How to start a pressure washing business

The paperwork is genuinely light in most states, and it is worth doing properly on day one rather than retrofitting it after your first commercial enquiry asks for a W-9 and a certificate of insurance.

• Entity. An LLC is the common choice for the liability separation. Filing fees and annual reports vary widely by state; check your own Secretary of State.
• EIN. Free from the IRS, takes minutes, and you need it for a business bank account.
• Local licence. Many cities require a general business licence for trades operating within the limits. Ask the city, not the internet.
• Sales tax. Whether exterior cleaning is taxable is a state question and sometimes a city one. Register if it is; do not guess a rate from a template.
• Contractor registration. A few states treat exterior cleaning as contracting. Worth one phone call before you advertise.

The honest minimum to do residential work properly, in rough order of importance:

Buy the flow, not the pressure. A machine that cannot drive a surface cleaner leaves you doing driveways with a wand, and that is not a business.

General liability is the baseline and it is what every commercial client will ask to see. Consider care, custody and control cover as well: standard liability often excludes damage to the very property you are working on, which is exactly the risk in this trade — the etched deck, the water inside the wall, the shingles you took granules off.

Get the certificate before you advertise, not after somebody asks. It is also worth reading what the policy says about height work, because a large share of exterior cleaning happens from a ladder.

Two separate questions, and new operators usually only think about the first.

Supply. Most residential jobs run off the customer’s spigot. A buffer tank makes you independent of a weak supply and lets you take jobs with no water at all — and it is a line item on those quotes, not a courtesy.

Discharge. EPA’s stormwater guidance is that untreated wash water carrying soaps, solvents, detergents, sediment or grease should not reach a storm drain, surface water or groundwater; municipal permit holders treat it as an illicit discharge, and the best-practice route is on-site treatment or the sanitary sewer. State and local rules differ and are what you will actually be held to. One call to your local water authority, made before your first commercial bid, is enough.

Equipment is the easy part. Ten paying customers is the part that decides whether this becomes a business, and it costs time rather than money at the start.

• Do three jobs at cost for photographs. Not free — at cost, with an invoice. You need before-and-afters more than you need the margin.
• Work one street at a time. A driveway being cleaned is the best advertisement in the trade. Knock either side while the machine is running.
• Google Business Profile before anything else. It is where local searches land, and it is free.
• Ask for the review on the day, standing on the clean driveway, phone in hand. A week later it never happens.
• Route density beats volume. Six jobs in one suburb pays better than ten spread across a county, because driving is unbilled.