What does it take to establish yourself as a roof cleaning expert in a constantly evolving industry? We sat down for a chat with Paul Hickmott to answer just that!
Q. Thanks for agreeing to sit down and talk to us. Can we start with your history? How long have you been working in exterior cleaning?
5 years. Before that, I had managed sales teams as a Sales & Marketing Director. Finally, before starting exterior cleaning, I ran a printing business of ten people with my business partner.
Q. And have you always offered roof cleaning services? If not, when and why did you get involved in providing that service?
In the beginning, I was learning the ropes with a good friend of mine. We did windows, driveways, and some roof scraping jobs only, generally from ladders. I noticed that the roof scraping jobs brought the most satisfaction – seeing a hard job completed and seeing the smiles on my customers’ faces. Many of them said, “I’ve got a new roof”! I cannot tell you how satisfying that sort of feedback is.
I like to push boundaries, so I started to investigate how we could improve the roof cleaning service we offered. This quickly led to me using low-pressure flat surface cleaners, steam cleaning, and template brush scraping.
Q. What are the challenges with adding a service like roof cleaning to your business?
Like I said, I like to push boundaries, and I didn’t want to stay with just one method of roof cleaning. Looking at the tiles, I realised that different methods of cleaning a roof would be more effective depending on the type of tile. So, I set out to try them all and gain a broader understanding of what I was happy to offer.
The roof cleaning industry was still suffering from a poor legacy reputation, whereby in the past, people had disregarded health and safety guidelines and just gone up onto a roof with a turbo nozzle and blasted the moss off without thinking about the implications of this approach in terms of health and safety and damage to the roof.
Q. Do you have any memorable roof cleaning jobs you want to share?
A company that made short-run engine parts for Aston Martin and Land Rover had a large roof area over the manufacturing plant, with lots of roof skylights that had darkened with black algae over the years. The new Ops Director wanted to improve the natural light his workers experienced whilst working. He brought me in to discuss.
We agreed on a methodology to clean the roof and increase natural light access into the building. Because my company is accredited to use harnesses at height, I put a proposal together using their existing harness system that saved them tens of thousands of pounds, as they did not need to hire expensive, large Spider Booms. When we completed the work, I was overwhelmed by the response from the people on the shop floor, one even said they felt like they were working in their back garden nowadays.
Q. You are passionate about roof cleaning. Why do you think that is?
I love the positive feedback the customer gives you when you have done a good job.
Statements like, “I can’t believe it, I’ve got a new roof!” make me happy. In effect, I am getting paid for making someone else smile. That can only be good, can’t it?
Q. If someone was considering either setting up a new business that included roof cleaning services or adding roof cleaning to their existing business, what would you say to them?
Go on a roof training course to understand exactly what tools you need and how to go about delivering the service, and you will have made contact with a team of people that you can turn to for advice in the learning year ahead of you. Besides that, you will have gained industry-recognised accreditation for roof cleaning. Your customers will buy into this when deciding who to use.
I would also encourage them to adopt a work statement one of my employees once told me: never say, “That’s good enough”. If you have this approach to your exterior cleaning business, your customers will sense it, and they will never let you go.
