yazbird8

I do 99% residential work and hand write my contracts on those standard forms you can buy at any stationary store....My handwriting stinks and I need to type up something nice for a large condo job....The condo manager wants my certificate of insurance sent by fax (no prob) and a contract describing work to be performed and terms of payment........Does anyone have something very basic in the Word Document format ? Stephen Andrews Power washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Whadda ya think Beth, another month? I wannna copy.. At 7-8 hundred pages I bet it sells in the 40-50 buck range... Can't wait! Hope it reads like a good suspense thriller...

Beth can expose a small piece of herself as long as she doesn't expose her Henway!

How much will the book cost, Beth? Sounds like a "Must Own"!

Hello, How does a 5 GPM 3000 PSI belt driven pressure washing machine sound if I'm using it for concrete?.... Also using to do occasional house washes and low roofs using an x-jet M5. Thanks Steve PS.. I'm a former, and new member. Mr Petry out of Jersey used to be in my neck of the woods... I was a deck guy like him...

Thanks fellas, I went with the 5 GPM because I will be marketing to residential only and the issue of water at the tap made me decide on a lesser GPM machine... Getting an 8 GPM machine would have entailed a whole different rig set-up.. From my past experiences with 4 GPM I figured 5 GPM would suffice... As for hot or cold? I figured cold is fine for mold and dirt, albeit a tad slower... Oil stains were the real concern I had, but from what I understand, your not getting up all the oil anyway.. There will always be a shadow... With the machine I bought, is the 19" Whisper Wash Classic SC "good to go" right out of the gate? Also, could this machine be used with a 24' or 26" SC?...... The cold water machine I bought was a belt drive from Northern Tool.

I am thinking of making the switch to Downstreaming. I use the X-Jet now but have been swayed by many on this board to seriously consider giving downstreaming an honest try...Barry M said that downstreaming can be done using a 5 gallon jug and that a huge tank is not neccasary...He tells me that Jarrod uses it for stripping decks, besides using it for house washing...My question is..Can you guys show me what downstreaming looks like with some photos "in action"....And maybe some photos of what a basic downstreaming system looks like....I am the type that learns better from photos and hands on stuff, as opposed to words....Afterall, a pictue is worth a thousand words..right !!!....Thanks guys Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

I have a pool apron wash coming up (indoor pool)....The walking area is red brick which is like the brick you see on drivways, and the skirting around the pool and hot tub is Travertine....The drainage is poor so I will have some run-off issues. I will use a wet-vac for this......My question is: Can I use EFC-38 as the cleaning ingredient in a room that has Chlorine in the pool?....I want to use the EFC-38 because it's environmentally safe (in case of run-off into pool).....But will a gas be formed if the EFC-38 gets mixed in with the pool water?.......Any thought on this? Also, is there an alternate cleaner that I can buy locally in a pinch?......The job starts on Thursday....Thanks Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Thanks Russell..Any suggestions for a back-up product?..... Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

98 here in Jersey also....We are going to put down a few replacement boards and be done with it for the day.....It's to hot...................But not for golf tonight though Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Powell and Rice were appointed officials. They were not elected....I think the real question is why do blacks choose to run as Democrats almost exclusively? (At last count there are, I believe, 40 blacks in the house and 1 in the senate (Obama)....There are no black Republicans.....Does anyone want to take an honest stab at why that is?.........Lets be real here.............. Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Amen Danny Boy.......A black or a woman president...Only in the Democratic party are such things possible......Like everything else socially groundbreaking...Such things just don't happen in the Repulican party.............They don't even have a black in the House or Senate........Male or female........ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Under Bush, the past 7 1/2 years feels like 30 years. Bad times seem to take forever. Good times are gone in a flash. Since Reagan something in this country has fundamentaly changed.(Maybe it's because I came of age around that time and started to understand politics better) He was president for what seemed like 30 years to me...I loved the guys personality but his politics towards the middle classs was just awful (anyone remember trickle down economics?) Then it was Bush 1 for another, what seemed like, 15 years ( A thousand points of light). I thought that maybe he was a martian version of Mister Rogers.....lol... Then we had Clinton and I finally took a breath...Good times were here again (22 million new jobs were created and new employees were naming their own price if they had an "in demand" skill)..He also enacted NAFTA though and that was a huge mistake..We are still being torn apart by that piece of doo doo legislation.The whole Monika thing sucked also (no pun intented) and it screwed up his going away party...........Now, we have what seems like 30 years of Bush 2... Man this prez give me the willys.......ughhhh We now need Barrack so we can all breath again....This country needs an energetic, optimistic prez again...I'm positive our foreign allies would agree. We need a "Reagan type" personality again.......But with Democratic values... Someone who has the "middle class" way of life as a high priority........ Reagan gave us "Star Wars"................ Obama hopefully will be more creative on how money is used. Hopefully he will take religion out of science so we can let scientists do what they do best........Stem Cell Research comes to mind.......Michael J Fox and others might agree.......... Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

$1,500 for deck to strip, brighten and seal. $750 for fence to clean, brighten and seal. Stephen Andrews Power Washing

Big business is so corrupt it's deeper than your ability to conceive it. Whomever holds the power holds the money and whomever holds the money holds the power..........Big business even controls the way you view them...It's corruptive force is the reason for incredibly low wages. It's true that big business creates lots of work for the working class. But it's also true that they have the ability to set wages thru collusion. If people's wages were much higher then they are now imagine how much more money would flow into the consumer market. The economy would explode, social programs would cease to exist (almost), and democracy would be more moral, more equitable, and more liberating to all, not just the lesser among us. There would be a much lesser need for social programs. It's not so much a Republican/Democrat issue, but they do sleep with currupt big business .....I found the article (shown below) very enlightening. It also supports what I've always believed to be true. There are also some great graphs and charts (that I can't attach) if you go to this website...........Please read below Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power Another way that income can be used as a power indicator is by comparing average CEO annual pay to average factory worker pay, something that Business Week has been doing for many years now. The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to as high as 531:1 in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, when CEOs were cashing in big stock options;. It was at 411:1 in 2005. By way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe. The changes in the American ratio are displayed in Figure 6. Figure 6: CEOs' pay as a multiple of the average worker's pay It's even more revealing to compare the actual rates of increase of the salaries of CEOs and ordinary workers; from 1990 to 2005, CEOs' pay increased almost 300% (adjusted for inflation), while production workers gained a scant 4.3%. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage actually declined by 9.3%, when inflation is taken into account. These startling results are illustrated in Figure 7. Figure 7: CEOs' average pay, production workers' average pay, the S&P 500 Index, corporate profits, and the federal minimum wage, 1990-2005 (all figures adjusted for inflation) Source: Executive Excess 2006, the 13th Annual CEO Compensation Survey from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. If you wonder how such a large gap could develop, the proximate, or most immediate, factor involves the way in which CEOs now are able to rig things so that the board of directors, which they help select -- and which includes some fellow CEOs on whose boards they sit -- gives them the pay they want. The trick is in hiring outside experts, called compensation consultants, who give the process a thin veneer of economic respectability. The process has been explained in detail by a retired CEO of DuPont, Edgar S. Woolard, Jr., who is now chair of the New York Stock Exchange's executive compensation committee. His experience suggests that he knows whereof he speaks, and he speaks because he's concerned that corporate leaders are losing respect in the public mind. He says that the business page chatter about CEO salaries being set by the competition for their services in the executive labor market is "bull." As to the claim that CEOs deserve ever higher salaries because they "create wealth," he describes that rationale as a "joke," says the New York Times (Morgenson, 2005, Section 3, p. 1). Here's how it works, according to Woolard: The compensation committee [of the board of directors] talks to an outside consultant who has surveys you could drive a truck through and pay anything you want to pay, to be perfectly honest. The outside consultant talks to the human resources vice president, who talks to the CEO. The CEO says what he'd like to receive. It gets to the human resources person who tells the outside consultant. And it pretty well works out that the CEO gets what he's implied he thinks he deserves, so he will be respected by his peers. (Morgenson, 2005.) The board of directors buys into what the CEO asks for because the outside consultant is an "expert" on such matters. Furthermore, handing out only modest salary increases might give the wrong impression about how highly the board values the CEO. And if someone on the board should object, there are the three or four CEOs from other companies who will make sure it happens. It is a process with a built-in escalator. As for why the consultants go along with this scam, they know which side their bread is buttered on. They realize the CEO has a big say-so on whether or not they are hired again. So they suggest a package of salaries, stock options and other goodies that they think will please the CEO, and they, too, get rich in the process. And certainly the top executives just below the CEO don't mind hearing about the boss's raise. They know it will mean pay increases for them, too. (For an excellent detailed article on the main consulting firm that helps CEOs and other corporate executives raise their pay, check out the New York Times article entitled "America's Corporate Pay Pal", which supports everything Woolard of DuPont claims and adds new information.) There's a much deeper power story that underlies the self-dealing and mutual back-scratching by CEOs now carried out through interlocking directorates and seemingly independent outside consultants. It probably involves several factors. At the least, on the worker side, it reflects an increasing lack of power following the all-out attack on unions in the 1960s and 1970s, which is explained in detail by the best expert on recent American labor history, James Gross (1995), a labor and industrial relations professor at Cornell. That decline in union power made possible and was increased by both outsourcing at home and the movement of production to developing countries, which were facilitated by the break-up of the New Deal coalition and the rise of the New Right (Domhoff, 1990, Chapter 10). It signals the shift of the United States from a high-wage to a low-wage economy, with professionals protected by the fact that foreign-trained doctors and lawyers aren't allowed to compete with their American counterparts in the direct way that low-wage foreign-born workers are. On the other side of the class divide, the rise in CEO pay may reflect the increasing power of chief executives as compared to major owners and stockholders in general, not just their increasing power over workers. CEOs may now be the center of gravity in the corporate community and the power elite, displacing the leaders in wealthy owning families (e.g., the second and third generations of the Walton family, the owners of Wal-Mart). True enough, the CEOs are sometimes ousted by their generally go-along boards of directors, but they are able to make hay and throw their weight around during the time they are king of the mountain. (It's really not much different than that old children's game, except it's played out in profit-oriented bureaucratic hierarchies, with no other sector of society, like government, willing or able to restrain the winners.) The claims made in the previous paragraph need much further investigation. But they demonstrate the ideas and research directions that are suggested by looking at the wealth and income distributions as indicators of power.

Plainpainter...Good job. You called it like you saw it on the labor issue and I agree with you. It's hillarious to sit back and listen to the predictable attacks from the certain few. I wouldn't use the word stupid to describe someone though. Thats a bit much. Naive would have sufficed......Heres an interesting tidbit: There are NO black Repulicans in the house or senate (41-0)....Also:2/3 of all women in the house and senate are Democrats......What could this possibly mean?......Any good Republican ideas why this is? Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

If the people with all the power (the rich business owners) paid the poor and middle class what they were worth the poor and middle class could pay more in taxes. Everyone who works in america deserves, at minimum a living wage. I'd put that at $25 bucks an hour in some parts of the country. Maybe more. I was a Draftsman. With the advent of Autocad software I was able to do twenty times the workload. Where was my raise? I had to educate myself with student loans on my own dime just to stay relevant. But my wages did not increase much with the gained knowledge and gained productivity. This country should get back to being unionized like the old days. Back when women could stay home and raise a family(if they choose to). Like it was back in the day when one wage earner could support a middle class family. When the middle class had some power in numbers through organized labor. I wouldn't worry too much about the 1%. When the middle class becomes the poor and have nothing, you can kiss this country goodbye. Thats when the 1% might wake up to what their greed has created and all the jobs are overseas.........Whomever holds the power holds the money. And whomever holds the money holds the power. And whomever holds both will decides the fate of others less powerful.....Oh ya, take a look at this country's defense budget. It's sickening......Ahh, that felt good...... YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

I've been watching the Live Earth concerts today and must admit the cause is great but the talent is not even mediocre...In fact I think todays music for the most part is terrible....The big music execs have taken total control of the industry and have destroyed true creative freedom....My favorite groups of all time are as follows..in no particular order The Beatles Frank Zappa/Frank Zappa and the Mothers/Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention Joni Mitchell Gong Pink Floyd Caravan The Doors Did I mention Joni Mitchell?........... YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance Anyone care to share their favorites?...........

You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take..........Wayne Gretzky YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

I'm looking at the same quote on my board as I type this.....Great quote..... YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

That girl is smokin in that bikini..............Gore lurks and will win......... YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Where did you get that cartoon?....Are there more?.....It has given me some ideas for my advertising. YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

I "target market" only..Only direct mailings to my high end target...When I receive a call I always insist that the potential customer be there when I give estimate...ALWAYS.....I always show them my book of before & after photos which are on glossy photo paper....I do it page by page sometimes and a dialog is opened up between us through the photos....I always mention customers in their area which I've done...I always tell them I have loads of references....I believe that emphasizing quality and professionalism goes a long way to selling yourself to them....I always ask for their business and I always give a particular week that I will start their job...Oh, and I try to let them know that quality work from me costs more money and that mediocrity from others costs less but will leave them disapointed.....If they have looked at my Before and afters then they know exactly what I mean... YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Your bank account will let you know if your making any money....What do you have in it now?...What did you have in it 3 months ago?.......If you are not increasing your monthly balance by at least what you will need to get through the winter (northern guys) then you are in trouble unless you have another source of income coming in.....Thats a bit simplistic but it's a good indicator for me....I was able to put an extra 10k into my account (after expenses) in May and June which tells me I am going in the right direction......I would suggest that you figure out what your personal numbers need to be to build your account up and then strive to always better those numbers....Like Ken said, you have to go out of your way to try and retain your cutomers because thats where your true future in this business is...Do what you can do now to fill up next seasons schedule with repeat business from customers who aren't afraid to open their wallets for professional results..... My target market is to upper end incomes only so I know what I'm getting............Oh ya, referals are another important part of the equation....If you do super work and super customer service then the referals will just come.....No advertising dollars there..... YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance

Beth...I would think that if the customer changed their mind after you applied a natural stain to an area it wouldn't be a big deal to appy a solid over that........But if it was the other way around and you had to re-strip a solid so you could re-apply a natural it would be a major PITA and cause you to come back to the job for yet another day.....How would you charge them for something like that? YAZ Stephen Andrews Power Washing Home & Property Care & Maintenance