This is Under Pressure, a podcast where we dive into the untold stories of entrepreneurs and business owners who have conquered adversity to achieve greatness. And now, here's your host, Nic Staton.

Welcome to another episode of the Under Pressure Show. I'm your host, Nic Staton. Today's guest is Steven Stallone. Steven, if you don't mind explaining to the guest a little bit about yourself and your background.

Nic Staton

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So we started this business about three years ago. My whole background is a chef. So I've actually went to culinary school. I've been a chef my whole life. I've worked my way up from a dishwasher to a line cook, a banquet chef, sous chef, menu development chef. all the way to Corporate Chef of Southeastern Grocers here in Florida. So they manage Winn-Dixie and Bilo Harvey's Fresco y Mas. And I moved here to Jacksonville seven years ago to be the Corporate Chef. And now I do production planning for Southeastern Grocers. I actually still work full time. Monday through Friday, I work remotely. So, I'm at home, I'm working at home and I run this business on the weekends and I have actually started this business three years ago because I wanted to give my kids something to grow into. They were, you know, nine and ten at the time and I said, you know, I want to create a business and we used to be called Stallone and Sons. We were Stallone and Sons Pressure Washing. And my long guy actually came to my house and I used to see him going up and down the street with this pressure washing trailer. And I just said to him one day, I was like, hey, you ever want to sell that trailer? Let me know. Eight, nine months later, he came by and he's like, hey, I'm about to sell this trailer. I said, all right, I'll grab it from you. And we just started doing like little, you know, $99 jobs, $120 jobs, little driveways here and there. And I had my kids working in and I'd make them a couple bucks. And then I realized like people spend a lot of money to wash their houses, you know, wash their exteriors down here in Florida, things get moldy. And we're in an up and coming area and fruit Cove, Florida, right here in St. John's right between St. Augustine and Jacksonville, where the area is just about to explode. And all the land is already bought here. So, what they're building is all homes. And all these homes are going to be HOAs. And what do you have to do in HOAs? You got to maintain your property. So, it's just a win-win here in this area for a growth of exterior cleaning services. So, that's kind of how we got started from my career. I went from a chef to being an exterior cleaning company. And now we just hired our first employee. So, that's kind of where we're at right now.

Steve Stallone

Okay. Nice. Yeah. I noticed whenever you went to go log in that it had like you in a chef outfit and I was like, he has something to do with cooking.

Yeah. Yeah. I have to change that profile picture. It's a little bit old, but yeah, that's from my cooking days.

It goes from the chef and then you log on and your thing comes up and it's like, I'm about to knock you out.

Yeah, I have like a eight inch thick cooking portfolio and my exterior cleaning portfolio is very small still.

Yeah. So how'd you get started?

Well, and when in the exterior cleaning, I got started with my lawn guy when I bought his trailer. But when I really said to myself that I wanted to go all in was actually this year, this January, we were still on in the sun's pressure washing. And I hired a company here in Jacksonville called Fable Heart Media. They're one of the biggest media companies. They do canine for warriors. They do Alihambra's dinner, dinner and uh, like show, they have like dinner and show. So they do them. Uh, so they're a real, real big company here. And they said, the guy said to me, I actually wanted to do Google ads. I was getting crushed on Google ads. You know, I would put out like a thousand dollars in Google ads and I wasn't getting anything in return. So I called this guy up and I said, Hey, I want to advertise. And he said, well, looking at your website, it's not meant to convert customers. You know, it just, you could spend, five hundred thousand dollars a month and your website is just not gonna convert customers it's not built for that and i made my website myself for weebly so i hired him. He said if you're ready to go all in on this we have to start from beginning we did a four phase approach. Phase one was to come up with a new name, which was Stallone and Sons Pressure Washing. We changed that to Stallones Pro Wash. And that kind of was a little bit more generic because we do roof washing, we do exterior cleaning, we do commercial, we do driveways, do a little bit of everything. So it was a little bit better for us to get under more customers. The second phase was to create a new logo. And this was a big part of where people confuse logo and branding. People on social I see all the time, they're like, hey, I want to just get a quick logo, $45 logo. If you look at all these guys, they're all the same. It's like a house with a little droplet of water, and there's a pressure washing guy in the front, and he's shooting water. I can almost guarantee they're all going to Fiverr, and they're getting the same type of package, which is like an AI-generated logo. With a brand, you're an identity. Like wet and wild pressure washing, I look at you and I'm like, yeah, that's wet and wild. I know the colors, I know the logo. You can't deny that it's you. You have a brand. So with me, I was like, I don't want a logo, I want a brand. So we started with Stallones, which was a custom made logo by a graphic designer. And then they created the mascot, which was the little boxing guy, which was the play off of the Rocky Balboa theme. So we did that. We created a color scheme. We created typefaces. We created icons. Everything is now integrated into my website, which is then integrated into my business cards. It's integrated into my door hangers, into my yard signs. Everything is together. It's all connected to my wrap on my truck. And it's all a brand. It's an identity. So when you know that Stallone's ProWash did your service, you know that it was me. You can't deny that it was me. Just like you have your own brand.

Right. Have you looked into getting a trademark?

I did. I did look into that. Yeah. I mean, we there is certain copywriting, you know, restrictions that people have as far as how it is legally. But we have looked into getting a trademark. We'll probably do that here in the future.

Yeah, because that's what I did with Wet n Wild. Yeah, I saw that. Anytime that I go to start something from now on, I'm going to look it up and find out if it can be trademarked and just go ahead and trademark it off the rip. Just so that just in case, because you see so many of these other pressure washing companies, man, they have the same fucking name. And then one of them is like doing really good. And then next thing you know, he gets onto the group page and he starts complaining.

Man, so-and-so down the street or whatever's got the same name as me just started up and he's taking my business.

It's like, well, damn, all y'all got the same fucking name. Yeah. Join the marriage. Cause that's what it is.

Yeah. When we actually were going through our, when we were going through our name, our name change phase, we had three different routes to go down. One was a very generic route, which was like, I can't remember the name, but it was maybe like home bright exterior cleaning or something like generic like that. But I wanted something so unique to us, which Stallone's ProWash. It's our name, you know, and it just works. So it just made sense.

I like it. Like when you when you cut the camera on or whatever, and that like popped up, I was there first. I was like, looking you up on Facebook and trying to figure it out. And then this popped up and I was like, oh, shit, boxing.

Yeah, this is my it's like my brother in law actually 3D printed these little guys for me. They're little mascots.

Oh, nice. That's cool.

He's got a 3D printer. He actually bought the colors Miami. It's the Dolphins colors. Yeah, it's very similar. It's similar.

Crane or canes or whatever.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, that's cool. What's been the hardest part so far?

So I think the hardest part is managing both jobs. I definitely don't like to combine the two. So I'm very strict at working my nine to five, Monday through Friday and not scheduling any work in those hours. If I do schedule anything, it's after hours and it's like an estimate, five o'clock, six o'clock, I'll do an estimate. But since I've hired now my full-time employee, I've been scheduling some jobs on Mondays and Fridays where he'll come to my house, he'll drop off his car, he picks up the truck and trailer, and he goes out and he does the jobs. So the last two years, what I've been doing is just creating procedures. So I've created a procedure for everything. When you get to a house, how to wash a house, how to wash a driveway, how to start the engine. So I've had this app called Safety Culture, where you can create training modules. And I gave him training modules before he even started to go through like the dangers of sodium hypochlorite, what you need on the job for PPE, how to talk to a customer, how to start a job through market. So all these things are already outlined for him and all he needs to do is follow the program. He's a real bright kid. is twenty four years old he's got a great work ethic i'm as soon as i brought him on board he was just ready to learn so i'm ready to you know i made him a lead technician so i you know my plan is around next spring next summer where i can maybe bring him on the salary worker is right now i'm paying him as a an hourly worker And if I put him on as a hourly worker, then we can get more maintenance done out of him. You can start maintenancing the trailer, doing oil changes on the trailer, just giving him some more work during the week to do everything that needs to be done for the business to function properly.

Got you. That's what's up. That's nice. Uh, it's always nice to have a good employees.

How long has it been working for you? It's hard to find, man. It's definitely hard to find. When I did that, I did a 21 apartment buildings over the summer, 21, four story apartment buildings. I hired all high schoolers. They were all on a summer break. I paid them two hundred dollars a day for five days and they were in heaven. You know, they just they they worked good. You know, they all worked good. They were all hard workers. They were all on time, 7 a.m. But the thing is, is that now they're all back in school. You know, they're all they all went back to school because they're they're in high school. So it was a good time in the summer to do that job. And it all worked out great.

Nice. How long has that guy been working for you?

Uh, it's been about, about five weeks now.

Yeah.

He's brand new.

You got to give them, give them some time. A lot of people come in hot.

Yeah.

Yeah. Then they try to find ways to just mingle by with what they're getting.

Yeah. I, I can, I definitely seen that.

Well, I mean, values or anything.

Yeah, I've created a core value culture when I started my SOP program. So I've created everything based on what I expect from my associates, what we represent, what we stand for, our mission statement, our vision. And I always talk to them about doing the right thing and making sure that we're always providing the best customer service. So that's kind of what I'm teaching him and putting him forward to.

OK, so you got SOPs, you got all of that. You hand all that to them.

Yeah.

Yeah. When you find yourself under pressure. What do you what do you do? Well, I mean, obviously, you're under a lot of pressure with with running. two businesses. Yeah. One's full time. The other one's full time as well, too, I would imagine.

Yeah, well, my main job, yes, that is full time. I work that Monday through Friday. And actually, my data analyst was on medical leave for the last month. So I've been double double duty on my regular job. So that's definitely been putting a little bit of extra work on my plate. We have some consultants in right now as well. And they've been helping with a conversion with some stores. But for my for my business, Well, you know, I'm pretty good under pressure. I mean, I've worked banquets as a chef for 1000 plus people. There's nothing like being on a line at Friday night when you got 250 covers and a fine dining restaurant, plates are slamming, and people are cursing and fires are going. I mean, that was my, that was where I thrive most, you know, I used to always be in my element in the kitchen when things were chaotic. So when I run my business now, I can schedule it how I want. So I don't need to make my business chaotic. There's been times where I've said to myself, I didn't charge enough for this job. That's definitely been a couple of times. But I've learned to What I've done with my business is I've created a minimum charge based on what it takes for me to operate. What does it take for me to operate my website? What does it cost for my insurance, my lunch cost, my gas cost, my truck maintenance fees, my maintenance for my pressure washer? What is my minimum? That price has came out to about $65. So it costs me $65 to leave my driveway. And I think a lot of people lose that. They want to say, well, that driveway is going to cost 125 bucks, because I know that it's going to take me 30, 45 minutes, and then I'm going to get paid $100 an hour or whatever it may be. But then they forget about their business costs. what it takes to run the business? What does it take for you to market? And the customer acquisition cost alone to run your marketing through Google Ads is somewhere between $10 to $20 a customer at some times. If you're putting out Google Ads... We run about $50 a day right now in Google Ads, which has been great because we've gotten about 4 leads a day consistently since we started that campaign. But if you put in the customer acquisition costs, and then the widespread area that it costs me to go from my house to North Jacksonville, which is probably 26 miles, it's a whole, you know, it's a whole range of fees that is associated with that risk. You know, now that I got an associate, I got to pay payroll costs, I got to pay workers compensation, I had to up my general liability. So to grow a business, you need to charge accordingly. You can't just say, well, that's a small driveway, it's gonna be 90 bucks. It's gonna be a lot more for me to get to that property to do the actual job. So there needs to be some kind of minimum cost inside of your business that you need to know what it costs to function your business. So that's how I started my pricing.

That's why a lot of companies go out of business is because they never do anything like that. And then you have a lot of people say, well, I made $400 today. And it's like, no, you didn't make $400 today, but then they want to go and wonder, you know, six months down the road or three months down the road while they can't buy equipment or they can't pay their taxes or any of that is because they took all the money.

Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail right on the head when you said, you know, they go out of business. And that's the reason because they're they're paying themselves and are not investing back into the business. I can go to the pressure washing store right now and I can say, I want two hoses. I want, you know, a soft wash hose. I want an extra gun. I keep all that stuff on my truck. And it's easy for me to pay for because I charge my customers that fee. I work it into my pricing. So if a hose goes bad, I replace it. I don't sit there on a job trying to fix it. If it's a hose that busts, I put a new hose on. If it's a gun that busts, I put a new gun on.

That's why all our trucks are the same.

Mm-hmm. I like your trucks. I'm definitely looked into getting a flatbed style truck. I like that style. I have a trailer right now, but I like the flatbed style truck.

They're nice to have, but I recommend having a lot of the same equipment on different vehicles. Mm hmm. That way, if something goes wrong, you could always grab something off the other vehicle or whatever. Yeah. Crunch. That's a good point. Yeah, because that's what I've really I'm. I'm real big on like game planning and analyzing and shit like that. So over time, how I've even started and ran this thing is, is basically I eat at bare minimum and, um, I'm constantly reinvesting back into the business, into things that I know that are gonna better it and help us out. Because at the end of the day, I don't want to have a lot of employees running around. I much rather have, you know, four or five, six trucks running around, but only have maybe 10 guys at the very most. Cause at the end of the day, it's more about the equipment that you've got that'll allow your guys to be able to equal what two or three trucks can do off of one truck.

Where do you keep that, um, riding pressure washer? Do you keep that in a box truck or a trailer?

That has its own trailer by itself, enclosed trailer. It's eight by eight by 10 or eight. Yeah, I think it's eight by 10. Um, but it goes in, it goes in the trailer by itself and I will. The truck that I drive right now pulls it around here soon. I won't be in a truck at all. I'll, uh, or not on this side. I'll be more of just running around doing sales and stuff like that and filling in on this side. Um, but yeah, the zero turn helps out a lot with a lot of different things because at the end of the day, like I said, it's more about, uh, less labor, bigger profits. I feel like the more that you can pay your guys and the more initiatives that you can give your guys, the better they are to, to want to stay around and to want to grow and to believe into your vision. Yeah. Uh, you pay the guys that, you know, bare minimum, because you need to have a shit ton of them. Then I feel like at that point you're running a McDonald's, a Chick-fil-A, Burger King, anything like that. Sure. And then at that point, a lot of those guys get burnt out because they can't grow anymore. And I'm not saying that you can't find those employees and you can't run a business like that because if you, if you look, there's a lot of companies that are like that, but I just want to take things in a different, different, uh, different way.

Yeah, definitely.

So that's why I like setting up the trucks the way that I do with more volume. Then, you know, everybody else has those eight gallons is just a soft wash or something like that. I'm more of like, how much volume can we actually have on a truck?

Yeah.

You go into a parking garage, man, 109,000 square feet. We just set up for the very first time with both trucks. And honestly, we were faster than the company that we were there to clean for. So they still weren't like 100% ready for us. And I told them when I came there, I said, man, we'd have this done in a day. He's like 109,000 square feet done in a day. There's no way. And I was like, all right. So we got there and we had to wait four hours for them to move some shit around. And then we started. And then, uh, We only had nine hours of actual ride time and everything in cleaning and had that whole parking garage cleaned, but we had to wait several times for them to move around. That's awesome. That's awesome. Um, back to you. Um, how do you manage your mindset and stuff like that?

Well, I mean, I, I try to definitely. pace myself throughout the week and making sure that I'm scheduling jobs accordingly. Um, I mean, I, the, one of the things I actually picked up recently is pickleball. So I've been playing a lot of pickleball. Yeah.

Why are you playing? No, I have a buddy out West or whatever that fucking plays pickleball. And he posted a picture the other day about something and I was like, that's not pickleball.

It's a little rec center right in front of my community. It's literally a three minute drive from my house. So I joined it. Great. It's a, it's a hell of a workout too.

You enjoy it?

Yeah. Yeah, I do. It's, it's a good, it's a good place.

What, what is it? Is it like tennis or something?

It's like, it's like ping pong, but you're on, you're playing on the table. That's the best I can describe it. So it's, it's not, I don't mean I've never played tennis, but I've played ping pong and it's kind of like ping pong, but you're just, you're on the table instead of outside the table.

Okay. Nice. Yeah. Um, what's been the best part so far of this whole thing with the pressure washing?

the growth, definitely the growth. We'd never thought we'd be where we are now when we first started. We've set ourselves some goals this year and we've crushed every goal. We crushed our yearly goal in July. We had to set new goals because we were just We were just way beyond what we even thought we were going to be at. And a lot of had to do with the branding. As soon as we rebranded, we just soared. That's probably been the best part.

Another good thing about being down in Florida is if you actually answer your fucking calls and you show up on your say that you're going to show up, you'll probably land a lot of jobs in Florida.

Customers love the punctuality.

Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I hear people saying that that's the biggest key of, of them, you know, they'll call a service company. And it's not just pressure washing. It can be anything, any service company and the company will say, yeah, we'll be out there and they never show up. It's like, what the fuck?

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

But I bet your brand stands out really well down that way. Like what is the, what's the, what's the longterm, uh, vision of still loans? Like, are you going to, you're obviously going to trademark it and then, uh, What are you, I mean, my long-term franchise or anything like that?

I don't think, I don't think we're going to go the franchise route. I mean, there's always, there's always opportunities for everything. I'm willing to. I'm willing to hear anybody out for franchising, but my long-term goal would be to expand into this area and, you know, just be the provider of the Northeast Florida area. Right now I have one truck. So I'm planning a second truck hopefully by mid next year. That's kind of a goal of mine is to get a second truck. Um, but yeah, that's my, my goal is to expand and just continue to grow. And I even thought about, uh, you know, look, I'm looking at some window cleaning companies and I might. You know, eventually look at buying out a company, a window cleaning company, because we do some window cleaning, but it doesn't, it's not worth my time to do a commercial window cleaning right now and create an account when they want to, you know, it's like five bucks a window. And I'm not gonna create a route for two commercial accounts at 40 bucks a month. It's not worth my time. So I'm looking at some window cleaning companies and maybe two years down the line, I might offer to buy that company and create a window cleaning division where we can have the water fed poles, we can have the interior cleaners Cause I did one interior cleaning window cleaning and that was the last one. I was like, I'm not doing an interior cleaning, you know, just carrying a ladder around people's personal property and moving couches and blinds that don't work and they're broken. And I was like, this ain't for me, you know, I'll stick to the outside. So there's people that will deal with that and that's fine, but I'll, I'll buy that. I'd rather, I'd rather not do that on my own.

Right? No, I completely understand that. 100%. I'd much rather do commercial windows inside and out than residential.

Definitely. Residential is tough to do inside. I did it once and I haven't done it since.

Yeah, I'm not going in your house.

I had to put little booties on my boots, you know, little covers, a little step ladder. They had couches all in front of the windows and even pulling up the blinds and it's going up all crooked because the strings are broken. And I was like, yeah, I ain't doing this again.

Yeah, no, not at all. What are you excited for for the rest of 2024?

Well, I mean, we're closing out pretty quick. I thought we were going to be slowing down this month, but we're still I mean, we're still pumping. So I'm my compared to last year, I have, you know, I kept all my numbers from last year. So January and February was our slowest months. So we're kind of going to a little bit of a slower season. We don't do Christmas lights or anything like that. I don't have any plans on doing Christmas lights. I don't think that's in our future. I saw that you were doing that. That's, that's awesome. But I don't think we're going to do any Christmas lights. Uh, I, I looked at some commercial stuff like dumpster clean, you know, dumpster pad cleaning. And I just don't think I want to get into that either. You know, like I don't really want to clean dumpster pads. I don't know. I mean, I, I don't even like putting Christmas lights on my own house, you know, so I don't want to get into the holidays.

I don't even celebrate holidays.

So do you put, do you put the customers lights up or do you have your own lights?

Uh, we buy them and then we custom fit them to the house. So every house is custom fit. Okay. We just asked them what colors they want. That's the only thing that they pretty much get an option on, on that aspect, or then we upsell on bushes and trees and stuff like that. But it's a great, great business to, to get into and to, uh, to run, especially if you're already in the pressure washing and a lot of pressure washing companies slow down. So what I did so that I could run my guys for. Both businesses is I just added it on as a DBA. And by running it as a, yeah, by running it as a DBA said again, you had lights gone wild. Yeah. So my original business is advanced tech industries. That's what holds the LLC and then wet and wild as a DBA up under that. And then you have lights gone wild as a DBA up under that. So I have two DBAs. Um, And by doing that, they all run off the same EIN. So I'm able to pay. My employees. From both businesses, because a lot of times you're going to have some guys that work for the pressure washing that want to do the Christmas lights, then you're going to have some people that just want to do the Christmas lights alone, or some people that just want to do the pressure washing. Because they just, that's all they want to do. And they're perfectly fine with that. But those driven people that want to do both, you want to be able to have them to be able to do both and not get taxed twice. Yeah. And if I would have ran it completely separately, 100% separately, then they would have got taxed twice. And that would eventually, they would come back to me and say, man, fuck this. I'm not doing this.

Hmm.

So the only thing that's separate is going to be the bank account. So that way I can actually keep numbers and things like that. And then I'm going to open up another CRM just for the Christmas light side. What are you using for CRM now?

Say that again? What are you using for CRM now?

Housecall Pro.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I've, I've heard of that one. Uh, I use market right now. It's pretty similar, but I heard the house house call part was good as well.

So I also have go high level, go high level is basically our database with our, uh, lead connector that has our phone number and stuff like that. So all the information comes into go high level. And then that's what our admin has control over. And all the information that comes into the lead connector on there that, you know, their name pops up, their email pops up and all that stuff, or say that we asked for that information and then they just text it. As soon as they texted it automatically adds into go high level. Well, then go high level is linked with house call pro. So then it automatically links all their information over to that. So for right now, she's been hitting me up and just saying, Hey, This customer's first, last name, their phone number, their email address, job scope. I turn around, look it up. I give her a number. She messages that person back. She tells them that number, then they turn around and say, yes. And once they say yes, then it's automatically in house call pro. So the, all the thing I've got to do when I get home is just turn around and type in that person's name. Their address, all that shit pops up. The only thing I've got to do is just fill out the job scope, but I already have the job scope written down. So then it's easy for me to put it in. And then I just add in Richard's name in there to the job for him to go do, and then press save. It automatically sends out to his phone, letting him know that he has that job to do.

Great. And that's, that's pretty similar to what we have to. Yeah.

A lot of guys that use Mark Marquette or whatever those that you use. And then a lot of people use jobber. Yeah. I seen job. They're all similar and might have slight little differences to them.

Yeah.

Cool. Um, does that have GPS and stuff on it? Yeah, it does. Okay. Do you have the GPS?

Um, it's built into the phone. So, you know, I like, I can see where my associates are based on their phones because they have all their own logins. So I could, I could see where they're at.

So ours is basically like a little thing that plugs into the, up under the dash vehicle. So when I'm driving down the road, say I'm here at the house and I log on the computer, I can look at that vehicle and see it going down the highway.

That's good.

Yeah. It's funny. Uh, but anyhow, how can people find you, uh, on social media and stuff like that?

So I do run a YouTube channel. We've been, uh, you know, putting some YouTube content out, uh, under Stallone's pro wash. Through our Facebook, you know, we're under StallonesProWash under Facebook. We have a TikTok, StallonesProWash under TikTok. So we do, you know, a couple of different ways on there. And then, you know, you can Google search us under StallonesProWash and find us through there. We have great reviews and our website is StallonesProWash.com.

Nice. That's what's up. I like how it's all simultaneous. Yeah, it's all the same. Yeah, that's good. That's what branding is guys. Definitely. Uh, anyhow, I guess we're going to end that here and, uh, I appreciate you coming on and letting us know all this information about, you know, what you got going on.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. We've been watching you for a while, so it was good to get on and talk to you. Good luck with the podcast. I hope that I hope you do good on the podcast because it's, it's definitely something that people want to see and we want to hear more from you.

I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much. And guys, thank y'all for tuning in. We'll be on for another episode. Y'all have a good one. Peace.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. And remember, pressure doesn't break you, it makes you. Until next time, friends.