Fatrank Podcast

Kasra Dash:
So James if I want to grow a pressure washing business how do you recommend I do it, what should I avoid spending my money on and what do you think I should double down on.

James Dooley:
So if you're looking to grow a pressure washing company then first and foremost I'd want to know a little bit more information with regards to are you a pressure washing company for residential and domestic use or are you in the commercial side of things. If you're in residential for pressure washing I would go down the route of Facebook ads. I think that would work really well. Even other networks like YouTube ads or Pinterest ads could work well as well.
On social media it's very visual. If you're cleaning a driveway and before and after it's quite therapeutic actually looking. I might be being sad there like, but it's quite therapeutic in looking at a really mossy kind of surface and then after it's been nice and clean you can see the block paving or tiles that they have on. Could even just be tarmac to be fair but they're getting rid of the moss. So I'd say for social media ads on residential pressure washing would be good. I don't think it would work slightly as good on commercial. I think commercial's more got a search kind of intent to it so I'd probably then start steering down the road of SEO and PPC.

Kasra Dash:
Right okay. So where would you, if on a pressure washing company, would you do anything different to what I've said there with regards to what would you think the primary one would be in SEO and PPC.
So I completely agree with the therapeutic videos. It's like a time lapse of a two hour driveway being cleaned. So we both sad then.
Yeah.
So I get that and I think that would actually perform very well if you were to run that as a Facebook ad to just a simple lead form and then you're just picking up leads and actually giving them a quote and stuff.
So I think that would work well. Whereas something for commercial I don't think that business owners would be as sad as us. Maybe they are maybe they're not but I think they're probably going to search for commercial pressure washing. I think you probably want to focus more so on your SEO presence making certain your website is actually fully built and it's targeting those types of keywords.

James Dooley:
For sure. I mean from an SEO standpoint SEO's more than just the search engine optimisation of ranking for the keywords. Within that you've got like you want to be stamping your authority on expertise and experience so trying to make certain that if someone lands on your page from a conversion standpoint you've got all the trust signals, you've got any accreditations that might be needed and again you've got before and after photos.
I also think on top of SEO being a major play organic social media, so not even just social media ads, and I think a big one for it would be YouTube because literally you could get a bit of the time lapse and like we were saying we were sad looking at the before and afters. Some people watch thirty or forty minute videos of just someone pressure washing.
Right.
And they get millions of views on YouTube. So you could be each time you're doing a job putting a time lapse together and cleaning a driveway. One it's a great video showing the before and afters for like a condensed two minute video for your case studies especially if you can get a testimonial with that as well.
But for the longer form videos as well you could just get a lot of people coming through to your channel engaging with your channel which means the videos then would start ranking for the keywords like commercial pressure washing, industrial pressure washing. You've got other stuff then with regards to pressure washing not just for floors but like cladding pressure washing and stuff like that, graffiti removal, chewing gum removal is another great one.
So all these with regards to pressure washing have great sub niches within them. So there's so many different places pressure washing can be done. There's actually some great volume for like heritage building pressure washing.
Right okay.
So you need to, that's SEO volume like people searching.
Yeah.
Searching on Google and stuff like that. So for that you need to be very specialist because they don't want you damaging any masonry kind of building or architecture and stuff like that. So I'm not saying exactly the strength of the power of the pressure washing needs to be filtered down that little bit on those type of buildings and stuff.
But then I'd say for me I'm slightly biased. I obviously own fatrank.com and we do a lot of lead generation services for pressure washing companies. FatRank has a pressure washing lead generation offer where you only pay on converted jobs. So you have zero to pay for any SEO, any PPC, any social media. You only pay when a job actually converts. You do the job, you get paid and then you pay a commission out of that.
But what's your thoughts with regards to using other lead generation companies that might charge per lead and what's the difference in your opinion between let's say a Bark, a Yellow Pages, Checkatrade, those type of lead generation companies that charge per lead versus a pay-commission like with FatRank.

Kasra Dash:
My issue in the past, when I was less SEO savvy and less business savvy, is I actually signed up to Bark and the first lead that I paid for, I think it was like sixty quid, I phoned them three times and never picked up. You emailed them, never picked up. WhatsApped them, never picked up.
So you do have that issue. You've just paid for that lead and you just can't contact them. Not only that as well you do have the flip side to it where you can contact them but with a lot of the lead generation companies that are competitors with you, they are reselling that lead. So for example if a render cleaning job comes in they're selling that lead through to yourself and to three other competitors and then it just comes down to who's the cheapest.
And for me I want to be profitable but I also want to be competitive in pricing as well. I don't want to price something at two hundred quid when I can potentially get the correct pricing at five hundred let's say.
So that's my two biggest issues. Sometimes you pay for leads they just never pick up. In other cases you're sharing the lead with four or five of your competitors and it just comes to a rat race on who's the cheapest.

James Dooley:
I think if you are a pressure washing business owner and you are looking to use a lead generation company you should be vetting those lead generation companies making certain that the leads you're getting are actually converting and actually getting you return on investment.
At FatRank you only pay on conversions. The good part about it is they're exclusive leads. What Kas is talking about there from other lead generation companies, they will be reselling that same lead five, six sometimes even seven times in the pressure washing space. That means you're up against six or seven of your competitors and it's a race to the bottom on price.
So always make certain if you are looking to use a lead generation company for pressure washing leads, do your due diligence.
The last part that some people talk about with regards to trying to grow a pressure washing business is traditional kind of marketing and advertising. Billboard advertising, radio advertising, TV advertising, magazines. For me there's no KPIs. There's no, I'm someone who loves to talk about return on investment and when you can't see what return investment that billboard is bringing you at that point I'm like I think it's crazy.
But what's your thoughts on traditional.

Kasra Dash:
I don't think traditional would work. I don't think it would work in this industry. But I have just thought of a crazy idea for a billboard ad that you could potentially run.
I don't think it would be profitable at all but just imagine this. A big billboard. One side's really mossy and the other side's really clean. You could run that. I don't think it would work but I think it's a cool idea to actually run.
With traditional marketing my opinions are that in a lot of cases it won't work unless you're a certain business and I just don't think in this pressure washing space that it's one of those. But you could definitely do pressure washing for billboards because there are a lot of dirty billboards so that could be another service you provide.

James Dooley:
For sure. I think if you are a pressure washing business owner, for me the major plays would be using a lead generation company like FatRank that you only pay on the back end, doing SEO yourself, generating your own leads. If you can start generating your own leads, if you ever look to sell the business that business is worth a lot more money if you can generate your own leads as well.
So I'd look to try and start SEO-ing your own website also for trust signals and then maybe looking at social media, both social media ads but also videos of jobs that you've done.
I hope you liked the video. If you are looking to grow a pressure washing company is there anything else to add there of what you would do.

Kasra Dash:
No I think that's it. We've covered all the basics really.