College student Jordan Leahy is already doing well in his part-time window washing business. Now he's looking to really clean up with a tool that he thinks would be useful to window washers around the world. Leahy is one of five finalists competing for $8,000 in cash prizes that will be awarded tonight at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He didn't win one of the big cash prizes last year when he entered a business plan for his 5-year-old Clear Vision Window Cleaning business. But Leahy says he's hoping his Rendlex tool will earn him more recognition.
His latest plan is the result of prodding and "a really good, kind of life-forming lesson" Leahy says he received after last year's contest from William Dougan, a UW-Whitewater business professor. "He said, 'Now you have to create something you can manufacture and sell to everyone so you can get other people to do the work,'" Leahy said.
His latest plan is the result of prodding and "a really good, kind of life-forming lesson" Leahy says he received after last year's contest from William Dougan, a UW-Whitewater business professor. "He said, 'Now you have to create something you can manufacture and sell to everyone so you can get other people to do the work,'" Leahy said.
Jordan Leahy's been building businesses since he was 15 –about three years ago. Leahy searched out Gary Smith, director of the Southwest Wisconsin Small Business Development Center in Platteville, for business marketing advice. "My clients are not typically 18 years old," Smith said. "Jordan is clearly an exception -- not only with his desire to go forward with starting a business, but then to have a focus of what the business needs to be, how to grow it, how to manage it appropriately." Leahy, now a freshman at UW-Whitewater in pre-business, operates a small commercial and residential window-cleaning service, Clear Vision Window Cleaning, and a line of snowboarding clothes. Meanwhile, at Clear Vision Window Cleaning, he pays himself and his father $15 an hour to do the work, and he's flirting with the idea of franchising the company. The company is growing better every day, he says. The idea for Clear Vision started in a dentist's office where he and his father, Gary Leahy, happened to talk to a window cleaner who was there, he says. Leahy landed his first client last year - Mount Horeb's Gonstead Clinic of Chiropractic. "I just went in," he said. "They had really dirty windows."
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