust you because you have a brand that doesn't look like everybody else is 100% yeah this speaks to trust this says hey I think this is actually going to do what it says it's going to do and when you have

a uniform on it helps get you places that you shouldn't be otherwise so it's helped us sell so much um walking into restaurants wearing the uniform and just kind of hustling with the general manager people love like businesses that don't ever close we can just blend into the environment and honestly a lot of like business owners enjoy us being there because it's like hey it's this little style piece it doesn't look at a place guys aren't smoking sigs on the job it's clean does everybody have to have do you get a haircut like a is

there those are just the people that apply surprisingly enough it's like mullet or mustache and you're hired I love that let's get super tactical on brand so you don't have to go out and get VC money spend a ton in order to make millions in fact you guys started a logo for this company that's now being worn by rock stars but it cost what how much money we spent like 50 bucks from a friend that needed some work it was a buddy that he could like do some sort of graphic design work and we're like

you're the man for the job turns out some of the best money you've ever spent was on brand too right what was it it was the van wrap a billboard that drives around town um and it's parked in a central location in Austin and what do you call it we call it marketing it's so brilliant 4K you get a branded billboard that goes all over best money we could possibly spend then the Vans do you guys have to buy that thing for 75k or you leas those bad boys we leased one bought the other three

so for about 1,000 bucks a month you could lease one of those trucks and then you basically can still be profiting every single month while you own a really expensive piece of equipment it's one job yeah pay for and one so I think a lot of times people see all these numbers stack up and they get freaked out at the cost of the van but they don't realize there's this thing called a loan and you could use it all right Alfred of the day fit check people are always asking man where do you get that

we're about to tell you guys cuz you know we'll start at the top we got the hats Port Authority check them out.com new.com we got the shirts this from Dickies shout outs dickies with the pants to match thank you Dickies for hooking these full outfits up oh don't forget we got the big pin for closing deals you always got to have one on you you guys are trading on the fact that for dozens of years if not hundreds of years people who officially did things they looked official they wore uniforms so talk to me about

why did you start this and what does each item cost for your guys 100% well first of all we pay for everything m from hats shoes socks the full get up is always paid for but we looked at people like the Milkman so tightly dressed these like nostalgic characters like The Body Shop mechanic and we're like dude there's something to that it looks Pro and you produce Pro work first things first was Mak an incredible uniform that we wanted to wear and feel comfortable going to work in and then we had people reaching out wanting

to buy stuff so we were like oh I think we need to make a shop we need to put this stuff online and that's kind of what led to making a bunch of this stuff I think the best cleaning joke wins gear from pinks comment your best cleaning joke we'll send you a little something you guys are walking Billboards when people see you down the street you look a certain way you got these outfits on your Young Guns you're bringing respect back to a trade while also being a a business card how many times do

you guys get work just cuz somebody goes what's what's this that was the only business model at the GetGo it's like if we were wearing the uniforms and we were walking up in down prominent streets we were getting business it's because we looked the part and I think at the end of the day nobody knows any window cleaning companies and we just wanted to be the only person you could think of and we thought the best way to do that was to look the park our strategy was simple whatever everybody else is doing let's do

the opposite of that yeah so every other window cleaning they're wearing cargo shorts flipflops and a oversized Polo we're like let's have fitted uniforms that look different and that goes for our social media as well like we're not posting before and after pictures cuz that's what everybody else does um rather we want people to be engaged in our content and then think oh wow I've never thought about window cutting but now all of a sudden I'm thinking about it because of this fun brand we want them to see our face see our guys faces instead

of just a clean window and we want them to resonate with the personalities behind it rather than just clean window we're in the people business how many of your people are chicks a lot of your clientele women a lot of the clientele was women a lot of our employees are dudes we had we one girl we're not opposed to it it just hasn't happened as well I think we could change that today don't you think we have our first female pinks that's an yeah that let's do it you're hired oh are you guys ready this

ready to go clean some houses guys what you think let's go baby get to work come on let's do this next step let's get you guys some clients we are right now in a spot where there's a bunch of businesses that you can potentially sell and you told me this brilliant way that you guys think about getting sort of an an anchor client yeah we love doing a free clean for someone we think hey that's probably an influential person in this say gated community or they have the premier corner lot and it's like if we

can get into a neighborhood just by doing this for free and they can tell our story it'll unlock the whole place for us so give me an example it's like a gated community and you see like a nice Corner House and you're like man we couldn't get in there unless we cleaned that house if you're especially early on it's like hey I need more business I'm not wasting time by going and giving a free clean what takes us an hour just to do the exterior I'm going to go hey do you mind if we just

come in we're going to knock out all these windows we'll clean them for you and then maybe we can leave a sign at the end we did a good job don't pay us they always ended up paying us but like we didn't ask for it and just hey maybe you can tell our story yeah well it's so good because one they're like look at these young Hustlers ex get excited and two then you could leave your sign but also your Van's out front for part of it twoo yeah so yeah strategic location for people driving

by and then getting to put that sign up so it unlocks the rest of the neighbor for us whenever we have a client um let's say it's that corner lot what we'll do is is we will go to the neighbors our Van's already out front they see the van they see us in our uniform and we say hey we're cleaning your neighbor's spot why don't we clean yours as well we can come at 1:00 or we can come at 3:00 or whenever it's less salesy it's more of a warm intro because their trust and neighbors

is already using us next step marketing like Beyonce let's talk about how to get free marketing dollars basically one I love the idea you do for lunches talk about that really quick yeah so we pay for all of our crew members lunch every day up to $15 we want them out and about at the cool lunch spots wearing the getups um because so many people go up to them and they're like hey what do you guys do and they're all equipped with business cards they all know how to sell so it's yeah generating tons of

leads for us we don't call it marketing spin we call it a marketing investment the second thing that you guys do that's totally unique is your Instagram is banana so talk to me about that's expensive to do people get freak leaked out to do a bunch of Instagram and you guys are kind of like actors like what's going on how fun would it be if like we just kind of started performing and we put a face behind the brand and started yeah Brandon had this idea of doing comp cleans was originally how all the videos

started back at it again comp clean of the week comp clean of the week comp clean of the week hey let's go to a local business that's just legendary and let's give them a free clean because hey man you guys are doing things right you've been doing it for a long time we'd love to highlight you and those are all like the morals that we want to assimilate with as well so that's kind of it all started yeah we just wanted to bless a local company and that was the heart behind it can we talk

about my favorite video in which I don't know which one's my favorite I feel like this one oh that's so good okay then second favorite is the baby one the lesson here is you can either spend a bunch of money on doing the things everybody else does you can get slightly riskier asymetric do some Crea takes that might not out in the beginning but they feel Humanity yeah yeah and I think there's something about the service industry where we have taken all the humanity out of it with all these private Equity firms owning everything they

suck out all of the margin they insert a bunch of Automation and all of a sudden every company looks the same all over the country and none of them care about you you're just a number and you guys are doing the opposite of that imagine I'm a Latino American Woman I've started many businesses sold some businesses and now I'm with two ambiguous guys two great looking guys two guys are they brothers are they not no knows nobody know either also whenever you guys want to shut the you guys cuz so you starting from the bottom

now you're doing Arenas you guys do a bunch of commercial sites like this you guys can make 20 30 a couple hundred, from doing different large scale sites right we could say that like this place generates enough business to just run one van out of them how do you get a commercial client like this they found us on Google and we answer the phone the beautiful part about the service business is it's simple if you answer the phone you show up on time you do what you say you're going to do you're going to have

a great business scaling up from zero to now doing millions in Revenue how do you stair step your way into this you buy a van you start doing jobs with that van that van hits capacity or it's when it's about to hit capacity buy another van hire two more guys get another van and have that as your sales Van and picking up odd jobs and then once it's busy enough to like not have as much time selling yeah you roll it right into the fleet and you're good to go so it's something we kind of

did early on if we hit a slow season or we really wanted to like see what we could ramp get that extra van before maybe you need it and just throw them out in the field selling so every single one of your guys is trained on both selling and doing so you have a really efficient Workforce that can move back and forth between the two and then we have a little rule we call the 230 rule where if you wrap up in that 230 3:00 range and you want to stay on the clock and keep

making money we'll send them out to different neighborhoods and just start door knocking so they stay on the clock they're selling and it's like a way for them to get their 40 hours they need and do you give them a cut of the commissions if they close something exactly we give them 10% of everything they sell so we have a few guys that are making like a few extra hundred bucks a month because they've sold monthly maintenance PL oh that's and they get part of that ongoing Revenue it's mail boox money to them wow I

love that model we want to take care of our employees and two if they do leave we get a 10% pay raise on those jobs amazing we had to get over ourselves because I think growing up the narrative was is if you work in a doctor's office or if you're a lawyer or a commercial real estate guy or a finance guy that's a good job and if you're a plumber a window cleaner a lawn care maintenance person then you are less than and you are secondary and I think like we believe that for like most

of our life until we started pinks and even when we started pinks it took us it took us some time to like really believe that like that truth that one without the window cleaner without the plumber without the lawn maintenance person our city would be a disaster disaster and so these jobs are essential and like that's why we started pinks to help tell that story you know what I learned here today entrepreneurship is hard you'll lose money and time and employees and have to clean windows but working at 9 to5 is really hard too you'll

sit behind a desk for 8 hours you'll have a terrible boss you won't like what you do and at the end of the day you won't be able to pass down your 9 to5 to the Next Generation and you might get fired so it's really up to you to choose your hard I think these two guys are doing a really rare thing which is telling the next generation of young men that no actually you don't have to raise millions of dollars in Silicon Valley in order to make a ton of money that Main Street millionaires

are actually all around us that the millions are often found in the boring and that in fact you shouldn't listen to what everybody is telling you on the news each and every single day that you have to go work for somebody else in order to have an extraordinary life in fact maybe you should just clean someing windows [Music] oh [Music] [Music]