Residential routes · Commercial contracts
The season starts whether or not the system is ready
Residential routes and commercial contracts are two different businesses running out of one van, and most companies run them as one thing. That is where it goes wrong.
Small tickets at high frequency where density is everything, next to bigger tickets on longer cycles with a bid process. The same notebook cannot hold both.
Twenty minutes. We look at how work moves through your business and tell you what we would fix first. No pitch.
Two businesses, one notebook
Residential routes are small tickets at high frequency where density is everything. Commercial is bigger tickets on longer cycles with a bid process. They schedule differently, they price differently, and they fail differently.
Run out of one notebook, the commercial bids get done on Sunday nights and the residential customer who was due in April never gets called. Both halves are quietly leaking, and neither looks like a problem from inside the van.
Between somebody deciding their windows are filthy and you being paid for the work, here is where it falls on the floor.
Ranking by spring, or losing the season
You have a window of weeks when everybody in your town searches at once. Page three for your own service and your town, with a listing nobody has touched since 2019, costs you the whole spring rather than a few jobs.
Quoting on stories, access and pane count
Name, email, message box. So the first reply is a question, then another, and it takes six texts to establish what you would have asked on the page. Per-pane on Tuesday, per-hour on Thursday, and a commercial bid takes an evening.
Routes and crews on a whiteboard
Thursday exists on a wall. What happens to the week when it rains, or when a crew is a person short, lives in your head and gets rebuilt by phone.
Recurring customers who quietly stopped
The Hendersons were due in April and nobody called. They did not complain, they did not cancel, they are simply not customers anymore. In route work this is not retention. It is the revenue.
Net-30 commercial accounts at sixty days
Invoices raised from memory and chased by text, and no single screen that says who owes what and for how long. The account that is quietly at sixty days is the one you find out about last.
Reviews never asked for
Clean glass, a delighted customer, and nothing asked for while they were standing there looking at it. A week later they are not thinking about you at all, and a five-star review is worth more to you than a month of ads.
The biggest hole in a residential window cleaning business is not lead generation. It is that a customer who was due in March never got called, never complained, and simply stopped being a customer. Nothing about that looks like a problem, which is why nobody catches it.
A season is not something you get back
You have a window of weeks when everybody in your town decides at once. Miss it and you are not down a few jobs, you are down a season, and the next chance is twelve months out.
Meanwhile the recurring customers are the part that compounds. Lose four a year to nobody calling them, and in three years that is a route.
Same road, different nouns
A business that quotes custom work, books it, does it and chases the invoice is the same animal whether the work is glass or shirts. The nouns change. The road does not.
One of us runs a print shop in Colorado and built the first version of this for ourselves, because nothing on the market fit the way we worked. What transfers to window cleaning is not knowledge of your trade, which you already have. It is the shape of the problem, and every leak on this page is one we have hit in our own version of it.
Jobber and Housecall Pro are genuinely good at this, and if you are a one-van residential operation running standard work, buy one and stop reading. They stop fitting when the commercial side gets real, meaning multi-visit contracts, per-building pricing, certificates and renewal dates, or when your pricing has rules the form cannot express. That is the point where you end up running the software and a spreadsheet beside it.
Three steps, and you know the number before anything starts
We talk for twenty minutes
You walk us through how a job moves from inquiry to paid. We tell you where we would start, whether or not that involves us.
20 minutesWe show you the build and the price
Scoped after we talk, quoted before anything begins. No open-ended hourly.
In writingWe build the base and hand you the keys
You own it. You pay Airtable directly. No monthly fee to us.
Yours to keepWhat we build for businesses like yours
Which one you need depends entirely on where yours is leaking. Nobody needs all three at once, and starting with everything is how a project stops halfway. Not sure which platform? See how we pick →
Quoting that holds
Stories, access, pane count, frequency and travel, applied the same way every time, so a commercial bid stops taking an evening and anyone can produce it.
How it works →Routes, recurring work and money in one place
Who is due when, which crew is where, what happens to the week when Tuesday rains, and which commercial account is quietly sitting at sixty days.
How it works →The front door that feeds it
Found for your service in the towns you actually serve, believed in four seconds on a phone, and a request form that asks about stories and access so the inquiry arrives priceable.
How it works →The version where the route runs itself
A bid gets priced from your own rules in minutes instead of an evening, and anyone can produce it.
Who is due, which crew is where, and what happens when Tuesday rains are all on one screen. The review request goes out while the glass still looks new, and the customer due in April gets called in March.
Next step
Tell us where the route is leaking
Twenty minutes. You tell us how work moves through the business, we tell you where we think it is leaking and what we would fix first. If the answer is "buy Jobber", that is what we will say.