Your first thirty days

Week 1: legal spine and the rig

Days 1 to 5 are paperwork and marketplace, in that order.

Register the LLC ($50 to $500 depending on the state, most at the low end), get the EIN, open the business checking account, and buy the general liability policy the same week, before the machine. That order is deliberate: the entity and the policy are what make you a business; the machine is what makes you busy. While filings process, hunt the used 4 GPM machine daily, test it under pressure before money changes hands, and gather the hose, gun, surface cleaner, injector, and first chemical order. Total target: under $1,000 if you buy used, $500 to $2,500 new (Mike Vidan). Call the city clerk on two questions: business license or home-services registration, and door-to-door solicitation permit. Email the stormwater program one question: where wash water must go in your jurisdiction, and write the answer on a card that lives in the truck.

Practice on your own house or a friend's before anyone pays you. One full house wash and one driveway, following "The house wash, start to finish" and "Driveways and flatwork" step by step, with the camera out the whole time.

Week 2: the storefront and the first three

Set up the Google Business Profile completely: services, area, photos from your practice jobs, insurance noted. Claim the free website domain tier or a one-page site; the phone number and the quote button are the whole site. Print 500 door hangers and the two-window car magnets. Then book the first three jobs from your warm circle at the launch discount, trading explicitly for photos and reviews. Build the price card: skeleton prices, minimum charge ($150 to $219), the phone script from "Pricing and estimating" rehearsed out loud until it sounds like you talking.

Set up the money system on day one of revenue: the business account rules, the four buckets, the quote log. A spreadsheet is fine. Three tabs: quotes, jobs, monthly revenue.

Weeks 3 and 4: the street push

Now the volume work. Every completed job seeds four door hangers and two door knocks on the same block. The grand-opening post runs on your personal page with the 20 percent offer and a real deadline. Knock the streets you washed with the good-neighbor script from "Your first ten customers." Post every before-and-after to the profile and the page, and ask every single customer for the review by text link the same day. The goal for day 30 is not a revenue number; it is a pipeline number: ten completed jobs, five to eight reviews, a quote log with at least fifteen entries, and at least one full week booked ahead.

The season checkpoint

Before day 30 ends, answer one question in writing: when does your season open and close? Use the three seasonal shapes from "Money systems and the off-season," freeze, shoulder, or year-round, and set two calendar entries from the answer: the marketing ramp two to three weeks before your peak opens, and the winter-reserve target (three months of fixed costs) with a completion date in October. If you are launching mid-peak in a freeze market, run the thirty-day plan exactly as written. If you are launching in September in a freeze market, shrink the customer push and pour the time into commercial conversations and holiday-lighting groundwork, because your first real season opens in spring. The plan flexes around the season; the season never flexes around the plan.

When day 30 closes, you will have a business with a legal spine, a rig, a review base, a pricing system, and a calendar. What to do with year two comes later in the course.