CCPC

......I concur.....

Does anyone have a customer hand out that defines "pre, and post service, do's and dont's" that has things such as: things the customer should or shouldn't do before you arrive, or things they should or shouldn't do after the work is completed. Examples such as: customers that schedule 6 other contractors for various things during the same time you are their (I hate that). customers walking outside while you're washing their house removing items from areas to be cleaned suggestions to remove their shoes when entering their homes. etc, etc. There are many other things, but you get my drift. I'm looking to find out if any others are using these kinds of pre and post service hand outs. A lot of these things seem like common since, but suprisingly, I encounter these kinds of issue all the time.

I'm not talking about contracts. I'm talking about somthing that makes the whole process run smoothly for me and the client. Lets face it, you can have all the "I'm not liable" information you want, but if the carpet cleaning guy shows up while you're in the middle of washing the house, or if the customer tracks chlorine through their living room, being right about the contract isn't much of bonus. The idea is to make the whole process smoother for both parties, which saves time and aggervation for both parties.

Well now that its all said and done I think Jax did a fantastic job playing host city. We went downtown on Saturday to check it all out and kinda try to put ourselves in the shoes of those visting for the first time and we found that everthing was very well planned and very well thought out. They closed off many of the streets and the Main St. Bridge to only allow foot traffic they had music tower on every street conner, hundreds of vendors, probably a thousand bathrooms, more people on the streets than I have ever seen at any event that I've been to, a handfull of stages with dozens of great music artists. I'd have to say that it was one of the best well planned events that I've personally ever been to and my hat goes off to all of those on the host commity who volunteered their time to make it such a success. Oh yeah, and for all of those newpaper journislts who ripped on Jacksonville (of which most have never even vistted I might ad) Who's laghing now I'd say we are, all the way to the bank (huge dollars spent here in the past week). Another thing I thought I would metion is that I was routing for Philly for many reasons, one of which,they seem to have had twice the enthusiasm and where much more hummlbed by the opportunity to play in the biggest sporting event short of the Olympics. When we were there on Saturday, one thing we all noticed was how lopsidded the fan base was. There must have been 8 Philly fans for every one Pat's fan. I thought it was pretty poor that a teams fan base is either to full of them selves or to ungratfull to even show a good turn out to an event such as the Super Bowl. Shame on them. Here are a few pictures I took.

LOL! actually it was rather cold on Saturday, thankfully it warmed up a bit on Sunday. It was raining all day and night on Wed and Thurs. so I guess better to have a little cold than rain. One guy we ran into from the New England area said "At least you don't have to shovel the rain". About the Yaht, it is actually a lot bigger than it looks in the picture. There was a guy watching it and he told us it was the property of the owner of NasCar, from the looks of it I can believe it. :lgmoneyey

a few more pictures:

I like the classic, the larger font and the color contrasts of the original layout make it a bit easier to read, in my opinion.

Until the day that I don't spend anytime in the field and I can sit at the desk all day and answer the phone, I will always either run my business through a cell phone or have it forwarded to my cell phone. My customers don't want to speak with a receptionist that can't answer all their questions. With that kind of service, I might as well be Envirospec.

Why do you hate Walmart?

Get a 20" floating surface cleaner. there are many good ones. I use a Roto Blaster which has been great. I've also heard good things about the Whisper Wash Classic.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your pump isn't running the whole time you are using it. Expample: For a three hour roof job you may only run your pump for 30 to 45 minutes.

I have mine in the yellow pages, but I was told they couldn't put a cell phone number in the white pages. Maybe I should check again when I relist in a few months. The only reason we have a home land line is because we have a 13 year old daughter, of which we don't allow to have a cell phone at this time. She's at home alone in the afternoons somtimes.

I don't use it to often, but its a nice thing to have when someone requests some information from you (estimates, invoices etc.) or if someone wants to send you some information on a job. I bought mine for 99.00 from Staples. its a fax, scanner, printer, copier all in one. I figured for 99.00 why not.

I've never owned a surfacer with wheels, but I will say that I beleive that if your mainly using a surface cleaner for residential work (driveways, sidewalks, etc.) that the floater is your best bet. It has better versitilty for angleing it over the edge of the driveway and grass lines and can be manouvered over surfaces that I'm sure a surface cleaner with casters can not.

I to run my business through my cell phone. I have my cell number on all of my advertising including my yellowpage ads. Being a one man show, it seems a little pointless to have a business line at home when I'm never there. Sure, I could always use call forwarding to route my incoming calls to my cell phone when I'm not there, but why? I run my fax machine through my home phone which has worked out just fine also.

I basicly do nothing from Dec. 20 through early Jan. then things slowly pick up after that. It works out good though, because it allows me to do my Christmas shopping, and enjoy the Holiday. My busiest times by far are March-May and Sept-Nov.

Nice to hear from you David. Welcome to The Grime Scene.

Very funny, how did you manage to get pictures of every one of my ex-girlfriends and somthing that looks a little like yak and barf mixed together?

True that.

I agree a 100%. Look at Goggle or Ebay, sometimes simple is better. The most important aspects to a good website is the layout and ease of navigation. I can't name how many times I've skipped a site because of its intro crap and all of the unneccesary filler. Save that for childrens websites because most adults don't care, they are looking for functional and effecient.

I've had chlorine leak down my back and cause a slight burn. That was due to carlessness on my part by not making sure the top was sealed tight. In light of that back leak, I will still continue to use backpack sprayers. I hate hand held pump up sprayers.

I have a flomaster back back sprayer from Home Depot which I have had returned and replaced 4 times. They have a 5 year warrenty on them so everytime one breaks I take it back to home depot and they give me a replacement. I will continue to do this till I get my five years out of them as promised. I don't however, voulenteer the fact that I use some caustics which the documation says the sprayer is not supposed to be used for, but thats never been the reason for them breaking so I don't feel as though I'm cheating them.

You can host a site including your domain name registration for around a 100 dollars a year with Ipowerweb.com. They are a one of the best hosting services that I have found and they also have free resources available on their site like: how to market and promote your site, and website free website submission to 50 of the top search engines.

I usually have 23 PW'ing rigs running at any given time, 9 residential window washing crews and 13 commericial crews (skyscrapers). 4 gutter installation specialists, 3 PR/salesman, 6 office personal, and me.... sitting on a beach somewhere drinking somthing fruity with an umbrella in the glass. Oh wait....thats me in about 20 years...

I made a reversed Y connection that I hook directely to my machine which breaks off into two seperate hoses, that attach to two seperate spickets. Any job where I have encountered problems with either not enough pressure, or gpm, this has always solved the problem.