What to put in a window cleaning business package, explained

What to take away

Some services described here involve height, ladders or chemical treatment of glass. Requirements vary by building and jurisdiction, so get qualified safety and technical advice before including them in anything you sell.

The four elements of a package

A package that survives contact with real customers contains exactly four things. Anything else is decoration.

Write the four for your standard package first. Every other package is then a variation on one element.

The design method

Work through these in order. The order matters, because each step constrains the next.

Step one: name the anxiety. Storefront owners worry about looking neglected on a busy street. Facility managers worry about a complaint reaching them. Homeowners worry about strangers inside the house and about paying for something they could do themselves. Your package should answer one of those in its first line.

Step two: fix the visit length. Time the work on real buildings and set a window your crew can hit with a margin. A package the crew cannot finish on schedule destroys route density everywhere behind it.

Step three: choose the one variable. Usually frequency. Sometimes interior inclusion. Rarely anything else.

Step four: write the exclusions. Skylights, high panes above your stated method, sealed or damaged glass, moving stock or furniture, hard-water spotting that needs restoration, and anything requiring lift access. This is the step people skip, and it is the step that pays for itself.

Step five: read it aloud. If you cannot say what the package is in one breath, a customer cannot repeat it to a colleague, and that repetition is how commercial work spreads.

Three package shapes that work

Not a menu to copy. Three shapes to adapt.

The frequency ladder. One scope, three frequencies. Simple to explain, simple to schedule, and it lets the customer choose on budget rather than on features.

The inside-out pair. Exterior only, or exterior plus interior. The clearest split for residential work, and it maps onto how customers already think about the job.

The building agreement. One scope written for one property, with a schedule attached. Used for commercial accounts where nothing generic fits. More work to write, and much harder for a competitor to displace.

Add-ons, and where they belong

An add-on does not belong when it needs a different vehicle, a different competence, or a different day. That is a separate job with its own scope, and pretending otherwise turns a scheduled ninety minutes into an afternoon.

State add-on availability in the package and price it separately. Customers accept a clearly separate line far more easily than a surprise.

What you can and cannot promise

Packages invite promises, and promises are advertising claims. Guarantees, response-time commitments and outcome language all have to be supportable, and the Federal Trade Commission advertising guidance for small business sets out what that means in practice.

Three specific cautions for this trade. Do not promise a result on glass that is already etched or scratched. Do not promise that exterior glass will stay clean for a stated period, since sprinklers, masonry runoff and weather decide that.

Do not promise access to heights your company is not equipped and trained for. The fall protection guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration describes protection that is planned in advance. A package that quietly assumes somebody will improvise should not be sold.

Making packages measurable

A package you cannot measure is a guess repeated monthly. Tag every job with the package it was sold under and record three things: actual time on site, add-ons sold, and whether the visit was completed as scheduled.

The Internal Revenue Service recordkeeping guidance sets out the standard a system has to meet to show income and expense clearly, which is the same standard that lets you compare two packages honestly a year later.

After two quarters you will know which package runs long, which one generates add-ons, and which one customers cancel. That is enough to redesign rather than to guess.

Where the package sits in the wider offer

A package is an arrangement of services, so it can only be as good as the underlying menu. Settle the service menu and scope definitions before designing packages, and check the arrangement against your ranking of the most profitable window cleaning services, because a package built around a low-contribution line will sell well and pay badly.

Two practical constraints then apply. What the crew can deliver inside the visit window depends on the equipment and vehicle setup they arrive with. Whether a second crew can run the same package at the same standard depends on how you go about hiring reliable window cleaning staff.

Common questions

How many packages should I offer?

Three is usually right and two is often better. The number of options is a cost: every additional one gets explained on every call, forever.

Should packages be published on my website?

Publish the scope and the structure. Whether to publish prices depends on how variable your jobs are, and on whether you would rather filter inquiries or maximize them. Publishing a starting price no real job has ever met is the one option to avoid.

What if a customer wants to build their own package?

Let them, on a building agreement, once. Custom scopes are fine when they are written down. What causes trouble is a custom scope agreed verbally and remembered differently.

How do I move a one-off customer onto a package?

Ask at the end of the visit, while the glass looks its best, and offer a date rather than a brochure. The conversion happens in that thirty seconds or not at all.