What a window cleaning round really earns: inside Brightside’s year
Dan Ashworth started with £11 houses and a borrowed ladder. Seven years on, his verified sales tell a story about pricing, density and winter.
In 30 seconds
- Price per hour, not per house: a bad street must still pay
- Density beats distance. Dan only takes streets where he already has three customers
- Commercial contracts fill January and February, when houses don’t pay
The number everyone asks about
Brightside Window Cleaning takes about a quarter of a million dollars a year, and every pound of it comes read-only from Stripe and GoCardless. That figure is the reason most people open this page, so let’s start there and then explain how it was built.
The headline hides the shape. Summer months are close to double the quietest winter month, and the business only became steady when Dan found work that does not care about the weather.
Starting cheap, and paying for it for two years
Dan’s first price was £11 a house. People said yes instantly, which he now says should have told him it was too cheap. Moving those first customers up to £21 took two years, one letter at a time.
The customers who joined at £11 were also the first to cancel when prices went up, and the most likely to complain. The ones who joined later, at a fair price, stayed.
“If your first hundred customers all say yes in a day, you’ve found out your price is too low, not that you’re good at sales.”
Density is the profit
A round is a route. Every minute in the van between jobs is unpaid, so Dan made a rule he still keeps: only take a new street if there are already three customers on it.
It meant saying no to about one enquiry in five. It also meant more houses per hour, fewer miles, and a round a new hire could run without him.
- Map every customer and colour a street once it has three
- Knock the doors either side of each new customer on your next visit
- Say no, politely, to one-offs across town
The winter fix: glass that gets dirty all year
February 2021 nearly ended the business: rain, short days and cancellations, with the van payment still due. The fix was schools, dentists and estate agents. Commercial glass is cleaned all year, so winter stopped being a hole.
Today those contracts carry January and February, and the domestic round is the summer upside rather than the whole business.
What to copy, and what not to
Copy the rules, not the town. Leeds prices are not Phoenix prices, and a round in a dense city looks different from a rural one. What travels is the order Dan learned things in: price, then density, then all-year work.
If you are thinking about starting, the odds checker shows how many window cleaning businesses near you are still trading after three years, and what the middle half of them earn.