Owner Sells Window Cleaning Company

Mark S. Reinhart, Award founder and sales manager, watches his book of business grow with each addition to the Grand Rapids skyline.

Owner sells window-cleaning company: The owner of a local window-cleaning company has sold his operation to pursue other business ambitions. Award Window Cleaning Services has acquired Blue Sky Window Cleaners. Both companies are based in Grand Rapids and provide residential and commercial window cleaning services in West Michigan. Terms of the deal, which was announced today, were not disclosed.

Nate Wood founded Blue Sky Window Cleaners in 2009. Since that time, he has grown the company to multiple crews.  “It’s been a great ride, and I’ve had a lot of fun building my company,” Wood said. “But now it’s time to move on.”

Wood said Mark Reinhart, president and CEO of Award Window Cleaning Services, has a “great business” with an “excellent reputation.” “I’m certain my customers and employees will be treated very well,” Wood said.

Reinhart, who has 25 years of experience in the window-cleaning industry, said customers of Blue Sky can count on the same “high-quality work” and “positive attitude” they’ve come to expect from Blue Sky.

Wood will continue to guide the company through the transition. Calder Capital of Grand Rapids sourced the buyer and brokered the sale. Max Friar, managing partner of Calder Capital, said he has seen an increased level of interest in business acquisitions during the early spring months of 2016. “Many individual and strategic buyers are actively seeking to acquire small service, distribution and manufacturing companies in West Michigan,” Friar said.

He noted lending conditions and the strength of the local economy make this “a great time to buy.” Friar also said the transaction between Award and Blue Sky typifies a trend in the marketplace: established buyers acquiring small businesses where non­-retirement age owners are seeking a new path in life.

Also see:

Making the Skyline Shine

R.I.P. Tyler Cotter

Webinar Tonight - Automate - Grow - Sell

 8:00 pm Eastern Time (US and Canada), GMT +5 (1 a.m.)

Window Cleaning Webinar Tonight: Chris Lambrinides and Josh Latimer founded cleaning companies from scratch with no money. Fast forward a few years and they had a combined 75+ employees with just under $500,000 a month in collective revenue. Let them show you EXACTLY what they did to achieve this. Better yet, Josh only worked 4 hours a week on his business the last two years he owned it. The content in this webinar series took Josh 2 months to put together. It is REAL insight with zero fluff.

Automate - Learn the nuts and bolts of how to build systems into your business that will create freedom so you can spend your life doing what you really want. 

Grow - Josh and Chris grew their combined service businesses to over 75 employees with just under one half million a month in revenue. Learn how you can triple your revenue with-in 24 months from guys who have done it.

Sell - Find out why you should build your business to sell even if you never plan on selling it. Learn the techniques, create real value and equity in your business. 

Reserve your spot now

Sono - Will Window Cleaners Be Selling These Soon?

Sono is a noise-cancelling gadget that can selectively convert a specific annoying background noise into a more pleasant sound, such as birds chirping.

Noise-canceling window sensor helps you enjoy the silence amid cacophony: The cacophony of any city's hammering jack hammers, beeping buses, and relentlessly yacking citizens can make anyone long for an oasis of silence. Enter the Sono, a futuristic noise-canceling gadget that sticks on the window and turns even the noisiest of rooms into a chill place to think. The pebble-shaped device, a finalist in a prestigious design competition, serves as a reminder of the power of quiet.

"From time to time, I just want to escape the noisy world for a while to reset my mind," Rudolf Stefanich, an industrial designer who created the Sono device while a graduate student at the University of Vienna in Austria, told NBC News in an email. The gadget was selected as a top-20 finalist for the annual James Dyson Award. The famous designer will hand pick and announce a winner on Nov. 7.

Stefanich recently moved to Shanghai to take a job with Designaffaris, an international design and strategy company. Inspiration for Sono came while he was working in a large office where meeting rooms were enclosed with glass doors that looked great, but failed to contain any noise. "I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if you had a volume knob on that glass to simply turn down the volume," he said.

The Sono device sticks to the window where it senses the noise vibrations on the glass surface. It uses this information to generate a signal that cancels out the vibrations, similar to the way the noise-canceling headphones some travelers wear to drown out the droning conversations of their fellow passengers.

Sono can turn the sound of a barking dog into a tweeting bird.

The major advance comes from the digital sound processing technology that "allows for more complex functions like selective noise cancelling or sound event detection," he explained. "For example, you could detect the sound of your neighbor's dog barking, cancel out that specific sound and replace it with with a bird's tweet."

Yes, Sono can selectively turn the grating yips of that annoying ankle biter into more soothing sounds.

The gadget's battery can be recharged the old-fashioned way via plugging it in to the grid, but it gets extra battery power by harvesting energy from the electromagnetic noise in the surrounding environment, such as Wi-Fi signals. That technology, Stefanich noted, is currently being developed at Nokia Research Center and may soon be a standard feature in many electronic gadgets.

Stefanich is currently looking for a partner and funding to complete the engineering for the device and usher it toward commercial production. To see the vision, check out the video below.

Active noise control - Sound is a pressure wave, which consists of a compression phase and a rarefaction phase. A noise-cancellation speaker emits a sound wave with the same amplitude but with inverted phase (also known as antiphase) to the original sound. The waves combine to form a new wave, in a process called interference, and effectively cancel each other out - an effect which is called phase cancellation.

Modern active noise control is generally achieved through the use of analog circuits or digital signal processing. Adaptive algorithms are designed to analyze the waveform of the background aural or nonaural noise, then based on the specific algorithm generate a signal that will either phase shift or invert the polarity of the original signal. This inverted signal (in antiphase) is then amplified and a transducer creates a sound wave directly proportional to the amplitude of the original waveform, creating destructive interference. This effectively reduces the volume of the perceivable noise.

A noise-cancellation speaker may be co-located with the sound source to be attenuated. In this case it must have the same audio power level as the source of the unwanted sound. Alternatively, the transducer emitting the cancellation signal may be located at the location where sound attenuation is wanted (e.g. the user's ear). This requires a much lower power level for cancellation but is effective only for a single user. Noise cancellation at other locations is more difficult as the three dimensional wavefronts of the unwanted sound and the cancellation signal could match and create alternating zones of constructive and destructive interference, reducing noise in some spots while doubling noise in others. In small enclosed spaces (e.g. the passenger compartment of a car) global noise reduction can be achieved via multiple speakers and feedback microphones, and measurement of the modal responses of the enclosure.

8 Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have

Are you ready to be an executive window cleaner?

8 Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have: (Neal Jenson) Managing Director, Qazztek & BBS. Follow Neal Jenson on Twitter.

1. Be able to sell anything 

This is one of the most important qualities an entrepreneur can have. As an entrepreneur you are selling a lot. You will have to sell your ideas to customers, investors and potential employees. You sell your skills to these same audiences. You sell your leadership, your confidence, your vision and the importance of the values you promote. Aside from these things, you have to sell your products and services. Being a good salesman can be more difficult than it sounds. Are you able to step in front of a venture capital firm or a bank and defend that your idea is not only great, but is logical, convincing, and better than any other business who is seeking funding out there? You must be very convincing. If you are second guessing your idea back and forth, your idea is not ripe to take action, or you are not cut out for it. Don't waste your time and money on something you can't dedicate your whole heart to.

2. Don't leave things undone

If you have a problem finishing things, entrepreneurship is not for you. You cannot leave a business almost complete. Halfhearted attempts at starting a business will result in a business failure. If you are the person that people want on their team because they know you won't put your stamp of approval on a project until it is excellent, you should pat yourself on the back. Have you heard of entropy? Entropy is the tendency that things have to move from order to disorder. Businesses are no different. Businesses, without constant direction, can move from order to disorder if not appropriately shepherded in the right direction.

3. Vanilla, chocolate, or twist? 

You must be comfortable with your gut instincts. There is a lot of information out there, and the truth is, you can't gather every bit of information possible before making decisions. You have to be able to have the judgment to know when to decide that you have sufficient information to make a decision and when you need more. If it takes you an incredible amount of time to make decisions, you need to find a way to change that before jumping into business as an entrepreneur. It is great to think things through, but if you think about it too much, you will still be on decision number 3 when you should be on decision number 5. Time is a finite resource, making it very valuable. You cannot repurchase or reproduce time once it has been used. You must understand and be ready for the actual volume of decisions you will be making as an entrepreneur. Are you ready to make dozens of big decisions on a daily basis?

4. Confidence

Confidence is an important skill to have. You should have confidence in your ideas, in yourself and in others. You have to trust others to do their job and to do it well. No matter how amazing you may think you are, you cannot work everyone else's job along with your own. If you are confident in the abilities of others, you can allow them to shine. Your ideas are not always the only ideas or the best ideas. By showing confidence in the abilities of others, you allow for new ideas to emerge into the business. Also, in my experience, people try harder to do a better job when they know people trust in their abilities and can count on them. Being confident in your own abilities is critical to your success. Confidence is not only an attribute, but a skill to be mastered. Many people can show confidence when certain things are going in their favor, it takes a great leader to have confidence even when things are not going well.

5. Time management & planning skills 

As mentioned earlier, time is a finite resource. If you let time get away from you, you will have a hard time starting a successful business. Your planner should be your best friend. Learn to prioritize and plan. I suggest setting aside several hours each week to plan for the entire week and to make daily adjustments. I also suggest having quarterly and yearly planning sessions. Just like diets, most people know they should do it, but there are few who actually are successful at it.

6. Communication & Persuasion

It is a skill to be able to express an idea in a clear and concise manner. You should be able to pick out the most important concepts of your ideas and speak about them with clarity. You will also need to understand thoroughly the business industry in order to be persuasive. If you are talking to a potential investor and you get asked a hard question, be prepared to be asked an even harder question if you are unable to answer the first question. If you don't have an answer, it shows a gap in your knowledge. Too many gaps and you are out of a deal. You should also have enthusiasm. If you are not enthusiastic about your idea, it is hard to persuade others to believe it is good one.

7. Courage

Being a daredevil in high school or college does not guarantee that you are going to be a great entrepreneur, though it may help. A person can be fearless and stupid. When you have courage, however, you recognize the risks, but take action regardless. You accept the risk before you start and try to do what is possible to mitigate the risk while moving forward. There is a lot you can be fearful of when starting a business. As an entrepreneur you need to be able to overcome your fears and ensure they don't keep you from reaching your potential.

8. Learning skills 

Learning is a skill. As an entrepreneur you need to be a quick learner. You have to be willing to learn new skills constantly. One business owner I know is a great example of this. He has set aside the first hour of every work day to read about the current things happening in his industry. I know many other successful entrepreneurs who continually set aside time to learn new skills. You will need to learn how to gain understanding and find meaning that is deeper than the surface. You must learn to make your own arguments (not just those made by the media), synthesize new knowledge, memorize information, gain new relevant skills, and be able to utilize all this knowledge to create new things and make old things more efficient.

Good luck to all the new entrepreneurs, the world needs your enthusiasm and your new ideas. Let me know if you have any other thoughts on the skills needed by entrepreneurs.