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In this episode of Owned and Operated, we bring back Johnny Robinson aka SqueegeeGod as a guest, who shares updates detailing his start-up journey from window cleaning to launching several businesses and generating impressive revenue. Johnny also shares insights into hiring, marketing, and sales within the cleaning business, painting a vivid picture of the industry's challenges and opportunities. They also do a run-through on how they measure business performance and deal with competition and market changes, particularly in the wake of greater online visibility. To get the full picture of Johnny's journey, check out his previous episode before diving into this one.
Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter
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Owned and Operated Episode #93 Transcript
John Wilson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.
Let's get into it.
If you're a home service entrepreneur that's just starting out, or is early on in the journey, and you haven't broken the five million dollar revenue mark, we've got an event for you. This spring in Cleveland, March 19th to the 21st, we're hosting an event at my office. It's going to be awesome. Honestly, some of the most impactful visits of my career have been visits to companies that were larger than we were, that we could take lessons from, and see how they're doing stuff.
Like get a behind the scenes look, how are they structuring warehouse? How are they thinking about call center? Can I talk to their managers? Can I understand what their KPIs are? We're going to dive into all that stuff. We are here to help people get above 5 million in revenue. So join us in Akron, Ohio, March 19th to the 21st for a breaking 5 million event.
Love to see you there. Details are owned and operated dot com.
Today on Owned and Operated, we have Johnny Robinson. Johnny was on our show two, three years ago, and this was so much fun to bring him back on and talk about everything that's changed. So, I would encourage you, before you listen to this episode, check out, the last episode with Johnny, where we dive into his business that he has since sold and launched several others.
Welcome back to Owned and Operated. So today we have a returning guest back from 2021, Johnny Robinson or Squeegeegod on Twitter. We talked about power washing and window cleaning at the time, like two years ago. So we're excited to bring him back on to talk about what he's been up to over the past couple years.
Welcome to the show.
Johnny Robinson: Thanks for having me back man. It's been a long time. I'm excited to be here It seems like you guys have done some damage in the podcast world I saw you guys on the top of the chart. So that was cool to see
John Wilson: We're trying. We're having fun. It's an every Wednesday hobby that occasionally we get popular for.
Jack Carr: Yeah.
Johnny Robinson: That's awesome
John Wilson: We just redropped your last episode and it was a fun one to re listen to cause we were talking to some other guests and we were going through that. That business a little bit, but could you give us a little bit of the origin story for people that missed that last drop
Johnny Robinson: Definitely. Back in 2019 or 2017, I was 19 years old, just graduated high school, was going to college and worked my first job as a life guard was like took over my mom's car payments. They were like 460 a month. I was in Southern California. I was making like 800 a month after tax or something.
And I was telling my mom, like, Hey this isn't working out. I'm just going to work to pay for this car, basically. And she's like, Hey, like, that's life. Welcome to life. I'm like, there's gotta be a better way than this. So I get this bright idea to start a window cleaning company with my best friend Sergio, who's still my business partner to this day.
And he's my best friend growing up all through middle school high school. And we were like, Hey, let's start this window cleaning business. So with 150 bucks, we bought some polos from Walmart and some squeegees off Amazon. And we started knocking on doors. And little donut shops, liquor stores here and there and eventually built that business up, learned about, Google my business and building reputation and hiring and marketing and sales and learned all this stuff and eventually grew that business to about 65, 000 a month which was when I I think was on that, first owned and operated episode, it was still running the window cleaning business.
John Wilson: Yeah, still actively running it which you've had a big change since I think so but yeah still in it.
Johnny Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. I was still, it was still very much in it. And I think we still had like big goals to grow And I started tweeting about how I was running this window cleaning business remotely and people were eating it up. Just like follower count was growing like crazy. Like, how do I do it? How do I do it?
And I was like, what the heck? Like, what? Do people really want to know how to build a window cleaning business? Okay. Like this is kind of interesting. But it was, weird because we switched our whole model from hiring W2 employees because starting with 150, it was really difficult for us and being really young.
We couldn't get lines of credit anywhere. We couldn't finance any new vehicle purchases. It was all through the profits for making the business. So the whole four and a half years, we were like building this business. It was just scraping by every time we would make money, it was right back into another truck.
Next month it was wrapping that truck. Then it was getting all the proper equipment for that truck. You know what I mean? And so we're like man is eating us up on top of that workers comp for window cleaning is ridiculous. We're paying like twenty two dollars for every hundred dollars of payroll That we processed.
John Wilson: That's wild and you were in what was the city?
Johnny Robinson: I was in Orange, California, so Orange County,
John Wilson: Yeah.
Johnny Robinson: Yeah. And we shopped it around too. We couldn't get anything better than what we were getting. And so it was just ridiculous trying to operate that business, especially with two partners. And one day one of our old employees that left to do his own thing was like, Hey, if you ever need help, I'll do a job, not as an employee, but you just pay me 50%.
And I was like, I'll never do that. You're not going to show up with my wrap and my truck and follow my procedures. So I'm not going to do that. And then one day we had bought another window cleaning business. That had these big commercial accounts these big universities and we were servicing those and we're fully staffed I was in the field Sergio was in the field helping out But we still had two more trucks of residential that we needed to service which I had no idea how we were going to do And so then I had the idea.
I was like, oh, let me call Victor I was like, can you go do this job? It was like a 4, 000 pressure washing job. It was pressure washing, window cleaning, gutters, the whole shebang. And uh, he was like, Oh, I got you. Don't worry about it. Shows up to the job. Two days later, he comes to our yard and he hands me a check for four grand.
And I'm like, wow, I didn't have to like pay for your equipment and pay for your gas. I didn't have to do any of that. And the customer seems happy. So immediately switched everything to contractors and we were super profitable. We started making more money and we didn't have to worry about any of that stuff.
And I started tweeting about it.
John Wilson: You said no equipment. So like they were driving their own trucks. They had their own equipment. You were just lead gen basically for these contractors.
Johnny Robinson: We were still to this day. If you look up orange window clean, the business is still around. We're still number one. You search up window cleaning, Orange County, and we show up first page of Google top of the backpack. And we essentially used that to just, yeah, lead gen.
And we still had some ads running on Yelp and stuff, that was really helpful. But we started brokering off the jobs and we were really good at communication and setting expectations. And we knew who we were bringing on and vetted the contractors. So the customers didn't really care that it wasn't somebody in like an orange window cleaning wrap showing up. It just came really down to us setting expectations really well. And we were good at doing that and we're good at selling the jobs.
John Wilson: Was that like video or email or how did you set the expectation so well?
Johnny Robinson: All over the phone
John Wilson: Okay.
Johnny Robinson: And through having CRM, we had all the contractors we would assign the jobs to the CRM just like we would. And we would ask them first, Hey, can you take this? Yeah. Okay. Boom. They would have the app house call pro is what we used and they would accept it and then they would show up to the job and we would do a quality assurance check and the contractor is new based on the agreement they would sign which is okay.
This is what our customers expect, right? so just do make sure you do that because that's what they expect and It would get done
Jack Carr: What's the split now? Do you still have employees or are they all contractors? A hundred percent?
Johnny Robinson: Yeah, they're all contractors so I can get into it a little bit more we actually ended up pretty quickly. , I don't remember what month we recorded that last episode, John, but pretty quickly after that, Sergio sold that business to one of the contractors. Actually, he still runs it full time to this day and we ended up using that model to launch a house cleaning business because people were asking us, how can we do it?
How can we do it? But window cleaning is not going to work everywhere just because it's, any of us can go to Home Depot right now and pick up everything you need to clean a house. You can't do the same thing for window cleaning. You need specialty equipment if you want to do these larger jobs.
And so it just wouldn't work anywhere except for major metros. And so I was like, you know where it would work though is house cleaning. And at the time my mom was still driving a Uber full time. So what we did was like, let's call our shot on Twitter. Let's say we're going to take this business to 20 K a month and 90 days.
And let's see if we can do it to validate the model. And so that's what we did. We started a house cleaning business for my mom to essentially just answer the calls and broker out the jobs and try to retire her from having to drive Uber. Let's see if we can replace her income.
And we opened up a brand new Amex through 2, 000 of ad spend right on Yelp, just like we did with the window cleaning business. And that business did 20K in the second month 12K first month, four grand profit, 20K the second month, eight grand of profit. And we're like, holy crap, we got something. And then still to this day.
This was a little over two years ago, we just closed out marrying a mop last year at 300k, and my mom made 150 grand in taxable income. So I'm super proud of that, because it's the most money she's ever made, and she still runs the cleaning business, and it's all she does. To answer your original question, Jack yeah, it's all a hundred contractor, a hundred percent contractor based.
The legal actual name for the model is called a referral agency, at least in California. So there's specific rules you have to abide by when you operate that kind of business. But a hundred percent contractors, they get paid a percentage of the job. They don't get paid hourly.
Our contractors at Marriott and Mop get paid 40%. You'll see like 50 percent thrown around. We just find that 50 percent way too impactful on the gross margin. To be super profitable. So we dialed that back. If that answers your question.
Jack Carr: You actually answered two of my questions because the other question I was going to have following up was how are you getting around the specialty laws in California specifically but it sounds like you've got it dialed in. That's awesome.
John, can you do this for HVAC?
John Wilson: I'm like fascinated by this in general. So the thing you just did with cleaning Like, does your mom own 100 percent of the business and you've just been helping or like, what's the capital stack look like?
Johnny Robinson: The business legally under our LLC and we should open a new DBA for it. But eventually it got to be a pain in the ass because I was sending my mom money back and forth. I had access to the bank account. So she just opened up a new LLC transferred everything over to her and I really don't do much in the business She handles everything.
I try to help her out. But she's 65 years old and like It's tough to give her some advice sometimes because she thinks she knows everything but it is what it is. You know, she's at 30k months. She makes good money. It's fine
John Wilson: That was something I thought about doing like a year ago. I didn't think about doing it for or with a sibling or like a parent, but that sounds like fun. We were talking at the office. And we were like, it'd be interesting is what if we just built a business and gave it away?
Just to like prove that I'm pretty sure I can do this. And it sounds like you did. Like that's freaking awesome.
Johnny Robinson: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's not like Brock it's house cleaning. And you got, you guys know you're in home service. A lot of the industry is, mom and pop solo guys that don't, they've got a good paying job, and they're happy with that. It's no different in cleaning.
It's probably even more so in cleaning where you have a bunch of people operating off of referrals. They don't want to market. They don't really care about selling. They don't charge well enough prices to ever grow the business and they just want to show up and do the job.
Jack Carr: Yeah, definitely.
John Wilson: We talked to Liam Kircher and I think you guys are friends or tangential in some way. And it was a few years ago and Bryant Sollentrop. This was back in 21 when he was running his cleaning thing. But a big focus on how they were sourcing labor. For the cleaning business was like very intentionally this is a side hustle it was a side hustle for their labor Is that how you guys tend to find them too?
Or are these like full time 50 60 hour a week cleaners?
Johnny Robinson: Because they're contractors you tend to have both. It really depends where you look. There's kind of two ways to do it you have like the free and the pay you have like the outbound and the inbound if this were sales. You have the outbound where you say hey I'm gonna go to these local Facebook groups and I'm gonna make posts and ask for referrals for cleaners and then all the info you get you're gonna call and text and see if they're looking for more work or you can go to someplace like Indeed or any job board and say hey I'm hiring on a contract basis and that would be more inbound where you're interviewing them and vetting them.
Whereas the outbound you're looking on Facebook next door, places like care. com, a housekeeper. com, those places are going to be very like, you've got to sell them on the opportunity a little bit. And those ones that you find are going to be a lot more likely to already have a schedule. And so you're figuring out like, okay, what days can you work?
What days can you not work? Whereas indeed you have a higher likelihood to find a cleaning crews. Like we've got companies that have, three, four person cleaning crews that are knocking out big construction cleanup jobs on the 40, 60 split. Whereas indeed you're going to find the solo people more full time work 40, 50 hours a week
John Wilson: The afirst month was 12, 000 the second was 20. It's now you said 300 last year So what is that like 25, 000 a month or so?
Johnny Robinson: It fluctuates between about 25, 30 a month. Depending now that we're coming into spring. It's gonna shoot up. I think she'll crack into the 35 40 She's gonna be constrained there though, because she needs to get off the phones. She still answered the phone calls We try to get some overseas talent in there and she thought it was gonna be a magic bullet and It's like just go back to answering the phones.
She's blowing my phone out complaining, so
Jack Carr: Getting out of Uber driving though and making 150K a year is life changing though. is she trying to scale it?
Johnny Robinson: She says she wants to, I know what it takes to grow it
Jack Carr: Exactly.
Johnny Robinson: Shedoesn't. I've even tried putting her with some of our coaches who've helped
clean businesses get way past that. And she doesn't want to listen. So I'm not here to bash that. I love her. I love her to death that she's killing it.
But you guys know, you've got to put some things in place if you want to get past that.
John Wilson: Yeah. All right. So you, built one uh, you sold it, you built another, you gave it away. And I know now you've sort of alluded to it, but you have like a program that helps people do this, but did you build others before doing that? Like, did you go and launch any more individual locations?
Johnny Robinson: So what we did was we had the orange window cleaning, then we had Marion a mop, sold orange window cleaning, Marion mop still around, but I don't do anything with it. Then what we did was, after we had live tweeted that whole Marion a mop thing, the demand was just, DMs were blowing up, so I was like, hey look, I'm taking 15 people.
And I'm cutting it off after 15 people. And what I did was just pre sell this one year long coaching thing to see if we could get results for people. And that's what we did. I sat there for two weeks straight and I just had calls with a bunch of different people and we ended up filling up all 15 slots.
And so for the next three months, from January to the end of March, we didn't sell anybody new. This is 2022, beginning of 2022.
John Wilson: Were they all like brand new entrepreneurs or was this like I have something but I'm not doing it.
Johnny Robinson: All of them were brand new from scratch. So all of them had jobs or something going on day to day and we're building this on the side. And what happened was we ended up selling 15 of them. And Sergio and I built it in a weekend and we were like, all right, we're going to see if we can get results.
And so that's what we did for, from January to the end of March, we saw if we get results and we crushed it for them. And we had people get into, you know, 10, the first 10 K first 20 K in a month. And we're like, okay, let's open this up. And before we thought about infrastructure and hiring and everything, we're like, holy crap, like the margins on this is amazing because we're selling information, we pre sold 30, 000 or 50, 000 in two weeks of contracts.
We collected 30 of that in two weeks, which is like, you know, many windows we had to clean to make that much in profit. It was like mind boggling. And so this is it. This is the business. We'll go all in and I'll get to it. Cause like it's not all sunshines and rainbows. I'll give you guys all the details about what it's like behind the scenes of selling a program business or like a guru business.
Cause it's actually a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. But we pre sold all that. And then once we got results like, all right, let's just take all this capital we've accumulated and let's just deploy it into building a team and scaling. And just like we did the last business, which was orange window cleaning.
That's what we did. We ended up actually from April to December, we ended up taking that business from zero to 2. 8 million in nine months and went from like zero to, we have about 26 or so full time employees facing the U S right now.
John Wilson: That's a lot. And wait what was the revenue run rate again?
Johnny Robinson: It was zero to 2. 8 million in nine months from April to December.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's ridiculous.
I just think cleaning is fascinating So I met someone here locally. It's a guy named Jacob.
But yeah, I just think the cleaning business is fascinating and it must be that it is approachable. Like there's no licensure. You can do subcontract or W 2. It's not like a highly skilled labor. I think high trust is probably a really big thing you have to hire for. I know that like, I'm worked up about who we let out in our home to do our cleaning.
But like I know people, not even from like the Twitter. Like, Hey, you can run a remote cleaning business that have launched a remote cleaning business. Am I roughly right? That it's not like, I know you're here to like coach and like you do all this stuff, but is it as not complicated as it seems?
Johnny Robinson: I'll say it's simple, but just like any business, you're going to have your pains in the ass, like you're dealing with cleaning labor. That is the biggest pain in the ass in this business. And every business has it. But by far what everyone struggles with is the hiring, but on the flip side, I really like it.
I'm super convicted in cleaning me personally. We're going to launch a chain of cleaning companies this year, actually. So we're working on that and it's a really cool business especially if you want to get an entrepreneurship. You don't know what to start.
You learn all the core skills that you need to, because you're not like, you don't want to go and clean houses or anybody can go clean house. You're not going to really learn much doing that. But say you've got a nine to five and you're like, Hey, I don't know what to start, but I need like 15 to 20 hours a week to start something with cleaning your hiring contractors.
So you don't have to like purchase any equipment or spend your time training them. And you learn the skill of hiring. You learn the skill of hiring, cleaning labor, which is even harder. And then you also have to learn sales because you can spend the money on the leads and you'll get the leads.
Everybody searches for housecleaning, but if you can't close the leads, then, you're not going to make any money and you're going to just be burning money on ad spend every month. And then you learn the marketing component, you learn how to generate leads, and then you learn all the operations and the systems behind coordinating the jobs with the cleaners.
John Wilson: Yeah, it does. And I think you're right. It's like a gateway drug. What makes cleaning labor so difficult as someone who's only ever hired like a cleaning company to do it? I've never hired a cleaner. I hired a janitor for our business, but that's like, that's it.
Johnny Robinson: Yeah, you typically deal with just like you're hiring anyone. You got to sift through the shit. It's like the 80, percent of people you talk to are going to suck. 20 percent are going to be good. I would say probably 90 percent suck. 10 percent are going to be good. And if you're going to want to trust someone and build a good reputation in your area, you're going to want to background check them.
You're going to want to make sure they have their insurance. And that's really hard to come by. And I could tell you tons of stories we had one person who had a cleaning business down in San Diego. And he hired these people and they show they didn't have a vacuum and they showed up and they took they're taking their broom and they're sweeping the carpet to get the stuff off the carpet. If you don't do a good job vetting on the front end, you're going to deal with stuff like that because jobs like this tend to attract a lot of people who are just getting back on their feet, I'll say at least
John Wilson: Yeah. I can understand that. How does like, Handy, Thumbtack, I'm sure there's others. Are those like helpful to a cleaning business as lead sources or are those competition?
Johnny Robinson: No, I would say Thumbtack's helpful. Handy, we don't use too much. Thumbtack is very area dependent from what I've seen. Works some places well, other places it doesn't. I don't know what it is. A lot of these platforms are dependent on search volume. And for whatever reason, California might, like, Yelp is a great example.
Like, Yelp has a lot of users in California. If you look up any home service in California on Yelp, you're going to see thousands of that
John Wilson: I remember this specifically from our last podcast and still like to this day my mind is blown cause Yelp in Ohio is like nothing.
Jack Carr: This is what I had to learn to move from California to Nashville was in California, it's a big thing. Get to Nashville, nothing, not used at all. And next door is the big one for us.
John Wilson: Yeah, next door is the big one here.
Johnny Robinson: So I would say for thumbtack, it's very area dependent. What's universal right now is Google local service ads. Everybody just prints off Google local service ads. But now that everyone's using it, it's like. Just like any other ad platform, you're going to get higher lead costs the more and more
John Wilson: Yeah. What's the cost of a lead? Like I know it's like geographically dependent but like roughly.
Johnny Robinson: We're seeing anywhere 40 to 60 right now. When we started it was like 10, 10 to 30.
John Wilson: Okay. Yeah that's crazy
Johnny Robinson: So you got to be really good at sales to make it work.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, you do. What are the other things that cleaning companies can do to like drive leads? LSA would have been my first thought and I assumed it was going to be like seven to 10 bucks a lead.
Johnny Robinson: Oh god, no, I wish
John Wilson: That's 2019 numbers, man. It's a rookie number
Johnny Robinson: Yeah. No, I mean, you got all the people coming up, Tweeting about, oh, I want to start a cleaning business, right? It's gaining a lot of popularity so, you got a lot of these cleaning businesses that are signing up for it. As far as lead generation goes, we're big on organic, next door to what Jack was saying works really well.
We hardly run any ads on Marriott and Moff as an example. We generate all our stuff off next door posts. So once you get that flywheel going in a local group, like next door Facebook and you can get a customer to post a testimonial for you, everybody that likes that is now a lead. Everybody that engages in comments with it is now a lead and we just train our people to reach out to every single person that engages with any posts that you're mentioned in and say if they're interested in house clean and you don't pay anything other than your time to generate that. We've tested Facebook a little bit. We've had some people have success with Facebook. The problem with Facebook is you know, your close rate is going to be drastically lower than something that's like a Yelp or a Google LSA because they're already searching for it. You're trying convince them to get off Facebook and call your cleaning company So you got to be really good at sales and have a process around that to make it work. So if someone's just starting out.
I don't recommend it but as you start to grow and you need another lead source facebook works really well And if you can close them at a good rate you get a cheap cac or low cac. But those are the big ones we see right now. Outbound is big too. Building relationships with people like realtors, builders that can give you construction cleans because those are gonna be really high tech at 1, 500 to 3k a pop to do a construction cleanup. Property managers are great. Apartment complexes.
Jack Carr: What does the competition look like in the area? We talked with Tim Poole a few episodes ago, and he was mentioning
John Wilson: I keep saying Tim Pool, but it's Tim Ryan. It's
Jack Carr: It's Tim Ryan from the pool. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. just like Johnny Squeegee. Like, I'm gonna say that forever, probably.
Jack Carr: Point being is minus the name mix up. Tim pool, I'm sticking with it. He was talking about how private equity has started moving into the pool business in the recent years, and it's actually caused a ton of competition to spring up. Is that why you're seeing the higher cap cost, or is it a competition increase from individuals, or is it a higher competition increase from private equity and roll up groups?
Johnny Robinson: I don't see news a lot about PE coming into the space. I don't know why to be quite honest with you. As far as why they're not coming in but for the reason the lead cost arising is because I think cleaning is getting popular especially on the internet. There's a lot of people making content now about cleaning. We got in early and now there's a lot of people who've like I'm seeing people who've like engaged with my stuff two years ago when I was tweeting about it and now they're like tweeting about how that 40k a month, you know So it's it's really cool.
And then cleaning Twitter exists now I don't know if you guys have noticed but there's a lot of housecleaning business owners on Twitter now So it's really interesting and I think this the more people getting on LSA is what's causing that to rise I mean you see it with meta you see it with YouTube and Google. The more people start to use it just like any other ad platform.
John Wilson: There's a bunch of businesses that I've seen that have become more popular than I ever really thought they were. Like cleaning definitely took me by surprise, but there's a lot of content around cleaning. So I'm like, okay, that, that makes sense. Tree trimming, that one's taken me totally by surprise, but that has like taken off purely because of LSAs as far as I can tell.
What was the other one? There was another one that was just like, It was LSA enabled where I'd never even heard of it and then LSAs came out and it's like boom now it's a thing.
Johnny Robinson: I'm not sure I've seen a lot of power washing and gutter cleaning on the timeline though
John Wilson: Yes Or like christmas lights. I don't know if that's LSA able, but I see that everywhere
Johnny Robinson: Christmas lights, yeah, I was seeing a lot of Christmas lights. I saw a dude on there, actually, he was one of our buddies. We went to the same college, started at the same age, started the window cleaning business at the same time. He ended up sticking with it, and we follow each other on Twitter. The guy did like, 650, 000 in lights in six weeks.
John Wilson: That's crazy
Johnny Robinson: Yeah, Christmas lights.
Jack Carr: Wild.
John Wilson: Yeah.
That was part one with Johnny Robinson. Tune in on Thursday where we talk about part two.
Thanks for tuning in to Owned and Operated, the podcast for home service entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Twitter at at Wilson companies.
I'll see you next time.
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