Episode 2.5: Fill your calendar in advance of Spring

Summary

In this episode of The Huge Insider Podcast, host Sid Graef discusses why they’re publishing more frequent mini-episodes, each featuring valuable insights from proven seven- and eight-figure business owners.

He introduces Jim Dubois, a highly experienced window cleaning entrepreneur, who shares his strategy for getting a jump on the spring “money season.” By proactively contacting customers in January and February with special deals, loyalty rewards, bundled offers, and referral incentives, Jim ensures his company’s schedule fills up before the seasonal rush. He also emphasizes the role of office teams and sales staff in effective follow-ups, upsells, and overall customer engagement. Ultimately, Jim’s tips highlight the importance of proactive planning and marketing to outpace competitors and boost spring revenue.

 

This clear, action-oriented episode is especially relevant for service-based businesses and marketers seeking to maximize seasonal opportunities through organized promotion, team motivation, and early market priming.

 

Show Notes

•Guest: Jim Dubois

•Founder of Window Washing Wealth

•Owner of Squeegee Pros in Charlotte, NC

• References & Resources:

1. Window Washing Wealth

2. Squeegee Pros

3. The Huge Convention (August 20–22 in Nashville)

4. The Huge Insider Podcast Action Guides

5. Phone: 804-600-HUGE (804-600-4843) – Call to share wins or lessons learned

 

Transcript:

Sid Graef:

“Hey, my friend, it’s your host Sid Graef here. Welcome back to the Huge Insider Podcast. We’ve only published a couple of episodes and we’re already starting to publish many episodes that go in between our primary Monday episode. And here’s why we’re doing that. We’ve had so much good insight and feedback from seven- and eight-figure business owners that want to share tactics and strategies that are specifically related to what we’re talking about this week, we decided instead of just doing one a week every Monday, we’re doing a Monday, Wednesday, we may even add a Friday pretty soon because we’re really picking up some steam.

 

So here’s the deal. This is a brand-new show for home service professionals who are stuck trying to break the million-dollar revenue mark. If that’s you, if you haven’t gotten to a million yet, this is your spot. You’re in the right place. And you already know this: if you’re over a million dollars in revenue, you’re going to get even more out of the show because you’ve already experienced some of the breakthroughs and you go, ‘Oh man, I can take that tactic and run to the bank with it.’

 

So here’s the deal. It’s not your typical podcast. It’s not an interview show. It’s not expert-driven. We’ve just gathered up a whole bunch of our—literally a bunch of our friends that are seven-figure business owners, eight-figure business owners, and in one case, nine-figure business owners. And we ask them for insight on a specific topic and they roll, we record it, we publish it here, and you get the raw unedited version of what they have to say about how to benefit and grow from a certain strategy or a certain topic or a certain principle. And honest to goodness, I can’t think of any better way to learn and learn fast.

 

So I’m going to stop talking now. I want to introduce you to a legend in the window cleaning industry. His name is Jim Dubois. He gave us a short five-minute recording on how he primes his marketplace to maximize the end of winter and go into spring so far ahead of his competition that they cannot keep up. Meet Jim Dubois.”

 

Jim Dubois:

“Hey, I’m Jim Dubois with WindowWashingWealth.com and Squeegee Pros, based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We have 45 employees that make up my window cleaning and pressure washing company.

 

So today’s Huge Insider tip has to do with pre-season promos. Lots of things that we do with pre-season to kick off the season. And March, April kind of really mark the beginning of the busy season for so many, and how you prepare now determines how much revenue you’ll generate in the coming months. So I’ll break a couple of these things down with what we do at my company.

 

We look at spring, as most do, as the ‘money season,’ especially for exterior cleaning businesses, and the phone is about to start to ring. And the most successful companies—well, we don’t just wait for leads; we create demand. I want to take a couple of minutes and share with you what works for us, how we maximize sales, marketing, and some of the things that we do to optimize this preseason.

 

We do pre-booking with our active customers, aging customers, prospective customers, and we do this in January and February so that we can somewhat anticipate what March, April, and May are going to look like. And we do this simply by reaching out to our database, and we do this in multiple ways.

 

When we look at pre-season promotions, we really try to work hard to get ahead with pre-season deals. So we’ll do early bird discounts, and what that looks like in my company is we’ll offer a sale to get customers on the schedule before the spring rush. And the word—the takeaway here—is ‘before the spring rush.’ And we’ll offer limited-time discounts for customers who book before the peak season. An example of that is something like, ‘Book before March 15th and save 15%.’ And we’re doing this right now at my office as we speak.

 

We have loyalty rewards where we’ll give top customers, referring customers, an exclusive deal. We have what we call ‘prepay and save,’ where we get customers to lock in their service now with a prepayment discount. A lot of people do bundle packages; we do too, where we combine window cleaning, pressure washing—maybe roof cleaning—but at a discounted rate to increase our average job size.

 

Why do we do this? Well, it gets our schedule full before the season even starts.

 

A couple of other things that we do to get the phone ringing is we’ll do email and text campaigns, where we’ll reach out to our database with a ‘spring refresh special.’ We have referral programs, where we’ll have money-off credits when a customer refers a friend, and we get this out to our database to get the referrals coming in. So there’s a system behind that.

 

We have social media blitz campaigns, where we’re promoting on Facebook, Instagram, and local community Facebook groups or groups in general. We obviously have paid ads and direct mail, where we’re targeting high-value neighborhoods. It could be a message like, ‘Dirty windows? We can fix that!’ And then we combine that with an offer and a call to action. That pretty much works every time. An important side note here is we’re tracking every lead—where it came from and what that conversion percentage is.

 

Another thing that we do, as far as maximizing revenue for this pre-season, is our sales team and our office staff. They play a huge role in this pre-season rush—or pre-season push, might be the better word. Follow-up is everything: upsell and down-sell strategies, and job booking minimums to help us maximize our profits.

 

And the last thing we do is we keep our team engaged. So, you know, your office team is just as important as your field crew in this whole pre-season success that we’re trying to create. So we do things to keep them motivated. At my office, we have sales contests where we’ll reward the rep who books the most jobs in a week. We have team goal bonuses—if the team books X number of dollars in jobs for the week, everyone gets a bonus. We have morning huddles. These are little kick-starts that we do every day with a little bit of training, a little bit of motivation, and goal tracking. And then we have what we call how we kick off the season. We have quarterly events, and we kick it off in March with an employee outing, and this is kind of our way to give back and have some fun with our staff, and it gets them motivated for the upcoming season.

 

So if I wrap this up, a tip for you that are listening: the best and the biggest companies, they don’t just hope for a busy spring; they plan ahead, they market aggressively, they train their teams so that they can capitalize on this pre-season demand. And at my company, spring success is not based on luck, and it’s certainly not based on hope—it’s based on strategy. And this is how a multimillion-dollar window cleaning and pressure washing company stays ahead of the competition.”

 

Sid Graef:

“Wow. So that was cool. What did you learn from Jim? Jim Dubois, the OG, squeegee pro. This guy, he’s got a multimillion-dollar window cleaning company in the Carolinas, and he’s been at it for 30 years. He knows his stuff. And so that’s why I love Jim so much: he speaks from experience, not from theory. Like, he’s been there and done that.

 

So here’s what I want to do. I want to, you know, I want to challenge you—or at least encourage you—to take something that you learned today in this episode and see how you can put it into action this week and apply it in your business so that you can win and prosper in your marketplace. Because that’s the whole deal. We’re not in business just to think about business. We’re in business to win. We’re in business to profit.

 

Our mission here at The Huge Insider Podcast and at The Huge Convention is to help our blue-collar brothers and sisters build a better business so you can have time and money freedom. That’s the deal. I’m certain you got into business because you wanted freedom, not because you wanted to be a slave or in bondage. So we’re getting the best insights from seven-figure, eight-figure, even nine-figure business owners, and we’re asking them questions, and they’re giving us their answer. And we’re just giving it to you straight. We’re not distilling it, we’re not editing stuff out, we’re just going, ‘Here you go. This is what the man said.’ And it’s worked incredibly well for them. Now I want you to take it and run with it.

 

So here’s a quick recap of a few things. One, we’ve got free and paid resources for you. We want to help you win in business. Some of the things we do: we’ve got The Huge Insider Podcast right here. You get The Huge Transformations Podcast, where you get stories and interviews of some of the seven- and eight-figure business builders—some of the same ones that teach on this podcast. And we’ve got The Huge Convention every August; this year, it’s going to be in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee, August 20th through 22nd. Tickets are very inexpensive. I don’t know when you’re listening to it right now, but today is the lowest price you’re going to get a ticket. Just go to www.thehugeconvention.com and join us.

 

We also have The Huge Foundations educational platform, and you can find that on www.thehugeconvention.com as well. That has got over 140 hours of specific home service business education and a whole lot more. Every week we have the downloadable action guide from this show. It is at www.thehugeinsider.com and you can download the action guide and put it into practice.

 

We also have an amazing mastermind that you do have to qualify for. You’ve got to have at least five employees. You need to be pushing or past a million in revenue. And this is where we really pour jet fuel into your business, and this is for people that want a 10X and go from a million to 10 and beyond.

 

So that’s it. I can’t thank you enough for joining us. I hope you learned. I hope you put it into action. And we want to hear from you. We want to hear about your wins. Here’s the cool thing: we set up a special phone number for you—804-600-HUGE. 804-600-HUGE. That last four digits are 4843, spells HUGE. You can call in, you can leave us a message, and here’s what we want to hear: we want to hear a victory story. We want to hear your win. Especially love it if you take some of the principles or strategies or tactics you learned here and apply them, and then call us up and say, ‘I did the thing that Jim taught, and this is the result I got.’ And it doesn’t have to be big—like, ‘I did the thing Jim taught, and I got two new customers, and it works.’ Love to hear that. We also want to hear what we call lessons learned. Basically, that means I tried something, I fell on my face, and it hurt, and I got back up, and this is how it made me better.

 

We want to hear from you. Call, leave us a message, check out the website, check out the resources we have, download the action guide.”