In this episode of JackQuisitions, Jack breaks down why pressure washing is one of the most misunderstood businesses in America—and why the “low skill, low overhead, easy money” narrative is exactly what traps most operators in unscalable jobs.
Jack explains how pressure washing looks simple from the outside, but in reality is a sales, marketing, and operations business disguised as a trade. He walks through the real cost structure most people ignore, why underpricing kills otherwise busy operators, and why many pressure washing companies never scale past the owner.
You’ll hear why commercial and route-based pressure washing is the real prize, why pure residential pressure washing caps out quickly, and how successful operators increase ticket size by stacking services instead of chasing more leads. Jack also covers when buying a pressure washing business makes sense (and when it absolutely doesn’t), the systems you must see before acquiring one, and the hidden skills required to build a real company—not just buy a job.
This episode is a reality check for anyone thinking about starting or buying a pressure washing business—and a playbook for those who want to do it the right way.
🔍 What You’ll Learn
- Why pressure washing is not a low-skill business—and why most operators fail to scale
- The real cost structure behind pressure washing (fuel, chemicals, repairs, seasonality, callbacks)
- Why underpricing keeps operators busy but permanently unprofitable
- The difference between commercial route-based pressure washing and residential service
💼 Shoutout to Quick Staffers LLC
Need trained HVAC & plumbing CSRs at a fraction of the cost? Quick Staffers LLC specializes in placing top-tier global talent with the best SOPs and scripts.
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If you think pressure washing is an easy business with low skill, low overhead, and quick cash, you are exactly the person who should not start one, or at least not until you watch this entire video. Because pressure washing is one of the most misunderstood and difficult businesses in America today. It can be a cash flowing monster.It can also keep you busy and bleed your cash dry. And if you are about to start one or even worse, potentially buy one. There's a few things that no one will tell you. It's time to talk about it.Pressure washing has perfect internet optics, and that's why you see gurus all over tucking it under its wing as the golden child. 'cause it has cheap startup costs. There's no license in most states. It looks simple and there's tons of $20,000 a month screenshots and weekend warriors and gurus riding around posting in their Lamborghinis.And some people think, Hey, I'm just gonna go out there, buy a trailer. I'm just gonna go. Buy a pressure washer post on Facebook and print money. And that's exactly why the industry is overrun and overcrowded with bad operators because here's the truth, pressure washing isn't a technical business. It's a sales and marketing business.And if you don't understand that, you're gonna struggle throughout the entire time you're running this business because the biggest line pressure washing is it's low overheads, low cost. And that is true from a startup cost, but. The operational cost. It's not to grow and scale a business in pressure washing has a ton of variable costs.It has fuel costs, repair costs, chemical costs, insurance costs. There is equipment, downtime, opportunity costs. You get callbacks, there's water access issues, and then it's a seasonal business. So what do you do the other three months of the year? If you live in a snow area? There is a ton of costs associated with this business.It's not buy a pressure washer go because you can't scale that. To a business its job. Until then, it's no secret that my office here in Nashville is almost completely empty. So how do I support my team as well as have great growth metrics? Well, the answer is international contractors with quick staffers.So Quick Staffers is a premier staffing agency, which will place top tier talent in your business, built by the trades for the trades. So if you need a CSR. They'll be placing a CSR that is highly trained in your business that knows ServiceTitan and can book calls effectively, day one, call one.Affordable, reliable, and trained in all of the industry best practices. Quick staffers can help you cut that overhead, boost conversions, and scale your business fast. So don't waste another lead. Visit quick staffers.com and transform your business today. The killer at the end of the day is that most pressure washing businesses, they underprice to stay busy, and then they wonder why, Hey, I can't hire people.I can't scale this business and I can't sell. It's because there's not enough margin to cover all those costs that we just previously talked about and grow because busy does not. Equal profitable. There are only two types of businesses in pressure washing, and the first one is commercial, and even better would be route-based commercial.I want you to think about HOAs retail centers, your pressure washing fleets, your pressure washing, the football stadium, your pressure washing schools, and other municipal contracts. These are wonderful because they're big ticket, they're predictable, they're repeatable, they're boring, and they're scalable.So you get a B2B guy going in there. Getting those contracts, racking them up, and then that produces great income. The second one is residential service. Residential service is a little bit harder because it requires a premium brand. You're not gonna be the cheapest. You're not gonna be the fastest, but you are going to be the.Best marketed and the most trusted. This requires clean branding. It requires good scripting for sales and your sales folks. It requires great CRM systems with follow up and making sure your processes are tight on scheduling so that the customer gets the greatest experience out of your company. And these generally are a lot of costs for low ticket items.And so how do you make that business actually scalable? Well, it's never just pressure washing. I've never seen. A 20 million, $10 million pressure washing only residential company. 'cause it doesn't exist. The way that you actually work with that is you have to double or triple the ticket size without the customer feeling like they're being overcharged.And the way you do that is by offering additional SKUs or additional services. Some of these are gutter cleanings, they're soft wash, they're window cleaning. There are maybe pry ceiling roof treatments. There's different types of. Alternative services that you can do at the same time as pressure washing that allow you to double your ticket size without having to get a second or third or fourth customer.So this is the way that residential companies I have seen grow. So this is what you have to look for if you want to be a residential service business, is you need to get really good at marketing and sales. You need to understand how to do those things as well as how to expand your service portfolio to add these items.To your repertoire. So now the question is, do you start or do you buy a business? This is Jack acquisitions. We're about buying businesses here, but this might be one of the few businesses that it might not be the best option to acquire a business because the risk of starting a business here is much lower.Your risk is that you're going to burn yourself out, take two or three years of your life working and not scale a business. Whereas when you're buying, the biggest risk is that you're buying a job that doesn't have anything. Potential future scale and that you're still stuck now with debt working three years, not scaling the business.So there's one real easy way to know that. And the first one is, if the owner's going to disappear for 30 days, what happens to the business? Does the business collapse? Does the revenue collapse or does the business have enough people, systems, processes, and. It. Are they charging enough that the business will continue to run without the owner?And so before you buy, you need to understand that, but you also need to understand where are the leads coming from? What kind of systems are in place for marketing and lead generation that without the owner, those things are still coming in? As well as how are pricing decisions made? Is there a price book?Is there some standard or SOP that other people can price out jobs effectively without the owner doing every single estimate? And speaking of that, what repeatable revenue exists? Are you on contracts? Are you on yearly contracts with some kind of municipality? And are those municipality agreements, are they assignable, which is a huge one.It needs to be assignable so that when they sell, you can get those contracts next without having to rebid the entire process. And lastly, what, like what happens when the phone stops ringing? Is the owner answering the phone himself, or does he have a call center in place that's not only answering the phone but doing outbound?'cause outbound is a huge portion of this business because at the end of the day why I say that buying might be worse than than building here is because the problem with pressure washing businesses is that most pressure washing businesses don't actually fail. They just never scale past the owner. They never scale to a point where it's someone outside of the owner or potentially you running this business.And to me, if you're buying a business, that's the goal. You want to scale into a life where. You get some level of financial freedom. So here are the skills that you need to run a pressure washing business. And guess what? It has nothing to do with pressure washing. Even if you start one, yes, you'll need to do some level of pressure washing or soft wash treatment, but all of that is very simple stuff, very simple chemistry, very simple equipment.You can figure it all out where the real magic comes in of the hidden skills that you need. You need to understand how to. Build a call center. You need to understand how to market yourself and how to look at speed to lead, because again, this is an overcrowded industry. So when somebody's on a lead aggregator, like an Angie's List or a Thumbtack, they're riding six different people to go pressure wash their driveway.How do you make it so that at 9:00 PM you are the first one to respond to grab that lead and lock it in for the next morning? That is a speed to lead game, and you need to have the system in place to make that work. The person who runs this, that. A skill that you're gonna need is gonna be quoting discipline, making sure you understand how to build quotes properly, understand how to build estimates properly, that at the end of it they have enough margin in it that allow you to continue to grow, that you're able to handle the cost of labor, that you're able to handle the cost of the customer acquisition.So you need to make sure that you're able to quote properly, especially if you're getting into those commercial zones. And then lastly, you need to understand logistics and how to say no to bad jobs. X and Y axi of value and efficiency. And you wanna make sure that if you're picking high value jobs, that you can go low efficiency.You can drive an hour to do high value jobs, high value commercial business, but you can't drive an hour between low value jobs. So you need to have route based high density. Efficient jobs. So maybe whole neighborhoods where you're doing every single house you have somebody canvassing, knocking on the door saying, Hey, we pressure washed your neighbor.We can pressure wash you today. And making sure that you build that skill tree so that you can be efficient, even if it's low value, because the fastest way to kill your business is going to be chasing every job all over and every zip code. And. Bargaining with every single price shopper out there. This is not a shotgun game.This is a focus game, not a hustle game. Who should actually do this? I mean, you should really know yourself before starting or buying in this industry. And one of the keys is. You have to like operations, like this is an operations and marketing business. You're playing logistic games like that efficiency game I just talked about.You're playing marketing games on how can I get the best ROI for my money on marketing, maybe even you like content. This is a beautiful content business where you can show yourself pressure washing before and after. You have to like some of these things and you have to understand this is a business.Not a side hustle fantasy. If you come into this thinking that you're gonna be able to work 10 hours a week and hire your neighbor and he's gonna go pressure wash, it's gonna be all fun and dandy. It's not like this has to be treated like a business and not a side hustle, because if you're chasing easy money in this industry, this industry will humble you fast.If you're serious about buying a business and not just pressure washing, you should definitely be a subscriber. 'cause on Jack acquisitions, this channel's about what actually works and not what. Sounds good on Instagram. What side hustle is out there? This is how we actually build businesses, so like, subscribe, comment, leave it below.I read all of 'em, and we'll see you next time.
