Once you’ve purchased all the equipment and you’ve practiced with the machinery at home, the next thing you’ll want is actual paying customers. Unfortunately for many new businesses this is the area that is often overlooked. They sometimes assume getting the work for all that shiny new equipment will be easy. It won’t.

Your best bet is to have a multi-pronged plan of how you are going to get work. You’ll need to advertise and you can do this in a number of places: Yellow pages, your local newspaper, and the internet are examples.

Leaflet dropping can also work, granted you make sure you drop leaflets in wealthy areas to people who can afford such luxuries as a pressure washing service. This will need to be done just before and during spring/summer to reap maximum results.

Yellow Pages
I really don’t like dealing with the people from Yellow Pages, I think their salespeople are annoying because they talk a lot of bullshit. I also feel they are overpriced and believe the days of Yellow Pages are drawing to a close. They are pretty much already dead in the water in truth.

Using Google to search for your local town’s companies is so much more efficient. Typing: —Driveway Cleaners Birmingham— into Google to look for Brummie Pressure Washing Businesses, is a lot quicker than fingering through your local copy of Yellow Pages, especially when you consider that Yellow Pages doesn’t have a section dedicated to pressure washing.

Unfortunately a lot of older people haven’t cottoned on to just how powerful the internet is, or they simply don’t own a computer and have no intention of ever doing so. These people will still use the now outdated Yellow Pages. It’s those same older people who have money to spend and can’t physically clean their driveways and patios themselves. You’ll have to decide whether it’s worth advertising in there or not.

If you do decide to go with Yellow Pages, do two things.

1. Try to make sure you have an advert that stands out from the crowd in some way. It doesn’t have to be large and in colour because an advert of that type will be very expensive. It could instead be an unusual shape like an oval.

2. Don’t sign up for Yell.com. Why would people search on there when they can search on Google?

By the looks of it Yellow Pages is a slowly contracting business, it will probably always exist but in a far smaller state than previously.

Local Newspaper

Your local newspaper can be a good place to advertise, but it can be expensive and you need to have an advert that stands out.

One good thing about advertising in your local paper is that will only get you work in your local area. This is good because it saves on your petrol costs. By the same token though, you may find you are covering too small an area with this kind of advertising.

The Internet

Let’s face the facts, the internet and Google have changed the world, and like it or not, as a businessperson you have to adapt.

More and more the internet is becoming the most important place for businesses to advertise, and if you aren’t an internet savvy individual, you are going to have to learn fast.

Having a well-designed website is not enough either. That website needs to be optimised properly so Google and the other search engines can find it.

You will most likely need to pay extra for your website design company to optimise the website they built for you, but without it, it will be pointless having the website to begin with.

I wouldn't however pay too much for optimising, because Google in the last couple of years have begun deliberately penalising websites for over-optimisation. After all, it is a deliberate attempt by companies and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) firms to artificially manipulate Google's search rankings.

Instead you might want to spend some of your advertising budget on Adwords, Google's advertising program. Google is a company like any other; they want you to spend your money on buying their Pay per Click adverts, rather than spending that same money on your SEO company.

Google is the big dog on the internet whether you like it or not. You might as well just accept that and play by their rules, by getting yourself and your employees well versed in using Adwords to direct traffic to your website.

Leaflet Dropping

This does work but you need to drop them in the correct areas (posh ones). Dropping leaflets is time consuming, and getting the leaflets produced can also be expensive. People get leaflets pushed through their letterbox every day, so again, as with advertising in Yellow Pages and your local paper; you’ll need leaflets that stand out from the crowd in some way. How you go about doing this is down to you, you’ll have to use your imagination.

Approaching Businesses Directly

Commercial work is what you should really be looking for. Commercial customers tend to be easier to deal with as they too are businesspeople and so understand the issues with running a business. And the jobs you do for them are usually larger than the ones you do for domestic customers, so they should be more profitable.

You can approach them in a number of ways.

Just Walk In

You can just walk into a business, introduce yourself and leave a leaflet or information pack of some kind. You could even offer to do a free quote there and then if they seem interested.

It goes without saying you’ll want to look presentable, clean, etc. I don’t think you need to go overboard though by wearing a suit, because you’re running a pressure washing business, not a bank.

Obviously the just walk in approach takes a lot of balls, and more likely than not you’ll struggle to get past the secretary.

Email

Difficult to make emailing a successful approach because of the huge volume of junk email people receive. You need to get the email to the boss of the company you’re targeting, because they are the one who will make the decisions.

You can go on a company’s website and with a bit of luck you’ll be able to find the email address of the business’s decision maker.

Telesales and Send Info

Another approach is to phone a business, introduce yourself and ask them who you should send your business information to. This way you can make sure your information/letter is addressed to the correct person. Just about every business will receive lots of sales calls from people trying to sell them something, so you’ll need to be persistent and thick-skinned.

Note: Whenever you send information or drop leaflets, make it explicitly clear on the info exactly what your business does, so that the instant a potential customer sees your leaflet/info pack, they know exactly what service you are selling.

It certainly isn’t Easy

You have to pester people to get work, and it’s not always a very uplifting experience, especially if you’re not a natural salesman. Businesspeople are hardened to sales jargon and pushy sales tactics, so don’t try to come across as a flashy Dan, try to represent yourself as an honest, professional person who is simply trying to promote their business in a straight forward, up-front manner. Honesty and confidence in your abilities to get the job done are the most important qualities you want to radiate to them.

One thing you might want to consider before you spend a considerable amount of money is to rent a petrol-driven industrial pressure washer from your nearest tool hire facility. Pressure washing is a very dirty, tiring, monotonous, and generally horrible job, by renting the machinery first you can see if it’s the right business for you. You can also see by renting first how hard it is getting work in the area where you live before you commit a large amount of money to the venture.