“I do the sell. I type up the invoice. I formulate the work order, and then I dispatch myself to go do it,” Noah Johnson says.
The man who walks the property and counts the panes is the same man who comes back with the squeegee. Alternative Window Cleaning, a family company that has cleaned windows in Johnson County and the Kansas City area since 1992, is built that way, and Johnson treats it as the main reason customers keep him.
“There’s no middleman,” he says. When a chain of people sits between the sale and the work, he says, a customer ends up talking to “four or five different people,” and the cleaner who shows up next time may not know “exactly how you like your windows cleaned.” At his company, the person who agreed to the job is the one standing at the glass.
Some of those arrangements go back decades. One retailer posted that Ken Johnson, and now his son Noah, have looked after the shop’s front windows for more than 28 years. Johnson says the company’s residential work is almost all recurring. Some homeowners have been on the books for about five years. Others go back 15 or 20, “people who have kind of been at the start of the business.”
The start was his father’s doing. After a run of odd jobs and some uncertainty about what he wanted to do, Johnson says, Ken began the business in 1992 with no investment and no help. He ran all the route work and did all the field work himself. Johnson’s mother handled the invoicing, administration and billing while she raised two boys.
Johnson and his brother, Clayton, started working for their father in their mid-teens. Clayton left to join the military, came back and worked for the company for a while. Johnson stayed until he was about 18, then took a job with a fire department.
“Didn’t like it at all,” he says. He returned to window cleaning. “I’ve been doing this ever since.”
Today the company is, in his words, “completely family owned and operated. No subcontractors.” Johnson names his father, his mother and his wife, Lauren, as the people who run it with him.
It has not always been that small. When Johnson was growing up, the company had four or five employees at one point, and it got to be too much. He would like to hire again someday. “It’s just about having the right employees,” he says. He is also wary of giving up what the current setup has. “There’s something so fun about being family owned and operated,” he says.
He wants the company to stay in the family and would like his own son to have the choice his father gave him and Clayton. “I want to do the same thing that my dad did for me,” he says. Selling is not on his radar, though he won’t rule anything out. “I’ll never say never,” he says.
The work splits roughly 80 percent commercial and 20 percent residential, he says, and the commercial side runs on biweekly schedules. He likes both, but he admits the routes can wear on him. “I don’t want to say it gets monotonous,” he says. “Sometimes it gets a little repetitive.”
Houses break that up. He finds them more fun than commercial stops, mostly because of who answers the door. “It’s always nice to do a house and meet a new face,” he says.