In my first business venture, I partnered with my younger brother Jeff — we were 10- and 12-years old. With my mother’s non-stop encouragement, we started a window-washing business, Bucket & Brush Brothers. We handed out flyers to the small businesses in our home town, Carlinville, a southern Illinois farm burg of 5,000 people. The charge: $1 per business.Our first customer was my parents’ business. We washed the windows of their ladies “ready-to-wear” shop on the north end of the town square. My Dad was a tough customer, he had strong ideas on how to wash windows the “right way”.
At our peak, we cleaned the windows for twenty businesses, which we completed in about five hours each Saturday. We were each generating $10 per week, which felt good.
From this early experience, I learned a few lessons.
* Sustaining a business is challenging, it takes discipline and a rigorous commitment. If you let up, you lose customers. If you call in sick, you lose customers. Calling your own shots comes with a responsibility that is unmatched when working for someone else. We shut down the business when I got hired on at Doc’s grocery store as a bag boy.
* A friend once described sky diving as “quintuple thrills”. Fear, excitement, happiness and intense worry are feelings I have when launching a new business — the mix of danger and approval along with the rewards of grinding out solutions to problems. It is an experience that I love to repeat.
* Doing business with a family member or a friend can be a mistake with low odds of success. With F&F, you have trust. Personal loyalty, however, can get in the way of making smart and difficult business decisions. My grandfather described it as “soft heart, soft head”.
* The product may inspire the business, but sales make the business.
* Wipe the squeegee carefully with a dry towel before applying it to the next window. Bring plenty of dry towels or the windows will be marred with ugly streaks.
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