Our Story

Our Story
Winn Outdoor Washing

Our story begins with me, Kolbe Winn, a student at community college, deciding to quit my job to pursue something fulfilling. I had set my mind to starting a soft washing company in Boise and started knocking on doors trying to power wash people’s roofs. After a few days of temporary defeat, someone asked if I could power wash their gutters out. I jumped on the task. This led to me changing my focus to gutter cleaning.

After my first gutter job, my friend Andre sold one of the neighbors our second gutter cleaning account. This client was again pivotal in our entire structure, he gave us insight into how to provide the best service for a nominal rate. He taught us to work smarter and harder so we could not only keep clients but become the reference to those clients’ entire families. We used this newfound knowledge on another neighbor that Andre had sold. With my new knowledge and equipment, I did an extremely thorough job on our third client’s house and they loved us. They proceeded to ask if we knew how to wash windows. While I did not at the time, I was determined to learn how.

person washing windows

This is where my window journey began. That morning I drove to the local hardware store to purchase a scrubber, squeegee, and a bottle of window washing solution. I started on the job and started cleaning all the top panes as I assumed the screens blocked dirt from getting on the bottom ones. Halfway through the job my client approached me with a screen key, I accepted it and realized my mistake. This gentleman was giving me guidance that would lead to my future success. While I may have had an extreme lack of knowledge, I made up for it with my work ethic. Unfortunately, I would soon come to realize that I needed a lot more than a work ethic to be successful with window cleaning.

While I was working on our third client’s windows Andre was busy selling both gutter and window cleaning jobs. I cleaned a few more gutters and decided if I wanted to get serious about window cleaning I would need the right equipment. I took all my earnings to this point and ordered our first de-ionized water-fed pole system. While I figured it would be easy to use the system and would make up for my lack of knowledge, I was thoroughly incorrect. When it arrived and I went to test it out, I was unable to work it at all. I realized that this was not a “plug and play” type of system and I needed someone with industry knowledge to teach me how to properly work the equipment. This is when Ben enters the story.

Solar Panel Cleaning

Ben is a family friend and world traveler that had been cleaning windows for two years up to this point, and lucky for me he needed work in between his adventures. I called him up and invited him to join me the next day to clean our biggest account yet, and lucky for me he was all over the idea. Ben was just the right amount of industry knowledge that we needed to inject into our culture. Rather than just muscling through jobs, we now had the knowledge of what our client’s windows needed to keep them healthy. This allowed us to grow beyond belief.

During our first summer, we cleaned over 200 clients in less than 6 months. This was unbelievable and it couldn’t have been accomplished without the help of everyone that contributed to our start. While this definitely includes our team of fantastic salesmen and window cleaners, it also includes our family of clients and their dogs that put nose prints all over their windows. We are especially grateful for those first few clients that put faith in us and all the clients that provided us with constructive criticism, which allowed us to grow our knowledge in and out of our industry.

While this story may be about the individuals that contributed to WOW’s beginnings, the true people that deserve recognition are the clients that gave us an opportunity.
Thank you.