Talking Business
by Emily Landes
Chris Ferguson has always considered himself a thrillseeker. The self-described former “ski bum” moved around from Jackson Hole, Wyoming to New Mexico to Colorado to Bend, Oregon, paying his way by teaching skiing and snowboarding, and spending his free time racing down double black-diamond trails. He moved to San Francisco when he was offered a job cleaning high-rise office building windows, and never once feared his daily routine of washing windows on a rickety platform—held aloft only by rope—hundreds of feet above the city streets.
So, it may seem to some that the window washer was ready for a slightly less adventurous life when he started his own blind cleaning business about three years ago. According to Chris, anyone with that view must never have cleaned blinds in San Francisco. Recently, he arrived at a home in the Mission district where the owner answered the door in only shorts and found the place filled with explicit magazines and hard hats. That was better, at least, than the resident who came to the door totally naked, and remained that way for the entirety of Chris’s visit. Other unique clients include a swinger couple in Marin and a tenant whose home was filled with garbage, including several inches of coffee grinds covering the kitchen counter.
But through it all, Chris keeps his head down and uses his innovative sonic-wave cleaning system to make his clients’ blinds look like new again. “A lot of times when I’m in those situations, I just close my eyes and see dollar signs,” he recounts. “That’s what keeps me going. I say to myself, ‘I’m doing it for the business. I’m taking one for the team.’”
The “team” right now is just Chris and his wife Melissa, who happily admits she is thrilled to be the one fielding calls in their home office and keeping track of the company’s finances while her husband is out cleaning blinds in people’s homes. This in-home service is what makes A Mobile Blind Cleaner unique among the Bay Area’s few blind cleaning services, yet Melissa knows it would also be the end of their business if she were the one doing the cleaning. “I tell him every day, ‘I’m glad you do the field work because I would honestly up and turn around and go the other way’” when faced with some of the undesirable situations her husband comes across on a regular basis. “I just don’t think I could handle it.”
Melissa also had a hard time with the idea of leaving her stable, 9-to-5 job “working for the man” for the uncertain future of a small, start-up business. Even though they were both unhappy working for other people, it took Chris months to convince his wife his business plan would work. “It was a big leap of faith, honestly,” Melissa recalls. “And a lot of coaxing,” Chris adds. But after Chris got the business going, it took only six months for Melissa to see that he was getting far too much business to run the company without her help. She finally quit her job and the business has only grown since she came onboard.
That’s not to say that the couple didn’t have any problems getting started. Chris may have cleaned windows before, but he had no idea how to clean blinds; he destroyed several expensive silk blinds before figuring out this material shouldn’t be cleaned in water. Neither one of them had any idea how to measure new blinds for installation—another one of A Mobile Blind Cleaner’s services—and that led to several costly mistakes. “If we messed up, we messed up big time,” admits Melissa. They also charged far too little for their services; the prices were so low that their clients had to tell them to bring their fees up to standard industry levels.
But now that the couple has cleaned several thousand blinds (15 blinds per property is about average), they have worked out most of the kinks in their growing business. The one thing they haven’t been able to overcome is the perception that it’s cheaper and easier to replace a blind than to have it cleaned. “We need to change the tide of thought over to cleaning rather than replacing, and quality instead of quantity,” says Melissa. “Yeah, you can get a blind at Home Depot for $12.99, but it’s not going to last you long and soon you’ll have to replace it again.” Forward-thinking property owners, however, realize that over time it’s cheaper to clean and repair existing blinds than it is to replace them every time a tenant moves out, her husband adds.
Not only are A Mobile Blind Cleaner’s services good for the bottom line, they are also good for the environment. The company’s cleaning system involves no toxic chemicals, just sonic waves in a nine-foot vat of water and a little orange extract. Yet these simple ingredients have worked miracles, Chris contends. He recently cleaned blinds that were in an apartment rented by a smoker for 15 years. When he arrived, the strings were orange and the blinds were brown. After two hours in the machine, they looked like new, he says. Plus, by saving these potentially unusable blinds, the couple feels they contribute to the environment another way: by keeping old blinds on walls and out of landfills.
The company’s next step is to get a few new walls of its own. Working out of their home office has been frustrating for several reasons, not the least of which is that clients call at all hours, not realizing they may be waking the couple, or their young daughter. They can’t wait to get a storefront, but, as usual, the pair differs over how long it will take to reach that next goal. Melissa is hopeful, but not certain that it will happen next year. Chris is so confident that they will have a storefront next year, he’s already thinking about franchising. “He’s very persuasive and very driven,” Melissa says of her husband. “It can be annoying, but it’s also a good quality for running a business.”
So, is the great adventurer getting bored with the everyday banalities of running a small, but growing, blind cleaning company? Not a chance. “I’m not bored. It’s our business,” he points out. “Plus, I’m not going to do something I don’t enjoy doing, it doesn’t matter what it is.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Copyright © 2006 by the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.