I first started gleaming glass in 2011 which happened to be my senior year of high school. At the time, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do career-wise or what I wanted to go to college for. These days, if you’re a senior in high school you feel a lot of pressure to attend a college and decide immediately on what you’re going to spend the rest of your life doing for money. It can be a stressful time especially if you have no idea what your passion is. At that time, I was really starting to follow the teachings of Dave Ramsey period I would listen and do his show every day in here what seems like every other person calling in complaining about all these student loan debt they had accumulated through their college Years. I did not want to be one of those people who accumulated a ton of student loan debt, nor did I want to stay in school for another couple of years. College just wasn’t for me. During my senior year in high school they started offering a new class called life skills class. At the end of the year we were offered the opportunity to job shadow someone in the Tulsa area. I chose to job-shadow a guy named Clay Clark who was at that time the owner of DJ connections among 9 or 10 other businesses. I got to pull him around for a all day along with my friend Austyn Schmidt. I had never been exposed to entrepreneurship before that day and after falling and around for a whole day I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur to. So I became brainstorming about all of the possible businesses I can start out with. The first thing that came to mind was starting a window cleaning business or a lawn care business. Both of these businesses seems like they would be pretty easy to get into as far as equipment is concerned and neither one require great the skills or education. I actually said it out trying a lawn mowing business and decided I didn’t really like doing that very much. I’ve been the type to give window cleaning and try and I went to Home Depot and bought a window cleaning squeegee, window cleaning strip washer, a bucket, and a ladder to get started. I built a pretty basic website using the service webstarts. At the time I thought it was a pretty cool looking website but looking back now it was awful. However, it was just good enough to get my first customer. I’ll never forget the day I received my first call to go and give a window cleaning Tulsa quote. Pam Richmond was the lady who called me to give a window cleaning estimate for automatic engineering, a business near downtown Tulsa. I was so excited and so nervous at the same time because I had no idea how to price that you window cleaning job. Nor did I have any clue as to how long this first window cleaning job would take me. So instead of giving them the price up front I told him I’m just clean the windows to see how long it took me and then I would give them up right after that. It ended up taking me 2 hours or so and I think I charged around $30 which was way under priced knowing what I know now. However, at the time I was very grateful for the work and excited to see the business take off from that first customer. Pam ended up referring me to another friend of hers who had a really nice home in South Tulsa. I went from cleaning no windows at all and having no customers at all to cleaning a huge brand new home in South Tulsa. Boy, was that a learning experience! They had a bunch of concrete on the windows from the pool that was just in the process of being installed and I had never remove concrete from Windows before. However, up to that point I had joined some window cleaning Facebook groups and I knew enough from those groups not to scrape off concrete with a razor. So I tried several window cleaning chemicals that had been recommended to me in the window cleaning Facebook group. One of them ended up working and allowed me to finish that job but it took forever! Fast forward five years and here we are still standing. I have a fairly large window cleaning customer base now, and it’s growing with every day. I have learned how to build a world-class website that actually looks good now and I have invested thousands of dollars in software to provide the potential window cleaning customers of Tulsa and it’s instant window cleaning quote right on our website. I no longer have to drive out to every job in order to give people pricing without the guarantee of even getting the job. After they receive their window cleaning pricing on our website they also have the ability schedule the job right and in there. We provide them with a list of available dates that they can choose from to have their Windows cleaned on. We now the best window cleaning tools available in the industry which makes our job much easier and just this year we’ve upgraded to a newer truck that has a bubble machine mounted on the top of it! Things are looking good in year 5 for gleaming glass. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next five years has in-store for us.
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