The Art of the Deal

I love my job. I love the work, the variety, the people, and even the monotony. I love the subtle details which go into doing something as well as it can be done. This is why I've done this work since 2012. The flip side is: as my friends and family have known for many years, I'm slowly turning to dust. This work is a grind and - despite my best efforts - I'm not getting younger. Before you say, "Just hire some help!"... please be aware that I deliberately don't want "employees" in the sense that other local cleaning companies have them; I don't want Outside Cleaners to become the typical exterior cleaning services that I see locally to my left and right. No offense to them, but.... no thanks. I see the quality of work they're performing, and I'd rather stay small and leave money on the table than become what those larger services necessarily are. It seems that every business in this industry claims to be a family business. In most cases, the reality is that the owner HAS a family... and that's as close as it really is to a "family business." (I do cringe at how sketchy my own industry is). Here's the situation over here at Outside Cleaners: my wife Leah continues to keep things running smoothly by her skillful scheduling, invoicing, video critiquing, paying bills, and keeping me on point, even as she recovers from cancer, a type of stroke, and a dogpile of other serious health problems. And "little" Alex (now 18!) - who has grown up maintaining pressure washers, cleaning gutters, and analyzing mossy roofs - is now now only helping in the field, but often running all over the mid-Cape area, meeting perspective clients and looking at new jobs for us. That's all well and good, but here's the thing I'm particularly excited about: unlike me, Alex isn't content to grind out the months and years for the same old predictable carrot. He's got an entrepreneurial mind and the unashamed income goals of a youngster, and he's steadily pumping ideas at me regarding how I can get ahead. Some ideas are dead on arrival, but others... well, let's just say I'm excited by his insights and knowledge. I'm excited about the future in a way I haven't been in a while, and I look forward to sharing news here. In the meantime, stay sane and keep talking with your neighbors.

When I started cleaning roofs and siding here on Cape Cod, I was bluntly told by an intelligent person that I was "a little old to be a roof cleaner." At that time, I was 34. There’s a reason for that. People are supposed to do this for a season or two, realize it’s a physical grind which never gets easier, and move on. That’s the pattern I’ve watched for years, as exterior cleaning services have regularly popped up and then quickly disappeared. It’s a grind. It never gets easy. Most people quickly move on to better things. ( Case in point: I just learned of yet another local cleaning service which has closed their doors ). I just turned 50. As I write this, I'm recovering from a surgery which was needed because I was wearing out. It turns out that if you wave a power washer wand around for twenty thousand hours or so, the repetitive motion takes a toll. Happily, we live in an age when things such as worn out shoulders are largely fixable. But sitting here looking out at the snow is causing me to reflect on how these last many years have been spent: the roller-coaster seasons, the blur of jobs and customers, the family events which have filled the small gaps between work, maintenance, and meetings. Juggling work, parenting, and caring for Leah as she recovered from the early stages of her stroke and cancer. Work-wise, I've had a good run; this business has been good to me, and I'm still at the top of my game in many ways... but it's time to throttle back. Am I retiring? No. Am I going to keep up the same torrid pace that I've kept all these years, cleaning five or six days a week from February through December? No... definitely not. That pace no longer makes sense. What DOES make sense for me now? Working local ; not traveling to clean buildings all over New England. Taking on jobs of a size that I can readily handle ; not signing up more humongous jobs. Working less so that I can work longer. Finding a better balance between time spend cleaning, and time spend living. I don't need to make a fortune; my "fortune" has been made. Now, I need the longevity to enjoy this next phase of my life. So, if you call me and find that I'm booked until early summer, and then you see me on a Tuesday afternoon this spring enjoying some fishing at the pond, please understand: A full "work calendar" no longer means an "actually full calendar." I'm setting some boundaries and limits, and it will be an adjustment, but to not do so will mean certain failure. And, as I've been telling others for years without listening to my own advice, "there's no trophy for burning out." Or turning to dust.

Every year here on Cape Cod, I see some new exterior cleaning services pop up. Often, they are branded as the "cleaning division" of a painting company. Sometimes they are started by the disgruntled employee of an existing cleaning company. And sometimes (rarely), they are started by an ambitious individual who sees an opportunity for those who are willing to work. The opportunities are there. Believe me: when a little company like mine - which doesn't even pay to advertise - is already 14 jobs deep into springtime 2026, the work is there. But then every year, I notice that an approximately equal number of these companies quietly disappear. As I write this, I'm looking at the text message I got from a local cleaner in response to me referring some work to him: Nate I meant to text you, through the ups and downs of this year Ive decided to go back to college and just moved... but I also wanted to say thank you so much for the work you pushed my way it made such a difference. ...another one bites the dust. It begs the question: why don't more local exterior cleaning companies last? There is no single defining reason, but based upon what I've seen locally, I can easily point to several factors : Lack of affordable housing. This leads to a lack of affordable employees. Hell, housing is so unaffordable that I couldn't afford to move here today if I didn't already own a place. Weather. Just because that waterfront house in Harwich Port needs to be cleaned doesn't mean that it CAN be cleaned. The weather needs to be calm and dry, and THOSE days can be few and far between. Weather is a factor for many (most) types of exterior cleaning jobs, and trying to schedule those jobs around renters, landscapers, painters, etc can be a nightmare and can be very limiting. Inexperience. It's amazing to me how many would-be cleaners go out and finance a fancy, overpriced cleaning trailer, only to realize they don't know how to use the equipment, it's the wrong equipment to begin with, or that they don't know how to clean even if they had the right equipment. This is common. Lack of financial sense . For example, I see too many new cleaners getting excited about that "big money job" which - after I do the math - they realize was a looser after factoring in all the effort and expenses. Or they buy a $45,000 cleaning drone, only to realize in hindsight that it will likely never pay for itself because the specialized work just isn't there in the volume needed. Folks, it's not what you make, it's what you KEEP.... It's hard work. Really. Hour after day after week after month... it's hard. It's a grind. It takes a toll. It isn't comfortable. As ever, I'm happy to discuss this business with anyone considering getting into it. Don't be shy. nate@outsidecleaners.com

what happens when you wash a tennis court

A difficult time for a small local business!

Somebody recently joked about me looking so much older than the younger man in some of my YouTube videos from years ago. Well, like Indiana Jones said, "It's not the years; it's the mileage." But with thousands upon thousands of hours spend outside cleaning - and along with the aching back, creaking knees, and throbbing right shoulder - comes the benefit of experience and breadth of view. I've seen things come and go over long enough periods of time to notice trends in the exterior cleaning industry. In this blog I'd like to share an observations regarding one of those trends. First, it's important to realize that the exterior cleaning market on Cape Cod is vastly different than nearly all of the rest of the country, because our roofs and siding materials are vastly different. Most residential construction in the U.S. features siding of vinyl, composite, or mayyyyybe painted wood. Roofs are almost always asphalt/composite. The bare cedar surfaces found so commonly here on roofs and siding are very, very rare in most of the United States. We are a tiny, tiny niche market. Similarly, the exterior cleaning industry on Cape Cod is necessarily different from the exterior cleaning industry elsewhere, where those hard, synthetic or painted surfaces are readily "soft washed" with a chemical solution dominated by sodium hypochlorite (i.e. bleach). While sodium hypo - or "SH" in industry parlance - is a fine and appropriate ingredient for cleaning many hard, non-porous surfaces (vinyl siding, "Hardiboard," tile roofs... I'm looking at you, Florida), SH simply isn't the do-all solution when it comes to cedar... especially the WHITE cedar so prevalent here on Cape Cod. Don't get me wrong: chlorine bleach does has its place in the local cleaning toolbox, but the toolbox necessarily contains many other tools as well. Companies such as Harwich-based Wash Safe set the standard years ago for non-chlorine cedar cleaning products, instead relying heavily on the cleaning power of sodium percarbonate ("hydrogen peroxide")-based cleaning chemicals. These non-bleach cleaning chemicals required different cleaning equipment and processes than the rest of the country was using to clean everything with bleach. Because our local cleaning needs are so unusual and insignificant compared to the nationwide industry as a whole, the ever-increasing number of companies who make fancy trucks and trailers for the exterior cleaning industry have never been motivated to make products designed for our niche ways of cleaning. So, on a national level, the equipment being marketed to the exterior cleaning industry has been nearly entirely designed for those who clean with bleach. For this reason, the experienced cleaners on Cape Cod have long since resorted to designing and building their own custom "cleaning rigs." I did the same. So, for years, one observable trend has been for cleaning equipment to become ever-more tailored to the legions of "Bleach Bandits." Pumps were built to be more and more resistant to SH's corrosive effects; synthetic bleach stain-proof clothing was marketed to cleaners; metered mixing manifolds allowed the fine-tuning of the bleach application. Then, the mixing valves became controllable with a little key FOB from your position on the ladder. Bleach, bleach, bleach. . But change is in the air. Happily, in this one little way at least, the change is a good thing. It seems that us niche wood guys are starting to be heard by the broader exterior cleaning industry. Many chemical vendors have added sodium percarbonate to their lineups, making their own version of "Wash Safe Cedar Wash." Even better, sodium metasilicate (the EPA's preferred replacement for trisodium phosphate, or TSP) has crept into common availability such that even companies in the very heart of bleach country are now offering their own sodium metasilicate-based wood cleaning formulations (looking at you, Southeast Softwash ). Today, the wood-cleaning crowd is being heard by even some cleaning equipment makers. Case in point: yesterday, I met with a young cleaner off-Cape who is adding a fancy, factory-build cleaning trailer to his small cleaning fleet. AND, to my delighted wonder, along with the typical bleach-slinging tools, the trailer included a tank labeled for (gasp) sodium percarbonate! I couldn't have been happier for him or the industry. Including more tools in the tool box, and thereby recognizing that bleach isn't the right tool for every cleaning situation, is a step in a better direction.

Here I discuss how the quality of cedar shingles are graded, and how I think it SHOULD be graded.

A discussion on methods of payment for exterior cleaning.

Deciding between an LLC and an S-Corp