A Day In The Life Of A Window Cleaner

Peter Manzi the managing director of Clearwater in the company's water purication plant where the equipment can filter up to 75,000 litres of water per day and is stored in these containers.

A day in the life: keeping Dubai water and windows up to scratch - Peter Manzi is the managing director of Clearwater, a window cleaning and maintenance company based in Dubai. The 53 year old Briton arrived in the UAE nine years ago having seen a new water purification system in the United Kingdom and sensed a window of opportunity opening in Dubai with the emergence of the property market. He began with three employees, which has grown to a staff of 20. The purification system he employs removes the sodium, calcium and magnesium to leave the water chemical free and windows streak-free.

6am

I have always been an early riser, not naturally, it’s because I have seven children, aged nine to 29. Only four of them are here at the moment, but Christmas can become chaotic. I get the kids ready for school. I live in Arabian Ranches with the kids at Jess Ranches, so I’m lucky enough to be able to walk them there. We have recently restructured the company so domesticity is a respite.

7.45am

I have a cup of tea and some toast and then pack the wife off to work. She is in property so is constantly busy. I swim 20 lengths every morning, it focuses my mind, strengthens my body and creates a positive energy that doesn’t leave me for the whole day.

8.45am

Clearwater has changed tack from the corporate world and rope access on high towers to the residential space. We moved from concentrating solely on window cleaning to adding a maintenance service. The service is a 24-hour operation so we have to be ready to react day or night to people with plumbing problems, AC maintenance or electricity concerns. When I began the business I partnered with the Lootah family, which helped with the licensing and the business development. That partnership ended 18 months ago as the Clearwater business didn’t fit with their core business. However, the family are still a valuable and dependable resource. We have the contract for cleaning the windows of all the Eppco and Enoc service stations. This has to be done at night which generally means the morning is more than busy.

11am

I often have site visits or contract negotiations. We recently signed the contract to do deep cleaning [when one tenant leaves and a home is readied for another] on 100 villas and preventive maintenance for 42 villas on Jumeirah Golf Estates. There has been a real movement in the business confidence of the city and it is showing in our contracts book.

1pm

I have lunch – usually a smoked salmon sandwich – which is generally eaten at my desk. I would like to expand regionally but for the moment I am relying on organic growth. The maintenance business is a very competitive field. It requires professional, prompt service and now we are seeing the benefit from the referrals. The past few years have been difficult but the fact that we have stayed in the market, delivering a competitive package, is now paying dividends.

3pm

There are usually more site visits in the afternoon whether it’s checking on the maintenance team or to see if an overnight clean has been done correctly. I believe in our product and the water purification system that we use [for window cleaning] so I have diversified into selling bottled cleaning water for interior windows. It was a natural extension as one can see a myriad of products in every supermarket that use countless chemicals to clean windows.

Our product is environmentally friendly and we keep our carbon footprint as low as possible. Our fleet of vans run on bio diesel, sourced from the Lootah family. The bottled water business is still in its infancy as the patent costs and the scale of distribution is huge but we are in Géant and Lulu. It probably needs a Dh3 million investment to push that side of the business, which at present I feel would be challenging, but you don’t get many cleaning products that are safe enough for your children to drink and kind to the environment. I am planning for a very good 2014 with 50 per cent growth in manpower and 28 per cent growth in profits. When you look at global commerce right now there are few better places to be in business than here.

6pm

I leave for home and make sure the kids have done all their homework. If there is something on the TV, or Chelsea, I may watch but generally the business always needs some attention. Supper is usually pasta at 8pm.

10.30pm

It’s lights out and straight to sleep as long as there has not been too much stress that day.

Three Window Cleaning Stories for Wednesday

The Dubai businessman Peter Manzi has a deviously simple plan to clean up: On a recent Monday afternoon, I watched as a shopper stood in the Géant hypermarket in Dubai, contemplating an expanse of window-cleaning products. First, the man picked up a spray bottle containing a blue liquid and examined the ingredients, then he did the same with purple and pink. The bottles of Clearwater, a colourless glass cleaner located on one of the lower shelves, went unexplored. Purple it was.

Clearwater, which is currently being produced in Dubai by an Englishman named Peter Manzi, could very well be the eco-friendliest household cleaner on the planet. In fact, I’ve just taken a swig of the stuff, and I’m fine. This is probably because Clearwater is just, well, clear water. As the bottle informs, it’s “100% Chemical Free”.
Manzi insists that there is more to his product than meets the eye. It’s gone through a filtering process, one involving complicated-sounding things like reverse osmosis. “Normal drinking water has particles in it – calcium, sodium, magnesium,” Manzi explains. “But this is pure water.” The idea is that, stripped of its minerals, water attempts to replenish itself with whatever particles it can find. As Manzi puts it: “It tries to revert back to its natural state. It actually draws in the dirt.”
Even if this is true, it doesn’t fit on a catchy label, so consumers are confronted with something that looks, smells and tastes like the stuff that comes out of their taps. “Yes, this question has arisen,” Manzi says. “I’ve had some comments.”
Manzi, 49, launched Clearwater glass cleaner six months ago, on the back of a window-washing enterprise he founded in 2007. The Clearwater cleaning company has done well, with corporate contracts that include ENOC and Etihad, along with enough individual clients to keep its 25 employees busy. While his firm isn’t the only one using hyper-purified water to clean windows, Manzi says that he’s the first to put it into a spray bottle – a leap, he says, that will one day make him a global force in the household cleaner category. “This could be in Wal-Mart or Tesco,” he says. “Why not?” Earlier this year, as part of an expansion drive, Manzi set up a plant in Barsha; according to him, it can produce 75,000 litres of purified water a day, though it might be a while until the plant is working at full capacity. Meanwhile, Manzi’s efforts to get local supermarkets to carry Clearwater haven’t been entirely successful – all but Geant and Le Marché have turned him down – and he is currently shifting only about 500 bottles a month. “I’m hoping the numbers will go up,” he says. “We’re looking into advertising, doing a proper marketing campaign.”
Despite Clearwater’s limited success so far, Manzi says he is confident that his product will soon be able to compete with more established brands. In fact, he adds, his biggest worry is that larger companies will see what he is doing and develop a clear water of their own. “There are only so many ways to filtrate water,” he says. ”You can’t protect yourself against imitators. The only thing I can do is get this product out there, because if the big players thought they could make money, they’d get it out there pretty quick.” The environmental appeal alone, he adds, makes Clearwater a very attractive prospect for the future.
“There’s a feel about the world now,” Manzi says. “If we want to protect ourselves, we need to start using these kinds of products.” Consumers, however, have 100 years of conventional wisdom telling them chemicals are uniquely effective at doing things like cleaning windows, that a bottle of household cleaner should be a strange colour, have a distinctive aroma and be harmful if swallowed. “The proof is in trying the product,” Manzi insists. “Buy a bottle and try it at home.”
I take Manzi’s advice and test Clearwater on a balcony door that hasn’t been cleaned, to my knowledge, since I moved into my flat over a year ago. As the bottle contains no instructions, I spray it on, leave it for a moment, then wipe it off with kitchen towels. My control group is an adjacent window, which I wash in the same way with ordinary tap water. The tap water window ends up streaky; the Clearwater window doesn’t. I wash a third window with a major-brand, blue-tinted glass cleaner, which also leaves the window streak-free. But I don’t dare to drink it.

A toast to the city's small businesses - A route back to employment: Starting a business offered a route back to employment for single dad Norman Straight, who set up window cleaning company Straight Clean after five years out of work. Mr Straight, 31, from the Marlpit estate in Norwich, was left with responsibility for his sons Jay, 13, Dominic, 11 and eight-year-old Ethan after the break up of a relationship in 2002, and spent years out of work, selling the Big Issue to help make ends meet. But in October 2007 he had an idea to go out armed with a mop and bucket to earn some cash, and with help from business support organisations he set up his company last year.
Mr Straight, who was recently named entrepreneur of the year in a national New Entrepreneur Scholarship competition, went on to win two big contracts, with the Henderson Business Centre in Earlham and an old people's home in Cringleford. He said winning new business was difficult in the recession but being self-employed helped him fit work around his family commitments. He said: “Being self-employed gives you much more freedom as a single parent. As a small business I can offer a personal touch. I know my customers and I treat them as individuals, where a big company would treat everyone the same. “I know most of my customers by name.
“You should think carefully before setting up a business in the recession. People just haven't got much money at the moment. When I go and try and get new business people are cleaning their own windows, even shops are doing it themselves, but I am keeping my head above the water.” Knowing my industry gave me the confidence to go it alone. With a string of shops standing empty across the city, starting up a business in a recession can be scary.

Ex-firefighter red-faced over shed blaze: Red-faced former firefighter Ross Sheppard had to call the fire brigade out when his shed caught fire. Mr Sheppard, 30, was burning cardboard and wood in an incinerator bin in his back garden when the flames spread to a wooden shed. The shed caught fire when Mr Sheppard went indoors to attend to his six-week-old son, Louie, and his partner, Claire Fonteyne, 30. The couple, who live in Awdry Road, Devizes, were alerted to the fire by the barking of their Jack Russell dog, Vinni, and Mr Sheppard quickly filled a bucket with water and threw it over the flames. He refilled the bucket about six times and, as well as attempting to douse the flames, he threw water on to his second wooden shed next to the one on fire to stop it spreading. He was unable to put out the fire but did stop it engulfing the other shed, although two perspex window panels in it melted.
Mr Sheppard, a window cleaner, said: “The flames were about ten feet high and the roof of the shed was well ablaze. The roof was gone so then it was a case of controlling it until the fire engine came. “I probably could have put it out eventually but it was easier to call the fire brigade out. It could have caught neighbours’ sheds so potentially it could have been a lot worse. “I went indoors to feed Louie and I got distracted. If I had stayed with the incinerator bin the shed wouldn’t have caught fire.” The shed that was on fire was destroyed, along with a trampoline and two children’s bikes which were inside.
Mr Sheppard was a retained fire fighter in Devizes for four years from 2000. He was featured in a local news television programme which filmed him as a new recruit to the fire service and followed his progress through training. He left the fire service when he moved from the town centre and could not give the same commitment. Pip Flowers, commander of Devizes Fire Station, said: “While we were on the fire truck driving to the fire we said to each other that we thought it was near Ross’s house. “Ross was a bit embarrassed about it and he had a fair bit of mickey taking from us. Joking aside Ross did everything right when he realised the shed was on fire. His actions in putting water on the second shed definitely saved it from going up in flames. He did well with what he had available to contain the fire.”