Six weeks out: how to fill October and November now
Listen to this post (6:12)
The pre-holiday booking window opens in mid October. Here is the 30 day plan, the reactivation text, the storefront walk-in push, and where to move ad budget.
It is the first week of September. The phone is slow, the heat is finally breaking, and in about six weeks every homeowner in your service area is going to decide that the windows need doing before company arrives.
The pre-holiday run is short. It opens around October 15 and it is effectively over by December 10. Companies that fill those eight weeks are not the ones advertising hardest in November. They are the ones who did the work in September, while nobody was calling.
Here is the 30 day version.
Week one: text last fall's customers
Your best list is the one you already own. Pull every residential customer who booked between September and December last year, plus anyone who booked in spring and has not been back.
Send one text, from your business number, one at a time or in small batches so it does not read as a blast:
"Hi [name], this is [your name] at [company]. I cleaned your windows last November. I am putting the fall schedule together and the weeks before Thanksgiving fill up first. Want me to hold a date for you? Exterior is $[price], inside and out is $[price]."
Two things make this work. It names the last job, so it does not read as marketing. It names a deadline that is real rather than invented. Expect somewhere between one in six and one in four to book, which on a list of 200 past customers is 30 to 50 jobs before you have spent a dollar on advertising.
Text the ones who do not answer once, ten days later, and then stop.
Week two: put gutters in the offer
Leaves start dropping right as the booking window opens, and you are already bringing a ladder or a water-fed pole to the house. Gutter cleaning at $150 to $250 turns a $260 window job into a $440 stop with one drive, one setup and one invoice.
Say it in the same conversation, not on the invoice: "While I am there Thursday, I can do the gutters for $180. On their own I charge $240, but the trip is already paid for." That is an honest discount and customers hear it as one.
The full argument for bundling, including how it moves your average ticket without a single extra lead, is in the pricing guide.
Week three: walk the storefronts
Retail wants clean glass before Black Friday, and almost nobody asks them for the work in advance. The first week of November is late. Early October is right.
Pick a block with 30 to 40 storefronts and walk it in daylight with a clipboard. The pitch stays short: "I clean the glass for a few businesses on this street. Yours would be $50 a month, and I will do the first one free so you can see it. Who handles that here?"
One yes in eight to twelve doors is a normal rate. Forty doors is a small route. Route customers pay the same in January as they do in June, which is the only real answer to a dead winter, and the month-by-month case for that is in the seasonality guide.
Week four: move the ad budget
If you run Google Ads, plan the shift now rather than reacting to it. Search volume for window cleaning climbs from mid October, peaks in the first half of November, and falls off a cliff after December 10.
Raise daily budgets on October 15, hold them through December 5, then cut back to a holding level rather than pausing. Pausing entirely resets campaign learning and costs you two weeks in the spring getting it back. Change your ad copy to name the deadline, because "clean windows before Thanksgiving, booking through November 22" outperforms a generic offer in every seasonal trade. The budget schedule and the campaign types worth running are in the Google Ads guide.
Before the phone rings, fix two things
The rush is a bad time to discover that the basics are broken.
First, answer the phone. In an eight week window with a fixed number of calls, every missed one is a job that goes to whoever picks up. If you are on a ladder, you are not answering, which is why missed-call text-back exists. Put your own numbers into the calculator and see what a few missed calls a week costs across a peak season.
Second, look at your Google listing the way a homeowner does. Across 14,348 window cleaning listings in 51 states, 68.4% show no hours at all and 32% have no website. If yours is one of them, that is a two hour fix that pays for itself in the first week of the rush. The benchmark report shows the rest of the field.
What the 30 days should produce
By October 15 you want a list of past customers who have already said yes, a gutter add-on quoted on most of those jobs, a small storefront route that bills every month regardless of weather, and an ad account ready to spend more on a schedule you set in advance.
None of that is clever. It is just done in September instead of November, which is the entire difference between a good fall and a busy one.
If you want the reactivation campaign and the seasonal ad schedule built for you, it is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.