How the owners found their first customers

Most coverage of these businesses starts once the customers already exist. The owner pages in this database go back further, and when they say how the first customers arrived, the answers are cheap and specific: a bar with bad cleaners, forty Facebook posts a day, ten-dollar window jobs sold door to door, a route bought from someone who was moving away. Paid advertising shows up in these stories, but almost always after the business was already earning. This piece groups the methods the owners describe, with what each one produced.

Knocking on doors

Johnny Robinson and Sergio Silesky were 19 in 2017 when they spent $150 on window-cleaning gear and went door to door in Orange, California, selling jobs for $10 and $20. About four and a half years later Orange Window Cleaning was running $65,000 to $70,000 a month, and they sold it. Luke and Heather Menear grew their Rochester striping company the same way, through door-to-door sales and word of mouth, and after two decades it approaches $739,000 a year in gross revenue.

Door knocking works best when the job is small enough to say yes to on the spot. A $10 window job needs no proposal. The point of it is not the $10. It is a customer who now has a reason to book the next, larger job.

Showing up where the incumbent is failing

Haley Gallagher's first customer was the bar where her husband worked security. The cleaning was mediocre and the manager was unhappy with his provider, so they asked for the contract. The manager owned a second bar across the street and gave them that one too. Moonlight Commercial Cleaning booked $100,000 of work in its first nine months and turned over $170,000 in its first full year, all after hours while the founders kept their day jobs.

Her method since then is the same one, repeated. She eats out, and if a place is dirtier than her crews would leave it, she hands the manager a card. Directory leads get a two-line email offering to come by and quote. The reasoning on her entry is that most commercial cleaning contracts are lost by the incumbent rather than won by the challenger, so the job is to be present when someone gets sloppy. Brian Winch has sold to the same kind of buyer since 1981: the property management company responsible for a whole shopping center, which needs the lot presentable every morning and has no reason to call anyone else once it trusts the person doing it.

Posting where the neighbors already look

Sam Evans had no marketing budget when he started You Call We Haul in 2016 with a $1,000 truck. He dropped flyers in local neighborhoods and posted in local Facebook groups, up to 40 times a day, as often as the moderators would tolerate. His entry explains why that works for junk removal: nobody looks for a hauler until the day they urgently need one, and the company already in their feed that day gets the call. By 2019 the business did about $180,000 at roughly 70 percent margins.

The same logic runs through Brian Scudamore's much larger version. 1-800-GOT-JUNK? was built on clean trucks, uniforms, on-time windows and a phone number nobody forgets, because junk removal is a trust purchase. Evans did it with posts. Scudamore did it with a brand. Both were trying to be the name a stranger already recognized.

Buying the customers outright

Several owners skipped the first-customer problem by paying for a business that already had them. Adam Hill paid $60,000 in 2014 for a Tampa Bay vending route from an owner who was moving away. His entry is clear that the money bought placements, the relationships with property managers and business owners that take years to assemble, rather than machines. Dan Spracklin acquired a septic company with 22,000 customers on file. Ryan McCoy bought the Dallas Scoop Soldiers territory he had managed for two years and passed 1,100 clients within a year.

Vending is all about locations and foot traffic. Adam Hill

Hill still has to add new locations, and his marketing for that is small: $100 to $200 a month on Google Ads, with copy that amounts to "get free vending machines in your business." The offer works because the machine costs the host nothing. Marcus Gram, who built his route from two machines, states the order as a rule: never buy a machine until you have a place to put it. In vending the first customer is the host, not the person buying chips.

Paid search, and when to hand it off

The owners who spend real money on ads mostly started doing it after the business worked. Joshua Brown was running his own Google Ads for Brown's Pressure Washing at up to $10,000 a month until a hired professional cut that to about $3,000 with better results. Once revenue crossed $1 million he bought television time on Nashville's Fox 17 around Monday Night Football and college sports, which he credits with separating the company from every other operator with a washer in a pickup.

Ian Hecht made the front door the business. A hauler he met while renting a dumpster knew every competitor in the region but nothing about ranking on Google, so Hecht built the website and sold them the jobs: about $100 a lead, roughly $50 of it margin, with the haulers keeping 80 to 85 percent of the job value. By figures he shared on My First Million, it did $2.1 million in its second year on about $26,000 of advertising. His entry carries the obvious caveat that a business built on rankings is one algorithm update from a bad quarter.

Making the invoice do the selling

Kim Hatch built referrals at Turner Septic by being easy to understand. Her crews use iPads and digital reporting and send photo-heavy invoices that show the homeowner what was found in the tank and what was done. In a trade where competitors still hand over carbon-copy receipts, that produces five-star reviews and a steady flow of referrals from real estate agents. Steve Hunsaker uses the end of the job the same way: taking the holiday lights down in January doubles as next year's renewal conversation.

Working on someone else's platform first

Christian Sanya never had to find laundry customers from scratch. She started taking orders through SudShare, an on-demand laundry app, while working full time in a medical lab, and those gigs earned $46,000 in 2022. Her entry describes the gig work as the customer base, the training and the down payment at once. She and her husband then opened The Laundry Room in Lanham, Maryland, a 40-machine store bringing in about $24,000 a month.

What the methods have in common

The first customers mostly came out of the founder's own life: the bar a husband guarded, the neighborhood Facebook groups, the employer whose territory was for sale, the app already on someone's phone. None of the owners above describe a launch. They describe a first job, then a second one from the same street or the same manager.

The money spent on getting customers rose after the business was proven, not before. Evans spent nothing beyond flyers, Gallagher handed out business cards, and Brown's television budget came after $1 million of revenue. The startup cost ladder shows how little most of these owners put in at the start, and the margin ledger shows what the trades keep once marketing and crews are paid. Our piece on route density covers why the second customer is worth most when they live next door to the first. New readers can begin with Start here, and every owner named above has a sourced entry in the database. This site is one of SideRoad's weekly builds, where the same first-customer problem gets worked through in public each week.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Route density: the one number that decides a service business
• Owners who bought instead of building
• What owners say they would do differently