We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ben Barlow a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ben, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.
My dad and mom taught me what it means to work hard, to serve others and to keep life simple. They helped me focus on what is most important in life.
I don’t grow up with parents that were extremely entrepreneurial. My dad was a teacher and my mom was a stay at home mom for the most part growing up.
One of the biggest things I learned from them is that people don’t generally care about your accomplishments, they care more about how you take an interest in other people’s lives. You don’t need to be “rich” to do that.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Ben. I am married to a beautiful wife and 2 boys. I love learning new things. I would say that my two biggest attributes are that I am curious and that I love to build relationships. I came across window cleaning from a buddy of mine that I taught ski lessons with. My brother in law and sister also had a smaller business they did on the side. For 3 years I did it solo while going through school. In 2020 I had a friend who was a partner for a year and he then took on a career opportunity. I continued the business for 1 year with employees on my own. At the end. Of 2021 I partnered up with my partner who is now the main owner today. Fast forward to today, we did a little over 4 million in 2024, we now also have over 100 employees and aim to do about 8 million this year. We are currently in Utah (Utah county, salt lake county, davis county), Arizona (phoeniz) and Colorado (denver). We primarily offer window clenaing and also offer other services including gutter cleaning and dryer vent cleaning. The biggest thing that sets us apart is having a solid structure that helps us make a greater impact. We have mainly systems and processes in place and we built in accountability with a lot of tracking. We also have built a culture to where guys stick with us for a long time (several years), rather than 3-6 months which is not uncommon for the industry. We are also always looking for ways to go the extra mile with our customers. I am most proud of where this business has gone to. It is cool to see many incredible people who are buying into the vision of the company. Many smart and talented people. It is exciting to see where things are going and foresee lots of great things to come.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I come from a family that is very proud of working hard and getting your hands dirty. I still love being involved, however, sometimes I am so involved with the operations I forget that I need to focus on the bigger picture. Scaling the business has forced me to step out of my normal operations mode brain and. Focus more on pulling out what I have learned so that others can perform at a high level without me needing to be there. Building out systems and processes are crucial to getting to the next step.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
We have never missed payroll, but this last month was likely the lowest our bank account ever will be and we actually didn’t get the funding we were initially going after. Turns out that has been a good thing in many ways, but we had to dip into our credit cards so that we could do payroll.
Because we have been tight at the moment we have checked in weekly to see where we are at with our CFO, we have also been refining our financials. One cool thing that happened is that we changed our business model to monthly payment plans and this has helped with cash flow, cancelation and retention.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Www.glidecleaners.com
