One thing I’m learning is that your door hanger close rate isn’t just about how good you are at sales or even just your pricing. It’s also about who you’re marketing to. I recently moved to a new city and started my window cleaning business in an area I didn’t know well. So I began door hanging in neighborhoods that looked like solid upper-middle-class areas. I got an average call rate from the door hangers. But once I showed up to quote in person, I ran into a problem. It seemed many homeowners simply couldn’t afford the service. Some even told me they were just curious about what window cleaning costs these days. In one case, a realtor referral turned into a complete waste of time as they were more interested in pitching me their services than hiring mine. Window cleaning is a luxury service. And if you’re pricing your services like a premium offering, you need to be in neighborhoods that can actually support that. I’m also learning that just because someone will pay for gutter cleaning doesn’t mean they’ll pay for window cleaning. Even though both are home services, window cleaning is often seen as more of a “nice-to-have” than a necessity like gutter cleaning. Right now, most of my window cleaning bids fall in the $450–$695 range. At that price point, according to AI, I need to be targeting households earning $150K+ per year. I wasn’t doing that at first and I think I wasted some of my time in neighborhoods that mostly wouldn't pay for window cleaning. One tool that’s helped me a lot is the USPS EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) website. It lets you see income and age demographics for specific neighborhoods within a ZIP code, which makes targeting much more strategic. If you’re doing door hanger marketing, I highly recommend checking it out: https://eddm.usps.com/eddm/select-routes.htm Bottom line: If your close rate is low, it might not only be your pitch or your price, it might also be who you are targeting.

I can use a horse hair brush. Open to other suggestions.

How’s January been for everyone business-wise? I’m still new and it’s been pretty slow for me so far. Curious how others are doing.

I have been washing windows for over two years as a side hustle. My son and I just launched this year. Should I keep door hanging, and bandit sign, and other marketing focused on residential only? Or should I use some time to go hand out my business card and try to drum up some commercial?

Has anyone else had trouble with SMS registration of their business VOIP line to be able to text customers? I'm using Nextiva and it's been over four months without being able to text. It's been a huge headache and the communication between the 10DLC verification process and Nextiva has been terrible. It's hindering my ability to hand out door hangers since I have "Call or Text for Free Estimate".