How Optimum Window Cleaning Grew From a 1987 Van to Two Florida Markets

How did Optimum Window Cleaning & Pressure Washing start?

Taylor Wood started Optimum at 19 with no money and a 1987 Aerostar van. He is from Atlanta, where he had a job as a kid with a nationwide window cleaning company. When he moved to the Florida Panhandle about 17 years ago he thought he was done with windows, but he saw how much opportunity there was. He was working beach service at the time. “I was a broke kid. I had no money,” he said.

He ripped the carpet and everything but the driver’s seat out of the van and made it his workshop. He was embarrassed enough by it that he parked down the street from his clients’ houses.

Knocking on doors with a friend got him nothing. His first job came from his boss at the beach service company, who let him clean his house in Rosemary Beach. Taylor charged $200 and it took two days. He would charge about $1,500 for that house now. It paid off anyway: the neighbors saw the work, and he used it in his early social media marketing.

When did it become a real business?

Around 2016 or 2017, when he bought his first Ford Transit. In the early years, he said, people saw it as “a cute kid business.”

The bigger shift came about six months later with a second vehicle, because that meant hiring. “That was when I had to let my baby go and kind of start hiring people and trusting people,” he said. Trusting people who do not own the business was the first growing pain he named. The second was marketing: reaching the point where the company could support him and still put money into it.

Optimum has now been operating for going on 15 years. Taylor says that when he started there were only one or two other window cleaning and pressure washing companies in the area, and that Optimum is one of the longest running.

How does Optimum keep quality up with a team?

By making customer service a protocol, not a hope. He described three parts:

• Speed. Get the customer a quote, and get the job on and off the schedule, as quickly as possible.
• A walkthrough. When the job is done, the crew walks around the house with the customer to make sure everything is up to standard. If it is not, they fix it.
• Treating people like family. That goes for employees and customers. At Christmas the company sends cards.

What happened with the purple house?

It is the story he says always sticks out, and he tells it as a lesson in learning from mistakes.

A customer whose windows Optimum had cleaned for about two years finally agreed to have her house washed. It was purple, and she was worried about the paint. This was when the industry was moving from pressure washing to soft washing. Taylor explained the process and tested a spot, and the test came out fine.

When the crew washed the left side of the house, the purple started turning blue. He stopped and told her. She was understanding and told them to keep going, and by the end the whole house was blue. He told her Optimum would paint it or do whatever it took.

What saved them was the paint itself. When she went to find the same paint, it turned out she had been sold interior paint for the exterior. “It wasn’t really our fault,” he said, but he took a rule from it: do your testing, and still know your boundaries with certain colors.

Where do Optimum’s customers come from?

Google. “It always comes back down to Google, man,” Taylor said. Door hangers are good, but SEO and digital marketing are what he says you cannot beat.

Optimum has used a marketing agency for about four and a half years. They have tried different things and kept what the analytics showed was working, and the one thing the agency always pushed was reviews. Taylor leaves the tracking to his office team, since he says he is “horrible with this stuff.” In the three months before the interview the company added 76 Google reviews and reached 294.

Growth is also geographic. Around August of last year Optimum launched a second market in Tampa. There is far more competition there than at home, he said, but also much more work, and it is growing significantly.

What would Taylor tell someone starting a pressure washing business?

Do not do everything off YouTube. He has watched the trade fill up since COVID with videos promising $1,000 a day that leave out everything else the business takes. His list for a 19-year-old starting from an old truck:

• Buy good equipment, even when you have no money and want to go cheap.
• Make sure you know what you are doing.
• Talk to your customers, and have waivers.
• Put your money into marketing. “That’s the biggest thing,” he said.