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Comment by henrygabby | Hacker News Reader

Unsexy tech business making roughly $6-7k/mo. I partnered with a local janitorial company that targets industrial clients with recurring nightly cleaning needs and I make roughly 7% of gross revenue as a recurring weekly payment as long as the client stays on w/o much work. I help do some client support, SEO, and pay for things like Apollo.AI to reach out to customers but other than that it is pretty hands off. I feel very fortunate.

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But what does the business actually do?

Sounds like brings leads to the janitorial company

But also saves the janitorial company from having to hire people to do customer management/support.

Correct

Yes, it is a leads driven business. I have focused on improving SEO in three of their core markets. Any new customer that signs up as a result of my marketing efforts, as long as their base margin is met, I get paid for the lifetime of that account.

I love everything about what you're doing here. There's a lot of opportunity in a lot of different niches and it's all just being slept on.

Did you already have a relationship with this company somehow or did you have to go and sell them?

I was introduced to them via a friend. I know the market well enough to recognize that there was potential to find clients and take a "scrape" off the new business. I know the qualms customers have with their existing service providers so whenever there are any concerns I curate very specific messages during the sales process to reel them in. Once they are signed up, getting it right 100% of the time is impossible, so I also step in on the "support" side and help solve issues, provide proposed solutions to challenges, etc. I do agree with you. Many other types of "sticky" and "unsexy" businesses out-there that are very easy to rank highly in SEO locally in dense urban environments.

> Once they are signed up, getting it right 100% of the time is impossible, so I also step in on the "support" side and help solve issues, provide proposed solutions to challenges, etc.

Maybe I'm reaching here, but as a guess, are you able to offer your partner's services out the cut you take to smooth over issues? I'm just thinking that you have fantastic incentives to do stuff like that (prioritize long-term money) that a support person working as an employee of the company directly would not have real incentives to offer...

I think I am following your question but can you clarify if what you mean is if: I take a portion of the proceeds to send customers gifts, take them out to dinners, etc to ensure the relationship remains strong? If so, then not really. Usually these clients just want smooth problem free services. I am working with him on holiday gifting ideas but that's really the extent of it. I also incur some expenses such as marketing costs, software, etc but it is pretty nominal. In summary, clients just want the teams to show up, do a good job, not break anything, listen to special requests, execute those special requests, and rinse wash repeat.

No, I meant if you need to discount or give them service gratis to smooth over an unhappy customer.

In a former life I was a support drone. Days were full of us taking calls from abusive a-holes who just wanted to get over on someone and also people who had legitimate grievances and deserved relief. We typically weren't empowered to do anything about either of them.

Ah, no, never had to do that. There are cases sometimes when the janitorial staff breaks say a light fixture. What we've found is that immediate and direct communication about what happened, how it happened, what will be done to prevent it from happening again, and how we're going to fix is usually is well received and the partner compensates/credits them for the damage. Of course the invoice amount is smaller for the "repair" so therefore my scrape is less. I've tried to explain to my partner that there is a very select type of client he wants and he for the most part has received it well. The larger industrial type facilities are better than the smaller in my experience.

Very interesting. I thought about a lot of projects over the same lines, providing similar services to various professions like the barbers, lawn mowers, painters etc. As I am not physically in the US, marketing and support has to be done virtually which seems bit of a blocker at this point.

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