Free lesson BEGINNER LESSONS Starting Your Pressure Cleaning Business

Understanding the Business

How residential, commercial, strata and recurring maintenance work differ — and the difference between being a person who pressure cleans and building a pressure-cleaning company.

Video — coming

Being filmed. The written lesson, the steps, the action task and the downloads below are complete — work through those now and the footage will appear here.

What You Will Learn

  • How the four parts of the market work: residential, commercial, strata and recurring maintenance
  • The difference between a person who pressure cleans and an actual pressure-cleaning company
  • The six stages a pressure-cleaning business normally goes through
  • The one number that decides whether you built a business or bought yourself a job

Step-by-Step Instructions

  1. 1
    Residential

    Homeowners. Jobs of $200 to $3,000, decided in days, paid immediately, won on trust and photos. This is where you start because the sales cycle is short and you can knock on the door.

  2. 2
    Commercial

    Businesses, factories, shopping centres, clubs. Jobs of $1,000 to $50,000, decided in weeks or months, paid on 30-day terms, won on paperwork and reliability. Better money, slower, needs insurance and documentation.

  3. 3
    Strata

    Apartment and townhouse complexes. One contact controls several buildings. Decisions go through a committee, so it is slow to start and very sticky once you are in.

  4. 4
    Recurring maintenance

    The same customer, on a schedule, forever. Windows every one to three months, gutters every three to six, exterior washes every six to twelve. This is the part that makes the business worth something.

  5. 5
    Understand the six stages

    Owner doing everything → owner plus a helper → a small crew → multiple crews → sales and operations separated → commercial contracts and recurring maintenance. Each stage has a different job for you personally.

  6. 6
    Pick your target stage for the next twelve months

    Not the end state. The next one. Then read the module that gets you there.

Notes & reference

Nearly everyone who starts a pressure cleaning business starts the same way: buy a machine, print some flyers, undercut the guy on Facebook, work weekends. Two years later they are busy, tired, and earning slightly less than they would have as an employee — because they built a job with worse hours and no super.

The difference between a job and a business is one number: profit per hour of your time, and whether that number survives when you are not the one holding the wand.

The three numbers that decide everything

  1. Average job value. A $220 driveway and a $900 house-plus-driveway-plus-gutters package take similar travel and setup. Same day, four times the revenue.
  2. Jobs per week. Set by lead flow, not by how hard you work. Ten quotes and a 45% close rate is four and a half jobs.
  3. Effective hourly rate. Revenue minus direct costs, divided by all the hours — travel, quoting, invoicing, the Sunday night spent on the phone.

Most beginners obsess over the first, ignore the second, and never calculate the third. That is why the $150 driveway feels fine right up until you total the year.

What "good" looks like in Australia

A solo operator running the system in this course should be clearing $120–$165 an hour of on-site time on residential work, and building toward $8,000–$12,000 months by month six to nine. A two-crew operation runs $30K–$45K months at a 20–30% net margin once wages, super and vehicles are paid.

Those are targets, not promises. They depend on your market, your pricing discipline and how many doors you knock. Nothing in this course guarantees an income.

Your job in this module

Do not buy equipment yet. Pick the suburb, pick the service you will lead with, and set the revenue target. Everything downstream — which machine, which chemicals, which ads — is decided by those three answers.

Action Task

In the portal these tick off and save as you go.

Write down which of the four markets you will lead with, and why.
Set a 90-day revenue target and a 12-month revenue target.
Open the $10K month planner and see what your target demands each week.

Download Resources

These come with the lesson when you enrol.

🔒 $10K month planner Calculator