Developing Cutting-Edge Window Cleaning Technology One Squeegee at a Time

Free Agent Podcast with Meg Schmitz – Guest: Chris Stoness, Founder & CEO of Sparkle Squad (U.S.) and Elite Window Cleaning (Canada)

Meg Schmitz
Hello, everyone. Welcome to or welcome back to my podcast, the Free Agent. My name is Meg Schmitz.

If you’ve been here before, you know that the convers here is all about free agency and taking control over your future. The mission of my show is to share inspiring conversations with real people who took the leap into self employment, business ownership, franchising and freedom from corporate refugees and executives tired of the desk job to entrepreneurs and investors looking to share camaraderie and inspiration in their own business journey.

My podcast aims a spotlight on real people who took the leap into the unknown and took control over their destiny and became their own boss.

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Sparkle, Mr. Elite Window Cleaning, Mr. Chris Stoness. And I can’t wait to dive into your story. We were able to start this off with a little bit of conversing about free agency and what all that means to my audience.

So thanks for joining me today, Chris.

Chris Stoness
Thanks for having me. I’m totally excited and always great to get a chance to talk.

Meg
Yeah. So how long have you had this bug? And I mean the entrepreneurial bug?

Chris
Yeah, I think I was born with it. It’s interesting. I think about a lot when I’m talking to owners, and it’s actually surprising how many owners share this. The similar background is I was raised in a household of entrepreneurs, and I should asterisks that my parents weren’t overly successful.

They worked really, really, really hard just to make ends meet as entrepreneurs. But as a kid being raised in that environment, I saw a direct line between effort and food on the table. There was no dad goes to this place for eight hours and comes home and all of a sudden he gets a paycheck.

It was, my dad does this activity. Therefore I understand exactly where my, you know, new bike comes from. And I think it was ingrained in me really, really young.

So I would say as a long answer to your question, it has been in me and it’s been kind of something that gnawed at me for the first half of my life of how I’m going to unlock it or how, how I can make sense of betting on myself.

And then really in the second half of my life, I was able to reap the rewards of, of taking that action. So you’re the topic of everything that you’re kind of about, Meg, is, is very near and dear because I couldn’t imagine a life where I didn’t take my own agency and make the world what I wanted it to be.

Meg
Did you ever have a job and work for somebody else through school or afterwards?

Chris
I did. So I thought at a young age. I thought that. And I’m very proud of the path. I wanted to be a sound engineer and I wanted to record musicians and I wanted to be like a photographer for a musician.

Chris
And so I worked really, really hard, worked through my way through studios, ended up working actually for a famous Canadian. Brian Adams was my boss. I was his sound engineer.

Meg
Love him.

Chris
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was pretty fantastic. But what I realized was it was actually the, the climb that I was in love with. It was the work that went into getting there.

And when I got to the position that I now just had a job. I had a cool job, but I had a job but I didn’t have a ton of control, I didn’t have a ton of influence. I was there to do my job, which was to record whatever bands were in the studio at the time or to assist on it.

And that’s when the bug really like the bubble burst for me and I had to. I realized that even in the situation where I achieved my dream job, it was still a job and I needed to take that leap.

So yes, another long way. I, I tend to have long winded answers, a long way of saying yes, I did have a job and I poured myself into it and I’m very proud of what I did.

But at the end of the day it’s still even achieving something that I had worked so long for. Didn’t have that couldn’t feed that bug that you speak to, So.

Meg
Yeah, it’s. You enjoyed the ascent.

Chris
And enjoyed the hard work, yeah.

Meg
There is something about getting to the top of the mountain and I’m sure for people listening to this, you get to the top of your career, you get that law degree, you get that job and then it owns you. Like I climbed this ladder and now I really don’t like.

Chris
Is. Is not always what you know it. You thought it would be. And that was exactly what happened to me.

I had this destination in mind that was a etherical really like it was a made up what this will be like when I get there. And when I got there, it just didn’t fulfill me in the way that the effort fulfilled me.

And you know, using the mountain as the, as the analogy here, like when I made the transition into entrepreneurship, I could just climb forever. There was no ceiling and that’s, that’s what I think I love most is my, my output has relational return.

And I can just put more out if I want to get a higher return or I can work harder or I can do things, I can question things. And that’s really kind of been my MO since the day I, I walked out of the door of the recording studios.

Meg
And when you walked out that door because you already had entrepreneurial genes, did you have a business plan in mind and know what you wanted to do?

Chris
I promise that this is not a planned segue. When I walked out that door, I didn’t know what I wanted to. I, I felt like everyone in my, in my life had watched me go through this journey and was just thought I’d lost my mind.

And I was living in Vancouver, British Columbia and decided to walk home through downtown. And downtown Vancouver is a beautiful city. It’s, it’s all glass buildings everywhere you look.

And I saw a high rise window cleaner on that walk home. And I stood there and I watched and I was like, that is the opposite of a dark recording studio. That is, that person looks like they’re just so free and just like, what a great way to pay the bills.

Will I figure out what the heck I’m going to do with my life? And so literally the day that I had made this huge transition, you know, fate, the universe, whatever it is, put my future path just on my lap and drew my attention to it.

And since that day I have, I’ve been in the industry of, of window cleaning and you know, exterior maintenance and I, and I love it.

Meg
So did you take a job doing window cleaning?

Chris
Did, yeah, I did. So great. I pretty quickly knew that the industry was underserviced. So this was back in 2006, most, most in the industry didn’t even have a website at the time.

And so I waited for the gentleman to get to the ground and I just asked him how I got into the industry, how I would get into this industry or get a job in this industry. And he actually ended up hiring me.

And I worked for him for six years and I learned the ins and outs of, from the front lines, how one of these businesses was run and how the jobs were priced and how, you know, the bigger the job, the less crowded the space. And I learned a lot from him.

And I realized at some point early on, probably in the first year, that this was going to be my focus. So I set an intentional plan because there is no school of the industry of window cleaning.

So over the subsequent, I guess six and a half years I worked for a few different companies trying to learn from as many people as I could. I got a great lens into what a bad version of this industry looks like and what a good one looks like.

And I went as far as Australia and worked down there for a few years to see if it was done any differently in other parts of the world. And it was.

And so when I moved back to Kingston, Ontario, where I’m speaking from now, to start Elite Window Cleaning, not as a franchise system, but as a business, I had, I had seven years worth of great knowledge, I had seven years worth of frontlines education.

I had the stamina and the energy and I had a borrowed car and a bucket and I just took everything that I had learned and poured it into making a great company focused on technology, primarily because the industry was just, it was begging for it.

You know, it hadn’t had an update since the, the squeegee was patented in 1936. And so that’s like, you know, that’s kind of the headspace I was in, shifting into that entrepreneurial gear I guess.

Meg
It’s funny how many people I talk to about window cleaning. They say, I don’t need a franchise for that. A man in a van, truck. In a truck. It’s the guy in a bucket and a squeegee and I’ll go up and down the road and I can forge my own path.

What, so you started Elite just as a business and at what point did you realize that you could replicate that and continue to grow it as a franchise system?

Chris
This was, this was a really interesting path. So it was about three years in and from day one, like I said, I was focused on not just like technologically being a good business, like having a great website and a conversion engine and really thinking about how I could get more customers through the use of technology.

I was really focused on the technology that could enable my window cleaners to be faster and more consistent at their job. And so we developed these water fed pole systems and we developed these filters and we were able to basically take the North American water table and understand the composition of minerals.

I won’t go too deep into this, but I think it’s an important segue into why we franchised. And we spent three years working on building out this incredible level of consistency for our own business so that we could maximize our profits.

And what came out the other side was a set of technology that just isn’t at the time didn’t exist in the window cleaning industry.

And so it was more of how do I build systems. Or sorry, less of how do I build systems to replicate and more of how do I share this with other people like me? How do I, how do I. Like, I felt like we had a cheat code to the industry that was so big and I had seen from the front lines for so long, and I just wanted to share it with people.

And the interesting part, about to make a long answer longer, how we were, how we franchised it was the business cash flowed so hard that we were able to build a franchise system like completely self funded, which is very unusual.

And so because we were completely self funded, we didn’t have any adults in the room. We didn’t have anybody saying, that’s crazy, don’t try that. This thing won’t work.

And so we were able to really mold the clay in a way that I don’t think if we had have gone, raised capital to build the system, it wouldn’t have looked like it does today. Like, it looks somewhat unusual by franchising standard.

And that’s because we built the, the entire system with the methodology of if I were a franchise owner participating in this system, what would I want?

That was like where we started from, what would I want from support, what would I want from, you know, marketing, sales equipment, you know, construction. And we just got to make it up as we went and we built a really, really cool thing over, over a couple years.

Meg
So I was reading a little bit about you before we hopped on here, and let’s talk about what if? Not just what if should I have, oh, that was a mistake. Well, what if I’d done something differently?

You really put it more into the future and say, gosh, what if?

Chris
Exactly. That was the whole thing was like, let’s, let’s. If we don’t try, then we don’t know. And so I always talk to, to our owners, and I use the pretty commonly used analogy of, of the Sherpa is like, I can’t. You have to climb Everest. I can’t take a single step for you. But I’ll tell you, I’ve tried almost every single dead end on this mountain.

And as being the founder who has been here since that borrowed car and bucket, I can relate to them on a level that I, I think is rare. And say, like, I know you’re thinking of X, Y and Z. Here’s why we do A, B and C.

We tried it and this is what it looks like. We just have all that history baked in.

So what if for me, is definitely. It remains like a, a, it’s inquisitive, it’s never rearview mirror. I think my vehicle was assembled without a rearview mirror, and I’m always out the windshield.

Meg
And I hit a real dead end in 2008. It was a terrible year financially for a lot of people, and there was a divorce I never saw coming. I was fortunate to have three mentors at the time, and one of them used that rear view mirror windshield analogy with me and said, Meg, you’re spending way too much time looking behind.

It’s like you have a tarp over your windshield. Could we take the tarp and put it on your rear view mirror? Now tell me what you see.

Chris
Right.

Meg
And that was one of the most. It almost makes me choke up every time I think about that analogy. But good for you, that, that enthusiasm and the excitement about taking those bold steps and knowing there might be consequences but you’re going to do it anyway.

Have you hit any big roadblocks that said? Whoa. Never saw that.

Chris
I think I hit just about every roadblock. The biggest ones, actually, for me, the biggest one was. I don’t actually don’t share this story very often. The biggest roadblock for me was because we had built this thing in an echo chamber.

We didn’t know all the tributaries and where they led. So when we were looking at expansion and taking this technology to the masses, we looked at franchising and we looked at corporate growth, and we thought, well, let’s try both. Like, let’s compare them. Let’s, let’s, let’s do both.

The, you know, the business was successful enough to fund them both. So in 2019, we launched our first four franchise owners in tandem with 18 corporate stars in one year. With no adults in the room. We go back to that, and it was, it was amazing. Everything worked as expected.

But the big shocker for me was every dollar in the corporate world was like corporate expansion land was less fun to earn because there was more HR. There wasn’t that closeness that we were able to have with our core team here.

But I was able to have that closeness with my franchise owners and entrust them to have that closeness, therefore, with their team. And so I’m going to take you through 2019.

We launched these both. They’re both going, you know, biometrics. Amazing. But one of them is way more fun than the other. But that’s okay because the other was, you know, really, really profitable.

And then COVID came around. So we had our first year we made all this investment into people and capital and making sure that all our, you know, everything was ticked and tied.

And then March of 2020, I was sitting in this chair and this desk with my leadership team and watching the news going, what does this mean for us?

Like, will someone buy? Like, is the world ending number one? And if it isn’t, will people buy our services? Are we relevant right now?

And so we sat in this room, and this is where franchising was codified for me, is we said what matters most and every single person without hesitation was, well, we got to roll up all the corporate so that we can support the owners through whatever’s coming.

And from that moment on, it was like, oh, it was the. It wasn’t. It was the humanity that I loved about franchising. It was working with owners, it was building people up.

And I just, again, like, corporate has never. The word hasn’t even been a consideration amongst the team, the leadership team. It’s been like, okay, now we know what we want to do, we know what we love.

And from that day forward, we were, we’ve just been, you know, all chips in on building amazing owners.

And turns out 2020 was one of the best years in the company’s history, followed by a record-breaking 2021.

But I never look in that again to the rear view mirror. I never look back at corporate and say, wow, if I had had those 18 shops in 2020, that would have been like. It just doesn’t enter the conversation because we know where we want to go and we know who we want to want to be.

Meg
Did you shut down those corporate locations or consolidate them?

Chris
We rolled them all up in March. We, we knew like, it was just too, it was too risky to diversify our attention until we knew what was going to happen with, you know, COVID and the whole craziness that happened to all of us.

And we just said, we gotta, we gotta consolidate all this back, put our effort into franchise owners, and take this as the big learning.

So that was the big roadblock. I guess that’s another long answer. But the big roadblock was we had to roll up a significant investment so that we could double down on who we wanted to be.

And the bet paid off handsomely. It was the right move, and I’m so happy that we did it.

Meg
That’s a great way to enter into such a rocky period of time for all of us. No one knew what was going to happen. Exterior services were really what people wanted to not just look outside, but actually be outside.

Were you doing—was your split, what was your split for indoor and outdoor services? Did you have to pivot, in other words, with the pandemic?

Chris
There was two interesting things that happened with like the service lines. We were always commercial first as an organization because that was where my background was. And so we, we do a ton of residential, but commercial was like, you know, I think about the biggest project in the system is a university with 70,000 panes of glass that get cleaned inside and out.

Like it’s, it’s a tremendous. It’s a three-month project for eight technicians. Great big job.

And one of our first pieces of insulation going into COVID was all our commercial clients were business as usual. And so that was really interesting because we, and it was like, okay, wow, I didn’t—we didn’t see this coming.

And then residential just went off the charts. It was like May, June of 2020 and people just got—I don’t know if fed up or something happened—and the phone lit up and we had to double our residential workforce system-wide.

And we were—yeah, it was exterior at first and gutters and power washing and all of these exterior services. And then it just turned into again business as usual, but at a velocity that we had never seen.

It was, it was wild. When people were locked in their house, they did not want to be looking through dirty windows. So that was, you know, the service was commercial at first. But then it kind of became just business as usual.

It didn’t have the retraction that I was worried it would even in the residential market, which was, you know, a great—I guess if there’s silver linings—great experience to have lived through.

Meg
No one wants to relive that whole experience all over again.

Chris
Okay. 

Meg
But we, my husband and I being in this office, we did what everybody else did and looked at your walls, your flooring, your carpets, your window treatments. Oh, there are your windows.

And, and so that’s interesting that you were talking about other exterior services. Do you continue to do the gutters and other exterior services?

Chris
Yeah, we really—so we have, we have a kind of like—or I have like a methodology with the business. And I say we because this is definitely not a one-man operation. This is, you know, this is a team effort.

But our thought around it is if we are going to add a service line, we need to prove that through technology we can be the best in the world at it.

So when we added gutter cleaning as a main service line, it should be better than a standalone gutter cleaning company—our service and our technology that we use.

And so we actually import our gutter cleaning equipment from the UK and we can reach up to six stories from the ground. It’s this high-powered gas vacuum and has a camera.

And our technicians can just walk around your house and clean out your gutters without stepping on your roof, without using ladders. And the efficiency gain is like crazy compared to climbing a ladder, cleaning, you know, a couple feet each way, climbing down and moving it.

So gutter cleaning, we still do. Soft washing, pressure wash—again, soft wash was that technology that we, when we were getting into the industry, we wanted to be best in class in soft wash, so worked really hard on that equipment.

And then our core service, obviously, windows—inside, out. So that’s kind of, kind of our suite.

Meg
It’s so sexy to talk about windows—window cleaning, gutter cleaning—but people who are getting into business want to be in essential services where consumers are spending.

They don’t want services that they’re going to go out of style. Window cleaning will never go away.

As a business owner, I just did it yesterday at my own business. Somebody taped up their holiday decorations and then taking them down. Now there’s residue everywhere.

Chris
So yeah, they get dirty over and over. And like here’s the other part that often gets forgotten about in home services that I think is probably the most—you know, it is the most important point. More so than the technology, more so than like the things that we’ve done to build the unit economics is one of the reasons when I started on that day in Vancouver and stopped is I thought this would be a cool job. I thought it would be a good job. And that is such fuel for me because it is such a good job for the frontline technicians.

It is not—they’re outside all day, they’re on beautiful properties. And so if you’re going to succeed in home services, you need to have a successful workforce.

And I think that we’ve been really intentional about the technician is the most important person in these businesses and we teach our owners that without that frontline culture, you just can’t scale this thing.

And so when I think about like what makes any home service business—anyone listening to this—any business, in my opinion, but particularly home services, is your frontline staff are—you should treat them like gold because they are the annuity in your business.

They are the thing that really makes this thing work. And we focus ultra heavy on finding the right people—Gen Z. I’m really bullish on people entering the workforce right now.

So I’m talking 18- to 25-year-olds. These people were born with an iPhone in their pocket. They can solve the world’s problems with a Google search or, you know, an OpenAI request.

And they’re entering the workforce for the first time. And there’s such an opportunity for entrepreneurs to build this incredibly capable workforce. And yeah, it’s just a huge point of focus for us.

Meg
Well, I—back when I owned Great Clips, which is just a single story, clean windows inside and out—it was just a guy in a bucket. And I did hire Fish Window Cleaning. I will say that I did hire a franchise to do that.

But what you’re talking about—a technician walking around a building looking at technology—what a great angle on your workforce and engaging that, meeting them where they are, which is on their iPhone. They’re, they’re looking at little screens all day anyway.

Chris
Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s meeting them where they are and empowering them to—I find that this generation looks at any employment as like micro entrepreneurship.

They see the value for their time and they want to get maximum value for their time. So we really focus on how you can incentivize your technicians to make way more than they ever dream doing this job by doing it really, really well.

And, and this, this generation loves to play the game. And the game for them of, of employment is what is—how do I get maximum value for the time I spend doing this and do I enjoy my job?

Because this generation, if they don’t enjoy their job, they will not work at that job and you’ll have high turnover. So yeah, it’s, it’s a huge focus for us.

Meg
This is a major aha for me. Thank you so much. This—as a franchise consultant, I present window cleaning. It’s been around forever. We’ve had glass and it’s going to be around forever.

But now you’ve solved X. And that’s the—what everyone is concerned about is the labor question.

When did it—when did your pivot into the United States take place?

Chris
So our pivot in the United States took place officially in 2022. We knew that that was where—like when the technology really started working and the owners were really just—it was working and they were winning and everybody—we were like, oh my goodness. Like this is gonna, this is, this is real. We did it.

And some cat got out of some bag and the acquisition requests started and people wanted to buy us. People wanted to buy the IP. And I just I was having so much fun that I wasn’t really that interested until I met Scott Frith, who was just an introduction from a friend. And he is the CEO of Lawn Doctor, but also the chairman of Happiness Brands.

And he said to me on our first call—we scheduled 15 minutes and it went almost three hours. And one of the first things he said to me was, there’s only two things that matter in franchising and it’s unit economics and franchisee–franchisor relationships.

And that was just literally how I looked at it. It was like everything else is background noise if we have the relationship and the economics stand for themselves.

And he said, I’m thinking about building this brand. I want to bring it to the U.S. I love what you’re doing.

And it was just a hand-in-glove fit. To this day we had actually, yesterday, we had an hour scheduled together and went two and a half.

So it’s, it’s, it’s all about the relationship. So in 2022, we brought Sparkle Squad to the U.S., or we began bringing it to the U.S., building out the systems.

Happiness has a manufacturing plant in Marlboro, New Jersey, where all the Lawn Doctor equipment’s custom built. You can’t buy this stuff off the shelf.

And now as somebody who’d been building technology, I had access to this manufacturing plant to build literally the best piece of equipment in the world. That’s always been my goal. And now I had all of a sudden the access to it.

So we spent a year getting really, really clear on who the right person was as the owner, the avatar, like, who would be disproportionately successful. Refining the systems, refining the technology.

And launched it officially for sale last January. And so in the course of the last, I guess, 12 months now, we’ve brought on 29 incredible owners across the U.S. operating in 56 territories. And it’s just been truly a dream come true.

So that’s kind of where we are today.

Meg
What necessitated or created the, the name change between the U.S.

Chris
Initially, so here’s the—here’s the real story.

The name Elite Window Cleaning was created by me in a hotel room in Rome on my—on a layover when I was returning from Australia to start this business. I knew almost nothing about branding. I knew almost nothing about, you know, how to make a—how to make a business. I just liked the name.

And when we went to go into the U.S., it was—there was no—there was trademarking implications. So I couldn’t. There was already—it was already trademarked in the U.S.

And I thought, wow, what a great time to again be best in breed with what we do. So we worked on the branding. We worked on, you know, the vehicles just turn your head when they drive by. You can’t not see these things.

And it was all, we got to be intentional for the first time about who we were and what we stood for outwardly to the world because Elite just had always been. So that was the genesis of it, I guess.

Meg
Got it. And now that you’ve had as many successful launches with franchisees as you’ve had, do you know what your ideal owner profile looks like?

Chris
Yeah, we’re very clear on that. It is—it doesn’t fall into an age, cut, color, background, none of that.

It falls into a person who believes that they have the stamina to put effort into something for a prolonged period of time to reap that benefit.

And what I realized really, really quickly is stamina is—you know, people say we look for grit, we look for, you know, somebody who has a high self-worth or values their, their themselves and their effort.

Stamina is such an underrated attribute in business is you have to do the hard things day in and day out for years.

And like I—you know, we have multi seven-figure revenue at this point and I still wake up and do the hard things because that’s, that’s where it comes from.

So we look for stamina, we look for people who believe in the industry.

It’s like you may not believe in the industry until you meet Sharon Kupak, who does our development, and she educates you on it. But we can see when somebody’s light bulb goes off and they’re like, “Oh, I see how this fits. I see how this applies to my market.”

And yeah, it’s that stamina, it’s that, that hunger that those people just thrive in this environment.

Meg
You’ve had so many success stories. How do you help your franchisees who are potentially struggling to, to get above water, get to break even, see that cash flow?

What are your internal mechanisms? In a way, it sounds like everyone’s coming out of the gate really successfully, 

Chris
Yeah.

Meg
But there got to be some challenges there.

Chris
There’s always challenges. I would never paint a picture that was—of entrepreneurship that was rosy at any stage. There’s always challenges.

So again—this actually, I’m going to tie it back to your rearview mirror/windshield thing—we try to know where, we try really, really hard in our coaching structure to meet owners where they are.

So based on revenue, based on technician footprint, and we try to tailor the coaching into brackets based on what the real experience of this owner is.

So if, you know, Meg and I are meeting and I know Meg has a half-a-million-dollar revenue business, I’m going to talk to Meg about that playbook. I’m not going to talk about the $2 million dream.

I am going to talk about, here’s how we get from half a million to 750,000, or like and so by meeting owners where they are, we can kind of get in front of some of the things.

Like it’s almost like we’re, we’re trying really hard to, to meet you where you are and say, “Okay, here’s where you are and here’s what’s coming around the next corner, and you need to be ready for X, Y, or Z.”

I find that approach allows owners to be, again, like forward-thinking and not like, “Oh, I wish, you know, a tire—I blew a tire last week and that’s going to cost me 200.”

It’s like, “No, no, no, you have a, you have a 400 gap on your schedule on Thursday. That’s where we want you to focus.”

So I think a lot of it’s mindset. And just how we help them is we have lived the experience. And so we try to meet them where they are and talk about how we got across every hurdle or, you know, whatever they’re approaching.

Meg
Well, your around-the-world—not around the world—but your, your experience going to other countries, other climates and, and cultures to learn how this business might be different from one country to the next.

Well, plus your original experience where you worked for the guy who was up on the building playing Spider-Man, and you taking a job for a year there and subsequent jobs that you had before you really started to create this vision in a hotel room, which I love.

What a great place, Rome, to start to really flesh out your business model. Such a great experience.

How do you take that, that module in your brain that acquired all this experience and plug it into the culture of Elite and Sparkle Squad so that your franchisees understand the depth of your conviction but it’s based on experience?

Chris
I think there’s, there’s two things that are really important. I’m glad you asked that question.

Number one is, everyone in this business there’s only one transplant in the entire organization. Every single person leadership team, business coaches came up from the front lines in some fashion.

And that’s the great part. Again, people are looking for more reasons to hire Gen Z—you hire somebody who’s going to school for, you know, whatever, to get their MBA. You teach them this awesome business and then they come in with the institutional knowledge of the business and the MBA and they can grow up inside the organization.

So number one is we try to make sure everybody has like relevant experience to our owners.

And then how I, how I guess I get it out or I unlock the experience is I am very hands-on with the owners. I join the group calls every single week. I pop in on the coaches’ one-to-ones.

Like right now, we’re at the top of the year I’m going to be on every single one-to-one for every single owner so that I understand what their goals are for the year and I can help them deconstruct that.

Like, we stay, we stay really, really close because I think there’s a lot of upside and power there for them unlocking.

And, you know, my phone’s always on. Luckily they respect it and it’s not ringing all the time.

But yeah, it’s—we’re close. I think we’re closer than maybe is usual in franchising as you know how we interact with the owners.

Meg
I would say so. When you’ve got that organic upward growth of your frontline people who are now taking charge of marketing or branding or operations, technical support.

You are a technology company that happens to do window cleaning. Window and gutter cleaning.

Truly unique. Based on my experience, that’s 30 years in this franchising industry—to have a leadership team that all came from the front lines with the exception of one.

How big is your team now, by the way?

Chris
So around at HQ here, there is, if you take out the admin positions, there’s 10 senior people here.

Then we have a call center that handles all inflow. The cool thing about this is back to that echo chamber, we thought about what would a franchise owner want from a call center?

We could centralize it because when I was out in the field, I went through so many phones and I was constantly trying to juggle and book jobs while executing the jobs.

And we decided we wanted to build a call center that not only took the calls, sold the jobs, but scheduled them on behalf of the franchise owner.

So we use this relatively complex routing system so they always make intelligent routing choices. But you, as a franchise owner, can be out, you know, doing sales or doing networking or out with your team doing different things.

And we call it “the jungle.” The jungle can be here taking those orders and putting them right on tomorrow’s schedule, this afternoon’s schedule—making sure everything’s ticked and tied while you’re out focusing on growing your business.

You have some attachment mechanism.

So it’s another kind of sidebar, but it’s a really cool feature that I’m proud of. It’s not just order taking—it’s like seeing that customer journey kick off.

We call them technicians, our call agents, I guess. And the reason we call them technicians is because they’re a part of the window cleaning process. They’re, they’re still a technician. Like, they still are part of this job happening and we want them to feel ownership.

Meg
What a great insight into your entrepreneurial brain.

I was thinking about it before we got on this morning that some people are born with it. I’m not one of those people.

I’m an excellent franchisee. Give me the recipe, tell me how to make it work, and you’re going to get a great outcome. I’m not, my mother is an entrepreneur, but I have more of the execute gene.

It’s so eye-opening—and I’ve always loved Happiness and Lawn Doctor. It’s bringing sexy back to lawn care is what I had said to Eric Martin at one of our conferences, because he was talking about technology.

And it’s really amazing how you have had this vision of something as simple as window cleaning. The positivity of the “what if” with the excitement, rather than looking back with regret.

I think I could probably talk to you forever.

By the way, are you coming to Houston to our conference?

Chris
I will not be at Houston, but I will be at the next one.

I have a double-book at the Houston one, but I will be at when they tell us where the next one is, I will be there. Absolutely.

Meg
That’s such a great event that is coming up all of our franchise companies. I sit there for five days and get to hear from each of the founders, visionaries, CEOs. And then we’ve got the Eric Martin, Sharon Kupaks of the world who are in franchise development.

And it’s for me to sit there for five days and listen to each pitch, I like to tell people that every now and then I’ll come across one and go, “You just don’t get it. It’s not making sense to me.”

And that’s when I have people come onto my podcast because if I have head trash about it, I know that my candidate is going to have head trash about it.

I’ve never had that with window cleaning. But people still don’t get the value proposition, the huge financial upside to this, the ongoing necessity of it.

It is absolutely essential. And I’m so glad that you were able to pull the layers back for my audience and really bring some clarity to this opportunity.

And so I thank you so much for spending the time with me today to bring your story to life and give me a couple of twists and turns that I didn’t expect.

Chris
Oh, thank you, Meg. The pleasure was all mine. It’s you know, anytime we can get to have a conversation like this, it just fills my bucket.

I think you’re right to the degree I think I was born with this. But what I love to do is just talk to people about it because I’m passionate about it.

I remember the first time I spoke at the conference, the franchise conference, to everybody and Sharon I was so nervous. And Sharon’s like, “Just go up there and tell them why you love what you do. It’ll be just do that. Don’t try to say anything other than why you love.”

And I just—it felt so natural. I really do love what I do and I appreciate anytime I can talk about it. So thanks so much for having me on.