After leaving his cabin work, Kyle Ray started the bartender, the waiting tables and the cleaning of the windows.
His first client was a massage lounge in a shopping center in Houston.
He transformed the boom side by using a unique pricing model and “unreasonable hospitality”.
For Kyle Ray, there is little more satisfactory things than cleaning a dirty window.
It is “an instant gratuity”, told the native of Texas, to Business Insider, and something he knew for the first time in high school while working in odd jobs. “It is one of those things that seems insane and easy, but it is actually quite complicated and takes skills, and I just enjoyed it very much.”
In 2007, Ray needed work. He had abandoned the university to start a real estate business with a friend who finally failed, then spent about a year working a work of 9 to 5 cabin which made him crazy: “I did not like having a boss.”
He resigned, picked up the night changed bartender and waiting tables, and devoted his mornings and afternoon to the construction of a window cleaning company.
Although he had a certain experience of his adolescence, he had to refine skills.
“The fastest way for me to gain as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible has been to work for someone,” he said. “So I worked for a window cleaning company for about three months, then I said to myself:” Ok, I got it. “”
Ray bought about $ 100 in Home Depot equipment, loaded his truck and went to shopping centers in Tout Houston. He became a showcase in store, asking managing directors if they needed to clean their windows.
His first client was a massage lounge.
“I entered the door because their windows were dirty and I asked them if they wanted a quote,” he recalls. “They said no. They do it themselves. I said to them:” Well, you haven’t done a very good job, and I can do a better job. If you let me do it, it’s only $ 15. “”
Ray, whose second and third customers were a hair salon and a wing store, called its cleaning of side geek windows.
Ray spent about a year cleaning the brick and mortar windows. Residential did not go through his mind until the director general of one of his commercial customers asked if he would clean his house windows.
His first residential job took three hours and won him around $ 300.
“It was then that a bulb started and I said to myself:” I need to become a good in residence “,” said Ray.
Ray started with a cleaning of commercial windows, but pivoted for residential when he realized how lucrative it was.With the kind permission of Kyle Ray
Although more lucrative than commercial jobs, this requires more skills.
“Your typical commercial locations have large pieces of glass. It is very easy to clean. There is no obstructions in front of the glass,” he said. “The residential is smaller. It can be suspended. It can be a divided luminous window – the small squares, and these small squares vary in size. They can be three inches large, six inches of large, 10 inches of large. Then, you have screens that you have to face, and you have multi -lourd levels, so two -stall or three -stall windows. residential. “
He also found more difficult to land customers, at least in the first two years.
“I would go out and hit the doors, and I would receive two people a day, but I would not get anyone for a week or two,” said Ray.
He was not discouraged because he knew he was on something. He decided to drop his commercial customers and put it in residence.
For years, Geek has remained a side jostling for Ray.
“I really appreciated the work, and it brought good money, but I was not enough to stop the waiting tables and the bartender,” he said. “I worked seven days a week. It started to become a hamster wheel in which I got used to, and I could not understand how to grow quickly enough to produce the level of income I needed to leave these other jobs.”
It changed around 2014 when he started to find out how to take advantage of SEO.
“I started reading a lot of books on this subject, and I started to build my website and do all the referencing things you would do at the time,” he said. “I received more consistent jobs and more customer references because we were doing an excellent job for them. And then, in 2015, if you were looking for Houston,” we were presenting ourselves in Houston “.
Ray, around 2014, when his side team began to win a serious traction.With the kind permission of Kyle Ray
Around the same time, it redesigned its price structure. A major advantage of his commercial work was consistency: once he has locked a client, they would generally like him to come back every week or every two weeks.
Its residential customers were more sporadic. To encourage them to establish recurring cleaning, he has experienced a pricing model in which customers would get a reduced price if they paid monthly costs for a defined number of cleaning, rather than hiring it for punctual jobs.
“I have mainly changed this program since 2015, and I would probably say that in 2019, 2020, it is when I really understood it – how to sell it and how to install people,” said Ray. “And then we started cooking with fire.”
Geek or ACP’s “still clean program” puts customers on an automatic cleaning program. Their monthly rate is determined by the services they select – Geek has developed to provide pressure washing, gutter cleaning and roof cleaning – the size of their home and the frequency of cleaning.
Ray, who has been part of the company for almost two decades, believes that maintenance programs, rather than funds, are the future of window cleaning: “I think people are doing now, and there are a few people who do it, but when I started to do it, everyone thought I was crazy.”
He also believes in excellent customer service. One of the fundamental values of the company is what he calls “unreasonable hospitality”, which he describes as “transforming the interactions of ordinary customers into extraordinary experiences”.
He trains his technicians to go beyond.
“If we present ourselves at someone’s house and his trash can have been thrown, we will just catch them and we will say:” Hey, where are your trash? “Or:” Hey, this luminaire was really dirty. “We do unreasonable things to make sure you are super happy.”
Hospitality is in his blood. He grew up looking at his mother, who headed a bread barrel company, take supreme care of his customers. He also joined the idea of providing exceptional customer service after years of waiting tables.
“You can be an asshole server. Or, you can be a really hospital and friendly server-and you will earn much more money,” he said.
The Geek window cleaning team working on Texas A & M Kyle Field after reconstruction.Geek Window Cleaning graciousness
Ray has teams of technicians in Houston and Austin, where he and his wife are currently resident, and plans to extend to Dallas in 2027.
The company has generated six income figures in 2024 and is expected to exceed $ 1 million for the first time in 2025. Business Insider confirmed these details by examining its P&L dashboard and Servicemonster 2024.
Ray has major objectives that he plans to achieve by implementing his always clean program, assuming occasional cleaning and continuing to provide unreasonable hospitality.
“The objective is to go to $ 40 million per year of income in five years and 100 million dollars per year of income in 10, then spread out of the state,” he said. “We know how to get there and and we are just going to go for that and see what’s going on.”
