A couple of days after Daniel finished cleaning a customer’s windows, a branch came down and left sludge across one of the panes. The customer reached out. Daniel was working nearby that day, so he went back, cleaned the one window and didn’t bill for it.
He says it barely took any time out of his day. “I’m not going to charge them just ‘cause I could charge them for it,” he says. He says it is the only time a customer has come back to him unhappy with a job.
That kind of fix is how Daniel runs Wash Away USA, a small exterior cleaning company in the Denver area. He pressure washes, cleans windows and clears gutters for homeowners and a handful of commercial clients. He started the company as a way to learn business, and he runs his schedule by rules he picked up on tree crews.
The company existed on paper for a couple of years before Daniel put much work into it. His reason for starting was practical. “I wanted to learn how to run a business so that I can buy other businesses and be successful in running those,” he says. “I basically just bought a power washer and started quoting jobs.”
He brought habits from earlier work. He has about five years of tree trimming behind him, and it shapes how he books his days.
The arrival window came from the tree crews. The men he worked for always gave customers 30 minutes, and they had a line about it, as Daniel remembers: “If we give a 30-minute window, then it’s pretty hard to be late.” He agrees, and he aims for the front edge of the window. A customer told “between 9:00 and 9:30” is usually happy to see him at 9:00, he says, and much less happy at 9:30. The latest he can remember arriving to a job was about two minutes late.
When he leaves one job for the next, he texts the customer that he is on his way and when his maps say he will get there. Things come up. A client may want to add to a project, or he may have to stop for gas. Some services might need a full hour’s window, he says, but a four-hour one would take a lot out of his own day if he were the customer. “I always try to put myself in my customer’s shoes,” he says.
Pressure washing was the first service, and it is still what brings people back. According to the company’s website, it uses soft washing, low-pressure water with biodegradable cleaners, on delicate surfaces such as stucco and siding, and saves higher pressure for tougher surfaces like concrete.
Customers led him to the rest. After he finished their pressure washing, people kept asking whether he did windows or gutters. Window cleaning needed little new equipment, so he tried it. Gutters followed, since he already had what the job required once he was doing the other two. The company’s website says the gutters are cleaned by hand, the downspouts flushed with water and the debris bagged and hauled away.
Windows and gutters are now the work he enjoys most, he says, though pressure washing is what builds a steady list of repeat clients. He has a few recurring window customers, and two commercial clients who have him back regularly for windows. One customer wrote in a Google review that after Wash Away USA cleaned the windows at Empire Collective, a retail building in Denver’s RiNo district, shoppers could clearly see the artisans’ work inside.
He also takes on lighting jobs to stay busy when washing slows. “I feel like anyone getting into the service business space kind of needs to expand their reach a little bit in order to stay busy in the off season,” he says.
The company serves the Denver metro area, according to its website. Daniel calls himself something of a solopreneur. A couple of people work with him now and then, but he has no employees yet, and he says he is just starting to explore hiring.
He has had people work under him before, and he knows how he wants to manage. He plans to lead by example, set clear expectations and talk it through when someone misses the mark. “If I just let it slide all the time, then people are going to know that that’s not an expectation, it’s more of a recommendation,” he says.
His work comes with a guarantee. “If anyone ever reaches out to me, my work is guaranteed,” he says. It is informal. A complaint within about a week of the job gets a return visit; windows that have simply gotten dirty again weeks later do not. What he cares about, he says, is that the property looks the way the customer wanted when he leaves. “I care about the people who I work with,” he says.
The long-range plan is still the one he started with. He wants to “grow it and centralize it by buying other businesses in similar industries,” he says.