Monday Mar 17, 2025
11: The Jim Dubois Episode
In this episode of the Huge Transformations Podcast, host Sheila Smeltzer interviews Jim DuBois from Squeegee Pros in North Charlotte, North Carolina. Jim shares his journey from starting as a solo operator to building a thriving home service company with efficient systems, a standout company culture, and a focus on hiring “A players.” Listeners will learn how Jim created detailed processes to incentivize high performance, retain quality employees, and scale his company with intent and vision. This episode is packed with actionable insights about recruiting effectively, nurturing a winning culture, and leveraging simple but powerful methods to stand out in a competitive market.
Designed especially for service-based and marketing professionals, this conversation highlights the importance of:
- Developing a clear vision and detailed roadmap for your business.
- Crafting engaging job ads and a strong onboarding experience to attract top talent.
- Paying for performance with spiffs and commission structures to reward excellence.
- Building a fun, positive workplace culture where employees truly want to come to work.
From rounding up daily performance metrics to organizing team-building events, Jim explains how a consistent, systemized approach can rapidly elevate a service business—even if you’re just starting out.
SHOW NOTES
Guest:
- Jim DuBois, Squeegee Pros (North Charlotte, NC)
Topics Covered:
- Company Culture & Hiring: How to attract and retain A-player employees.
- Performance-Based Pay & Spiffs: Using incentives to encourage positive behaviors and sales.
- Systems & Processes: Why documented procedures help create consistency and scalability.
- Vision & Leadership: Shaping a clear roadmap so employees understand your company’s direction.
- Time Freedom & Business Growth: Creating a solid structure to step away from daily operations.
Resources Mentioned Every Episode:
TRANSCRIPT
Sid Graef:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Huge Transformations Podcast. I'm Sid Graf out of Montana.
Gabe Torres:
I'm Gabe Torres here in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sheila Smeltzer:
And I'm Sheila Smeltzer from North Carolina. We're your hosts and guides through the landscape of growing a successful home service business. We do this by interviewing the best home service business builders in the industry—folks that have already built seven- and eight-figure businesses, and they want to help you succeed.
Gabe Torres:
Yep, no fake gurus on this show—just real-life owners who have been in the trenches and can help show you the way to grow profitably.
Sheila Smeltzer:
We get insights and truths from successful business builders, and every episode is 100% experience, 0% theory. We're going to dig deep and reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our guests will share with you the pitfalls to avoid and the keys to winning. In short, our guests will show you how to transform your home service business into a masterpiece.
Gabe Torres:
Thanks for joining us on the wild journey of entrepreneurship. Let's dive in.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Hi, this is Sheila Smeltzer with the Huge Transformations Podcast. I've got an awesome guest for you today: Jim DuBois, Squeegee Pros, North Charlotte, North Carolina. Jim and I have a just pure gold conversation about what it takes to build a business at scale. We talk a lot about recruiting, attracting the A-players, and the multiple channels of attraction—where do we find them, what’s the story we tell to them to bring them into our company? Everything here is just pure gold. We know you're going to love it. I can't wait for you to hear my conversation with Jim DuBois today. Enjoy the podcast.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Hello, everybody. This is Sheila Smeltzer with the Huge Transformations Podcast, and I have a very special guest today: Jim DuBois, Squeegee Pros out of North Charlotte in the Lake Norman area. Hey, Jim.
Jim DuBois:
Hey, Sheila. What's happening? How are you doing?
Sheila Smeltzer:
Oh man, it's such an honor to interview you today on the podcast. We've known each other for a long time.
Jim DuBois:
Yes, we have. And hey, I am honored to be here. This is always special to be a guest of yours—a podcast in general—so thank you for the opportunity. I’m super excited.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Yeah. Well, just so you know, I made a special request to interview you today. I've always admired you. We both have a residential-focused window cleaning company. Jim, you’re going to tell us a lot more about what you do as well. And we've both been in business for 25 years, right?
Jim DuBois:
Yeah, I'm a little bit longer than you. I'm in 29 years now, but yeah.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Wow, okay.
Jim DuBois:
Yeah, 1996.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Okay, yeah, I'm ‘99, so very good. Well, Jim, I've been to your shop in Charlotte—Squeegee Pros—and I gotta tell you, I was very impressed with your operation. Just a couple of takeaways: When I walked away, I came back to my staff and I said, “Man, Jim DuBois over at Squeegee Pros…he is running a tight ship.” There were so many systems, processes, organization—very thought-out procedure that was visible. It was visible that you built a model of a business where things were working. Can you—I want you to first tell us a little bit more about Squeegee Pros, but I want you to kind of dive right into what it looked like for you to get your business to where you are right now. Is that going to take up the whole hour or what?
Jim DuBois:
It could, but I'll give you the bullet points—the top bullet points.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Yeah, sure. Please tell us about yourself.
Jim DuBois:
I have to tell you, as far as Squeegee Pros goes, it wasn't always that way—I can tell you that, holy cow. I can remember getting my 5,000 little Ford Ranger and my bucket, my squeegee, and it was just me and that, getting this whole thing started. But it's amazing what can happen if you really focus on certain things—things we'll probably touch on here. I started in my home like a lot of people do, and eventually hit a revenue number that I was comfortable with to step out of my home and get a little office, which was on Highway 150 in Mooresville. It was like a little house, and that was a big step. That was transformational, really. Then I bought where I'm at now—which you've been to—I bought that in 2020, and that was another huge transformation in my company.
It’s like, every time I made a move—when I moved out of my house into an office—my staff was like, “Holy cow, this is so exciting,” even though it was just like a little house that probably had nothing going on. But growth just kind of took off. Then when I moved again to the shop that you've been at, it was like another just huge jump in growth.
But so yeah, that's kind of what that looks like as far as the backdrop. But I have to tell you—those watching—it’s interesting how I even stepped into the world of window cleaning, if you want to talk about that for a second, about how I even started Squeegee Pros. I remember I was 16 years old, and my dad said to me—we were sitting at the kitchen table—he said, “So what are you going to do for money? What are you going to do for a job?” because I was 16, I just got my car, and that whole thing. And I said, “Dad, I have no idea. All I know is I want to do my own thing.” I had no idea what that own thing would be.
Long story short, that was in Indiana. So I'm a farm boy from Indiana. But I moved to New Jersey, and I got a job washing windows—it was a commercial storefront, I guess, route that I was doing. So I did that for about a year, and then I started my first little company, Done Right Window Cleaning, and building that. That was kind of my start. I did that for a few years, and it was a pretty cool little company. I had 600 stores, so I had a couple of people doing that, and I had a guy helping me on residential. I did about 300 houses a year, so for a kid in my early twenties, I'm like, “Yeah, this business thing is kind of cool.” I knew nothing about business. I just knew how to wash windows.
So that was my stepping stone into the industry. And Sheila, I’ve got to tell you, I pinch myself almost every day that window cleaning, pressure washing—the industry that we're in—can do what it has done for so many people, you, me, and so many others, if you take it seriously and you really get away from the mentality of “I have a job I call a business” but instead focus on a business that you turn into a company. And if anything, that’s what started to click many years in for me, and I started focusing on that.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Can you pinpoint the turning point? Was there something really bad that happened? Was there something that—like, what was that wake-up, that “Wow, I've got a business on my hands, now I have to start running this like a business”? Was there a specific time?
Jim DuBois:
Yeah, it would have been—so back in the days of Done Right Window Cleaning, no, I was just a kid in my early twenties, just having fun, making money. My whole focus was the technician mindset: “Let me just wash more windows.” And I had, obviously, a couple people helping me. But when I moved down here to North Carolina and made the decision that I was going to start another business—and the short story is I wasn’t even sure I was going to do window cleaning. Some of you heard the story: I walked into a mattress store, and his windows were dirty. I told myself, “I'll pitch the guy on window cleaning. If he says yes”—and the chance is like this, that he would even be there, let alone say yes—“I will start another window cleaning business.” I had a couple of other business ideas I was going to try also. But he was there, and he said yes. I wasn’t even ready for that. I was driving a Corvette, and I'm like, “All right, give me till the end of the week.” I had to find a janitorial supply company—because back then you didn't have who we have online and all that—so I got there, I showed up.
But to answer your question, that was one of the turning points for me. Because when I walked out of the store, I again said to myself, “I'm going to build the biggest window cleaning business that Charlotte, North Carolina, has ever seen. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to do it.” That’s where the maturity changed from being in my early twenties to my thirties, and now I had to figure out how I was going to do that. That was a pretty lofty intent that I had put on myself, but that was the turning point.
Another turning point for me was I had hired an administrator. She was with me for a few years, and she moved on to bigger and better things. That was a turning point for me to come up with a better company culture. Because I figured when somebody gets a job, that’s a career for them. So I'm thinking automatically, they're going to be with me for 20 years. I did not know that there was a revolving door and that's how people's mindsets were and all that kind of stuff, because it just didn't register with me back then. So that's when it began—coming up with, “Well, I need to find the right people that are looking for a career opportunity, but then I've got to fulfill what they want that’s going to make them want to stay with me for many, many, many years.”
So that was a turning point for me, too. And I'll tell you another one. Another one for me was—we know how it is in business. It's like this, and we have to be prepared to make payroll every single week. So a turning point for me was, “I need to frugal up here a little bit. I've got to start putting some money aside. I've got to be prepared for those times, because it's not always going to be win-win-win-win-win.” Those are some things that, I think, began to align my business acumen maybe a little bit, to start thinking about those kinds of things—to build an actual company versus just something I was winging.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Right, wow, so much there. I'd love to dive into all of it, Jim, just so you know. But one thing—we talked about financials on another podcast I did with Jared Skinner—but this turning point of administrator, and now you had a key role to fill and you realized that you need to improve company culture.
What I know of you now is—do you actually have like a board of directors at your company? Are you structured that way? Because I know you have Chris. How are you structured?
Jim DuBois:
Yes, I have—so how does that work? And how do I say it in a non-boastful way? I don't want this to sound any weird way, but this is what's possible. I don't have an office at the office. I'm 100% separated from the day-to-day except I go in every quarter for a leadership meeting. That's where I keep the finger on the pulse and, “What are the strategic moves we're looking to make? Where are we weak? Where are we strong? Let's think about ideas.” That's kind of where I come in. I love that stuff. That's my jam right there.
Then there's Christina, and she's really at the top. She runs the show; she’s the president. I vested her in as a partner of the company. She's been with me for 18 years. If you kind of go back to what I was talking about before, that became really important to me to not have a revolving door, or limit the revolving aspect of the door turning as much as I could. So she's president. Then there's Brian, who is my vice president. Christina oversees the entire company, and Brian oversees everything to do with the field—and he’s hands-on in the office also. Christina is my right hand, Brian is Christina’s right hand. They make up my board of directors. The three of us get together and we talk heavy-duty shop.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Sure, okay. So company culture—what did that look like? What was it, at that turning point, that you decided, “Okay, I just lost a key employee, my administrator, and now what do I have to do? What do I have to change?” What was it that you determined? What did you come up with? What did that look like?
Jim DuBois:
Yeah, that's a great question, and I guess I would answer it probably a couple of different ways. One is, I think if we're paying attention to our employees—whether it be office staff or technicians—if we're paying attention to what they want, what they're asking, you can start to build a culture around that. This is how I learned: by listening to them, what’s important to them, how can I make it so they want to come to work versus having to come to work? That's a takeaway, especially—it was especially for me, but maybe that's a takeaway for a lot of the people listening. Because that sentence, that's where I went to work on building a company culture.
I want to make it fun. I wanted to make it, you know, if you pass by my office and if we're in hiring mode back in the old day, the sign would say “Help Wanted.” Today it says “Career Opportunities.” There's a different psychological spin behind that. So many different things to touch on with this. I built out a system to start attracting better people to help mitigate that revolving door, and building out a system that would not just attract them but keep them. And not just keep them—again, let's come up with pathways to advancement; let’s come up with things, dangling carrots, so that why would they ever want to go anywhere else? That's my mission. When they're out in the parking lot—if it's technicians or even office staff—I want them saying to themselves, “We’d be an idiot to go work for another company like this down the road, because Jim and his team, they've really got this thing together.”
So some of that backdrop: I started going to work on that. Back when I really did not know any of this—when I had a couple of guys working for me—I can remember like yesterday, I'd go to Outback for Christmas, and I'd bring my two guys. It wasn't on Christmas Day, but it was around Christmastime, and I'd have a little dinner for them, and I would buy it. And that's all I did. But I felt like, “Hey, I'm really reaching here to be the nice, cool boss.” But today, in comparison, holy cow, we have music playing every single morning outside—like some jams happening. So the guys are pulling up, it might be country day, it might be hip-hop day, whatever it might be. We have a tech lounge downstairs that's got leather couches, gaming is going on, we've got a pinball machine, ice machine in our tech lounge. We have cornhole going on. Every three months we take the entire company out for some kind of adventure, and it's every quarter like clockwork. So it's go-kart racing, it's ax throwing, it's—I think last time was Topgolf. We'll go bowling, we'll have cornhole tournaments—just all kinds of crazy stuff like that.
We'll do spin-the-wheel. We got one of those wheels in our office, and we'll do it for like our office staff. If they're hitting wins in the day, it's, “All right, everybody stop what you're doing. Meet us in the conference room in five minutes, as soon as you get off the phone,” or however we say that. Then we’ll spin the wheel, we'll give away cash, but we make it fun. We have a kitchen in our office—Heather made cinnamon rolls, not to go off on a tangent, but up against Cinnabon, and they're vegan. They were unbelievable, but we make it fun like that, so that they want to come to work, not have to come to work. Yes, the pay is good.
This is not—everyone's going to agree with what I'm about to say, but our technicians, they're not paid hourly. We feel we can pay them so much more in a percentage-based compensatory way, and it attracts the A-player. My feeling is: The A player, the B player, they want opportunities to make as much as they can. The C player, maybe; but the D player, the F player, they just want to do the minimal amount that they have to do and get an hourly wage to know they're going to get that money. The A player knows that they can make 50%, 100%, 200% more, and that's how we pay. That's tied into company culture, because they know they can make bank, and then they can make more on top of that with what we call spiffs. That's a different conversation. But it's those things—it’s kind of a long answer to your question—it’s those things that have changed everything. Birthdays—oh my gosh, they get more attention at my office than they probably do at home on their birthday! We've got prizes, we find out what their favorite cake is, we just turn it into an absolute spectacle—something they're not going to forget anytime soon. So things like that.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Okay, there's so much right here, there's just so much. I want to stick on the performance pay for just a minute, because I have to show you this. This is so cool. When I came to your shop, I have a whole note in my phone with the photos and all the notes and everything that I took, but you talk about spiffs. I know you don't want to go off on it, but I mean, I've got your spiffs—they're laminated and posted all over your tech lounge. You’ve probably changed some by now, but this is a couple years ago. Spiff number four: No Callbacks. Spiff number two: ProGuard Estimates. You clearly define what the spiff is, what the target is. This is part of your performance pay, right? You're paying commission; you're incentivizing for the good behavior, the good performance that you're looking for.
How did you build that out? Because there's always the things—when we build these ideas as business owners, what does that process look like? Because then we implement it and a bunch of things you didn't think about happen, right? Like, “Oh, we didn't think about that situation,” and “Oh, now we’ve got to go back and fix it.” What is your process? Let’s just talk about any type of procedure, or we'll stay on spiff. You're going to roll out a new Christmas lighting estimate spiff number three—when you, Christina, and Brian are sitting down, what kind of process, what kind of conversation is that?
Jim DuBois:
Yeah, problems that are happening in the company—challenges, issues—us as business owners, our mission is to solve them. It should be to solve them. If we can solve them, how can we make the company better, and how can we serve not our clients in this scenario, but our team, even better? The backdrop to this is our mission is always to hire the A player, the top-tier employee. That’s our mission, because if we know we can get those people hired, we know they're going to outperform the C player, D player, F player, every single time, if you've built out the right recruiting system. But then you're still going to get those that—let's go to Christmas lighting for a second. That's spiff number three, I think it was. That leans to marketing, so we wanted to come up with ways to get the word out on Christmas lighting a little bit faster, less expensively than depending on external marketing. All they have to do is just talk to the homeowner that they're already serving and say, “Hey, by the way, we provide Christmas lighting—Christmas lighting like you've probably never seen before. It is unbelievable because it does this, this, this, and this, and we'll do this, this, this, and this for you. It's white-glove, the Ritz-Carlton service in how we do it. If you'd be interested in an estimate on it—which I think you're going to love—I’d be happy to have my supervisor reach out to you.” If they do that, they get 50 bucks, whether we get the job or not. They get 50 bucks for generating that estimate, because we've run the numbers and know that the return on investment is through the roof by the number of jobs that we get and what we're paying out in spiffs.
Sheila Smeltzer:
That's great. What I just heard is you're taking a problem in the company, or in this case you're taking a new initiative or a new service that you want to promote, and you're turning that into a performance-driven spiff to get you the results that you want.
Jim DuBois:
Yes, that's exactly right. You mentioned ProGuard—that’s a gutter protection product that we have. It's the same spiff layout, how we do that. But then you mentioned one before, Sheila, which was callbacks. Callbacks would be an example of one. Another one is they're not showing up to work on time—that’s a big one for a lot of people. These were issues, these were little challenges that we had, so it's like, all right, how do we incentivize and limit those from happening in the future? With callbacks, we'll do something like if you don't have any callbacks for 30 days, you’ll get a half day off, and you can let those half-days off accumulate. Or maybe it's a day off, or however those listening want to build that out. But these are the ideas on how we do that. Now it’s on their mind. But here's the thing with spiffs: You can't just put it into the company manual, go through it on the onboarding day, and then never bring it up again. Or you can't just bring it up at the monthly safety meeting. You want to—yes, do that, but what we do is every morning we have roundup meetings. The supervisor gets together with the lead techs, the technicians. It's a 10- to 15-minute meeting; it’s a get-everybody-excited, we've got the music playing in the background, you know, the mood is right. Then, “Oh, by the way, don't forget—let me run through your spiffs. A couple of you are new, a couple of you haven't done these in a little bit. Let me run you through the spiffs. Oh, and by the way, this spiff—not coming in late—is going to be the spiff of the week.” We’ll take some of these spiffs and we'll take it to the next level. If they don't come in late for a 30-day period, maybe they'll get a hundred-dollar cash bonus, maybe they get a full day off, something like that. You can pick and choose how you break that out. But those little things are almost like a small hinge that begins to open up a big door.
Sheila Smeltzer:
There's another thing I heard there, though, Jim, which is very important with rolling out any of these types of programs. I heard basically you created a procedure for documenting and tracking those spiffs, but you did it in this really fun way in your—I call them huddles, I'm sorry, what did you call them?
Jim DuBois:
Our morning is a morning huddle, basically.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Yeah, morning huddle, yep. That is your way of tracking, right? Because as business owners, we can create all these really cool things, but we have to be able to deliver them so our employees can trust that they can expect that spiff on their paycheck. These are the parts that get really tricky and are so important to build. When I brought up, “What does it look like to build out the spiff when you, Christina, and Brian are sitting down?” as business owners, we have to build this out all the way through. We have to think it all the way through. It's really a brainstorming and a strategizing of what this looks like. I know you guys are really good at that because of, again, all the things that I saw when I was there—the way you guys are tracking your outbound calls on the whiteboard on a daily basis.
One thing that I saw there, too—and this is going into the systems and processes that ensure these programs that create this culture and environment that people want to work there—is, I think it was because I sit there and go, “Oh my gosh, okay, outbound calling, I've got a target for outbound calling.” You have—can you mind if I read this? This is coming straight off your board from your shop: “Daily calls, you've got an amount—so much per day for 50 to 100 calls, so much per day for 100 to 135 calls. That's a goal, 135 to 155 calls per day.” That's insane. “Closing jobs, 5 for every three jobs made. Sales—20 bucks for sales 1,000 to 1,500, 25 for sales over 1,500.” This is the cool part—so you get everybody listening to that. Then, when I watched, I was like, “Okay, now how does this filter into payroll?” Jim, you answered my question that day, because you’re like, “Oh, that's easy. They have a daily call sheet where they record all of their own metrics,” right? And they're turning that in for payroll. I'm sure there's some back-checking or auditing of that, but am I correct—is that what it looks like?
Jim DuBois:
You're spot on—right on, exactly.
Sheila Smeltzer:
You’ve done a phenomenal job at creating the systems, the procedures, and the processes that go into really building a strong business, Jim, and that was very apparent whenever I came there. I want to ask you—I want to dive back in, because you said it twice now: A players, A players. Let’s talk about hiring. How do you find the A players?
Jim DuBois:
Yeah, this is a challenge for so many people out there. So I'll use the word “backdrop” again. You have to really—everyone’s got to really think about this: Don't think that everything changes just because you hire an A player. You have to have the system built out. You have to have created a place that A players want to work. That's another big takeaway right there. If the people listening—if somebody listening, for example, hired me, and I'm an A player, well, when you're onboarding me, are you walking me through—so one, when you hire me, what does that look like? For most, what they do if they were to hire me, they'd say, “All right, come on in to work. We're going to get you in the training and get things started.” But I'm like, “Well, hold on a minute. What's the company manual?” “Oh, yeah, just go through that paperwork right there. I'll be over here. Just let me know when you're done.” No, I'm an A player. The owner needs to walk anybody that they hire through your company manual, through the company policies for that specific job scope, not just say, “Here, read it; let me know when you're done.” I did it wrong in the beginning, and then it got me in the end, because I did not do it right.
So now we walk them through—that’s a 45-minute onboarding process. One, it's almost like a second interview, even though it's not, because we're hiring them but we haven't hired them. If you get the gray area in there, we want to just make sure. So let's go through the company manual, let's go through all these different things, let's check-close them. “That makes sense, are you with me here, this is why we have that, any questions on that?” You’re going to get them talking a little bit. You want to make sure this is the person you want to hire, that the lean is an A player you want to hire. Then, so you have to have those things in place to get the traction to keep the A player.
I'll take it a little bit further: A certified training program needs to exist. I'm an A player—I'm expecting a training program, not, “I wish, while there's a truck, go work on this, go work on that.” No, I want to see—I'm checking things off. How am I doing? What's my improvement look like? Where am I at so far in the training? How many days? What's the training program look like? Because I'm an A player—I'm going to dial this in if I have a plan to work off of and a good trainer.
Then another part of this is we hop in your truck—McDonald's in the floorboard, there's gunky pennies in the cup holder, the inside of the windshield is disgusting, paper is everywhere, there's wet towels in the back—I'm already questioning, “Do I want to work here?” I'm an A player. This is a clinic. So you have to have that already ready to go before you start the attraction process for A players. That would—I'll pause there for a minute. There's a little bit more to that story as we go into the attraction of that, but…
Sheila Smeltzer:
That's powerful. If I'm a company that is—I've got maybe one or two employees, or maybe I'm hiring on my first employees. We've got to start somewhere. Do you remember what that looked like, and what would be your advice for people that are bringing on their first-time techs and their first-time employees when they don't have all this stuff to offer, Jim? What would be your advice?
Jim DuBoois:
Night and day compared to how I would do it today, or how—of course, I have a coaching company—how we coach someone that's at that level, compared to where it was for me back in that day. So the sentence takeaway would be: Create a perception of a million-dollar company, even though it's just you. Again, you're building a company; you're not building a job that you call a business, and that starts on day one. And again, this is where most are off-track with that. It's not their fault; they just don't know. But the wrap—a beautifully wrapped vehicle. Beautiful doesn't mean you just spent $60,000 on a truck. We've never spent $5,000, ever—ever, to this day, 29 years later—on a truck. You would never know it. We buy them right, we buy them smart, we beautifully wrap them, they stay clean, maintained. That's a whole different conversation when it comes to cash flow.
So if I'm that person, and they're looking to start hiring that first or second person, everything we just talked about becomes absolutely apparent and has to be on the table: the brand, the company manual that we talked about, some kind of a training program that can be documented, how the pay is going to work. Again, I'm an A player, you're an A player—we're not going to work for a lot of what people are paid out there currently because that's, in my opinion, a C-scale versus an A-player-scale pay. You want to build those things out so that there's opportunity for them to go after it, even though it's a one- or two-person operation or they're about to hire that first or second person. You need to already be thinking three, four, five steps ahead: “What's the company vision? Where are you going?” because that's an attraction mechanism for me to work for you. What do the pathways to advancement look like? Am I going to go anywhere in this company? I'm an A player—maybe I want to own it one day. What does that look like? So these are all things that the listeners that are at that place as a new, younger, smaller business—that’s what I'd want. If I'm coaching you, those would be the things that we're going to be talking about to get those dialed in before we start the hiring process. There's more to that story, but that would be a pretty good highlight.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Yes, very good. So, again, it's taking the time before you go out and initiate those first hires—it's taking the time to get organized, to document, to get things in place. Your manual, your—like, how are you going to train them? Have a job description with roles and responsibilities, right? Just get your stuff together, and it'll be far more successful.
Is it okay whenever we hire—especially in the beginning, we've started our business with all these big dreams and goals—is it okay to be sharing that vision a lot with our new hires? How do you recommend people do that? Sometimes people, I think, can get caught in talking too much about that, and then there's not the delivery, and then they lose them. They lose their hires, right? It's like, “Oh, they said I was going to do this much work and all this stuff, and it's not there.” We need to be very careful, right—humbly, like a humble visionary? What would you call that? When you don't have it to show it, but you aspire for it and you're doing the work to get it done, how do we sell that? What kind of culture does that look like?
Jim DuBois:
Yeah, that's a great point that you brought up. There's a couple of things that come to mind with that. One that I want to make sure I put out there real quick: When you hire that first or second person, or any person that you ever hire, you do not become friends with them. Let them talk to you and tell you all about their life and all that stuff that they have going on all day long. You listen. So let's say it's windshield time and you've got that first person in the truck with you that you've hired. You gotta be really, really careful. I did it all wrong; I learned the hard way. But they know nothing about my personal life in this scenario, but I know everything about their personal life. So what am I doing during windshield time is I'm training, I'm coaching them, I'm talking about how we do this, how we do that, “Repeat it back to me,” or however that might look in the conversation, especially when you're with them all day long. You've got to be really careful with that.
So that's gold, because what that is…when you don't have the capital, the cash, whatever, to have all this stuff that we're talking about to attract the A players, and you don't have the training program, you don't have a trainer—what you were saying is that as the business owner, and you have this vision of your business, when you're bringing on your first-time people, you're playing that role: “What does my role look like as the business owner five years from now and ten years from now?” They want to start it from the beginning.
Jim DuBois:
Yes, yes, yeah. And if we pivot to the other question on the vision—what we need to do as a younger, smaller, new business owner type company is, you need to have a vision statement anyways. We need to know, as the owner, what's the intent behind the company? Where do I want to go with this? But in the conversation with the technician or the office person, the vision statement correlates with the mission statement, and they kind of come together in the conversation. So in the vision statement, we're not going to make all these promises—this is the vision. This is where I want to take the company. I'm looking for the right people that are going to help me get there. It's a team. What's it going to look like exactly? Still figuring that out, but I do know I want to build the biggest company that Charlotte, North Carolina, has ever seen, and I will not stop until I get there. When they hear—when an A player hears confidence, when an A player hears that kind of vision, the A player wants to latch onto that and help make that happen. Especially when the A player knows there's pathways to advancement, when they know they're going to be taken care of financially. Again, that’s all the background stuff that the new owner or the younger business about to hire has to have already laid out, has to have it pretty much dialed in what that looks like. You're thinking three steps ahead as you go into step two—hiring your first person. That's how I would explain that, and we're not getting deep in the weeds with the vision and “Here, if this, you're going to get paid that.” We don't even know what that looks like yet. I just know we're going to get there, and we're going to figure those things out along the way.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Leadership from very early stage, thinking two steps ahead, three steps ahead before you implement, thinking about what it looks like five years from now. I've made so many mistakes, and if I would have just thought, like, “Oh, I'm going to implement this new program,” okay, if I would have just thought, “What does it look like five years from now?” I would have probably not implemented a ton of programs, right? They might satisfy something right now that's a problem, but they don't serve us later down the road with growth and market changes and things like that. So that is such gold, what you're talking about.
I want to go back to two things—I could continue this podcast forever—but we were going to go back to attraction, attracting the A player. Then I do want to talk about Window Washing Wealth before we come off. Let's talk about attraction. How do you—so first we were talking about getting the A player and how we keep them, but now we're talking about how do we even get them? How do you attract them? Where do you find them?
Jim DuBois:
Multiple ways. Kind of like in marketing, you want to have multiple ways to generate leads. Attracting A players—you want to have more than one way to find them. So one is, when you are building an A-player team, there's a pool of people right there that are going to direct you to other A players. So we have referral programs, referral incentives, because like-minded people pretty much hang out with other A-player-type, like-minded people, too. So that's one way. It doesn't typically cost anything except for maybe the spiff that you put out to them.
Then there's the different job placement platforms. There's multiples of them out there. This is probably where most people will lean to find people. And then I'll come to social media in a little bit, too. But on the ad platforms—one of the things that's worked very well for us is—it's like marketing, and I love marketing. Most people fail miserably at marketing because they're not good copywriters. If you go down and pick up the newspaper, or women listening—Cosmopolitan magazine—or if you go back into the ‘80s, early ‘90s, you had the National Enquirer tabloid thing. Those are great training exercises for headline generation—headlines attract. We carry that over into attracting A players. Come up with a headline, wherever you're marketing, to find these A players, and put the headline and the subheadline in there to attract them.
Where I'm going with this is, when we build out an ad, it's a long-form ad—going back to marketing, you have to separate yourself from everybody else as to why would they want to pick your company to do work for versus another company. It's the same thing when you're hiring people. When the people out there are looking for a place to work, what is it about your company that separates you from that company? Most of the ads look exactly the same on these hiring platforms. It's all the same stuff. So I like to zig when people zag. Our ads are long-form ads: headline, call to action, bullet points. We build out a story. “Imagine coming to work at Squeegee Pros, and we've got the daily jams going on when you get there, we're talking how you're going to make more money today than what you made yesterday.” I just walk them through the day, right, like a story. People like stories—they’re easy to listen to, easy to read, or whatever. And then, “When you finish up the day, you’re going to go and play a little cornhole or maybe go grab a beer with your new technician team.” I make it into where they're reading it, and they're saying to themselves, “This is the place I want to work. They do this, they do this, they do this, they do this.” Whatever that might look like for you might be a little bit more limited if you're a smaller company or don't have all of the things, or whatever that might be. But when you have a strong headline, when you have body copy that really engages them—and they're reading it like, holy—when it's written right, they will read all the way to the bottom, and then they will submit an application. That has been a big differentiator for us.
The big part to this, too, is that everything we were talking about before—it connects together. You've got to have that backdrop, you've got to have that foundation. Because if you're attracting these great, great people, but you've got dirty trucks, you’ve got $20 an hour pay—hourly, nothing wrong with hourly, but that's my perception of it—and you've got these things that you're not doing right, that person—like me in that earlier example—“Yeah, I don't think this place is for me,” is what they're going to say after day one or day two or week two. So you've got to have that foundation in place before you start attracting them.
Then, as the company gets more mature and there's cash flow, which is a whole other topic that's so important today, you want to be able to offer the benefits of a career opportunity. Again, that's the important word—versus just a J.O.B., journey of the broke. People want to win. They're going to come work for a company, they want to be able to support their family, do the things that they want to do. We as employers want to support the things that they want to do, and we build that into our model as well on the culture side. But all of that connects together, and it's so important.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Yeah, well, let's talk about Window Washing Wealth to close up our show here today, Jim, because obviously you've got a lot of these things figured out. Tell me, how are you doing that to help other window cleaning companies?
Jim DuBois:
Well, thank you for that, and that opportunity, Sheila—I super appreciate it. Thank you for saying I've got it all figured out. I’ve got a long ways to go, but I know where you're going with that. Here's the thing: It's when you've been in business—and I've been in business literally since I was 20 years old, 19 going on 20 years old—creating my own income ever since, and I'm pretty daggone proud of that. I never had to go back and get a job. But there's a seriousness that one has to take.
So if someone's looking for mentorship or they're looking for guidance—here's the lead-up: I would go to conferences, I would meet people. The first conversation, “Yeah, how are things going?” “Oh, everything's going great, going great.” A couple beers later, “I don't know how to do this stupid marketing thing. I can't hire people that stay. I'm taking draws; I can't even give myself a weekly paycheck.” You'd hear the real—it starts to come out. And after going to these and hearing and talking to these people so many different times, I'm like, “You know what? People need help.” They need help, and I was on this journey, too. Maybe I was just a little bit further along the pipeline or something, but that's where WindowWashingWealth.com came from. So I started helping people with all of these things, and it's seven years in now. We're coaching over a hundred companies around the country.
I'll tell you what—we were talking earlier, before we even got on, how I pinch myself on what window cleaning/pressure washing can do for one's life. I pinch myself an additional time when I—we have so many clients that have gone from wherever they are—$100,000 a year revenue, $250,000 a year revenue, to that annually, to that a month! $100,000 a year to $100,000 a month! It blows my mind. We have a system. We have so many clients who do that. So what we've done with Window Washing Wealth is we've created a roadmap: Do this first, do this second, do this third, check it off, let's validate it. We have a client accountability report to make sure they're doing each of these things. Then they all of a sudden get traction that they didn't have before to scale, to grow, because they're not making all the mistakes that I made. They're not wasting all the money that I wasted. It's literally a roadmap, and that's what we do. So if it’s marketing, lead generation, if it’s recruiting, if it's expansion, if it's policies, we have a system called World-Class Service Elements that will raise the bar above any competitor. It's all these things that we teach—there’s seven systems. You're familiar with the seven systems. We break it all down. So Window Washing Wealth is dear to my heart. We have so much fun with it, but it's even more fun when I review my “wall of wins.” That's an emotional point for me.
Sheila Smeltzer:
That's awesome. So much value that you can offer to people. To be able to be given that roadmap and avoid the pitfalls, I mean, that's what you're doing. You're investing in avoiding the pitfalls that cost you far more than maybe an investment working with Window Washing Wealth.
I want to know—working with these clients of yours through Window Washing Wealth, what's a big takeaway for you? What have you learned in working with them?
Jim DuBois:
What I have learned is the vast majority of those that get into business really have no clue about business. They were just like me, and that's where we hold their hand. That's where we put our hand on their shoulder and we coach them right down. Now, we’ve brought on clients that don't even have a company name. We have a whole exercise to get the company name right, get the brand right, get the pricing right. Some are doing way too many things at the same time, and a master of none. Focus on what you're really good at before you open up another division. We break all that down because the mission is one thing: scale operations—whatever that looks like for them—and get their life back. Let's go from 10 hours a day to 10 hours a week, or even 10 hours a month. Listen to that—that's the mission behind it. I call it “time freedom wealth,” because I call it Window Washing Wealth—that word “wealth” on purpose—because what we're involved with here, Sheila, is just a vehicle that can open up so many opportunities to have wealth in our lives if we do it right. The tagline to this is, when we coach people, we're coaching them to build it right once and be done. This is a two-, three-, four-, maybe five-year plan, and by that time, you should have your company dialed in to where you're separated from the day-to-day. The systems, the A-player employees run the company for you so you can go off and do other things. That's what we do.
Sheila Smeltzer:
I've thought about—so many times in our conversation I've thought about something my dad always told me, and it was: “It doesn't matter what you do, it's how you do it.” You've been a true example of that. Just from your story of wanting to do your own thing—farm boy from Indiana, 600 storefronts, and then you're like, “Oh crap, I'm gonna walk into a mattress store, and if this guy says yes, I'm going to start a window cleaning company.” I love that. That's such a great story. Then, you know, to where you are—and it does take time. It takes a lot of grit, right, Jim? It takes a lot of work. You said that before we hopped on. It's a lot of work.
Jim DuBois:
It really is. For many of us, it's the hardest thing that we'll ever do, but it's not 40 years of it. It's three to five years of working harder than you've ever worked. I tell people all the time, I didn't just snap my fingers and all this came together. I ate it, I drank it, I breathed it, I everythinged it, I sacrificed to learn what I had to learn to get it to where it's at, as so many of us have done who are further along that pathway.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Yeah, well, I sure congratulate you for your success, and I really thank you for sharing your story. There's been so much good stuff that we've talked about here today on the podcast. I know that there's been a lot of value for our listeners. Thanks, Jim—this has been a real honor to talk to you today.
Jim DuBois:
Well, thank you, Sheila. I super appreciate being on. We'll have to do another one. There's so much good stuff to talk about.
Sheila Smeltzer:
I've got a whole list of things on my sheet. We can keep going; we'll do another one.
Jim DuBois:
We will. Sounds good. Thank you for having me on.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Thanks so much.
Jim DuBois:
Welcome.
Sheila Smeltzer:
Thanks for joining us on the Huge Transformations Podcast.
Sid Graef:
Hello, my friend, this is Sid. Thank you again so much for taking your time to listen to today's episode. I hope you got some value from it. Listen, anything that was covered—any of the resources, any of the books, any of the tools, anything like that—is in the show notes, so it’s easy for you to find and check it out.
Also, I want to let you know: The mission for the Huge Convention and for this is to help our blue-collar business owners like you and me to gain financial and time freedom through running a better business. We do that in four ways:
Number one is our free weekly newsletter, it's called the Huge Insider. I hope you subscribe—it is the most valuable newsletter for the home service industry, period, paid or otherwise. And this one's free.
Next is the Huge Foundations education platform. We've got over 120 hours of industry-specific education and resources for you, and every month we do a topical webinar and we do Q&A with seven- and eight-figure business owners. It’s available to you for a $1 trial for seven days.
Next, of course, is the Huge Convention—the Huge Convention. If you haven't been, you've got to check it out. It’s every August. This year it's in Nashville, Tennessee. That's August 20th through 22nd in 2025. It is the largest and number-one rated trade show and convention for home service business builders. We've got the biggest trade show, so you can check out all the coolest tools and meet the vendors and check out the software to run your business. We've got world-class education and educators and speakers that will teach you how to run a better business. And it's the best networking opportunity that you can have within the home service business.
And then lastly, if you want to pour jet fuel in your business, check out the Huge Mastermind. Now it's not for everyone—you've got to be over $750,000 of revenue, and you're building toward a million, five million, or ten million in the next five years. It's a network, a mentorship, and a mastermind of your peers, and we help you understand and implement the Freedom Operating System. We'll go into more detail, but you can get all the information on all four of these programs and how it will help you advance your business quickly just by going to thehugeconvention.com and scrolling down and clicking on the Freedom Path. Or, of course, you can find the links here in the show notes.
Sorry, I feel like I'm getting a little bit wordy, but I just want to let you know of the resources that are available to help you accelerate and advance your beautiful small business. Keep on growing, keep on learning, keep advancing, and if you like the show—go ahead, I mean, if you would go and take 90 seconds and give us a review on iTunes, then subscribe and share it. Man, it would really mean the world to us. It would help other people as we continue our mission to help people just like you and me. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next episode!
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