How Casa Washa Grew a Power Washing Side Hustle From $175K and Took a $50K Debt Deal

Alright, you guys have seen power washing in your neighborhood and never wondered, hey, do these guys make money? That's exactly what we're gonna learn about today here at Casa Washa in Austin, Texas.

It's window cleaning, exterior cleaning, interior cleaning, any type of cleaning.

And are you guys now full time on the business?

I Part have another business. I manage money for a living. I'm a financial planner, money manager.

What do you think you'll do in 2026?

We could do 400 or a 500,000 this year.

The question is, do they have good ideas on how to double their revenue?

200,000 to open up in a new city that gets us truck, marketing.

If they do, I'll cut a check on the spot. So I'd be very nervous about me coming in and taking such a massive chunk and then having you guys go focus on something else. If I've got a chance to spend an hour getting more clients for my washing company or an hour to go take a call to potentially add a 100,000,000 of AUM to my fund. I'm always gonna go do a 100,000,000 AUM to my fund.

Yeah. Yep.

I'm Nathan. Ali, really good to meet you. Nathan.

Jet. Nice

to Really meet you, good to meet you. So this is your guys' truck, What's the business?

It's window cleaning, exterior cleaning, interior cleaning, any type of cleaning. So Ali and I and a buddy of ours, Eric decided we wanted to do this. And we've been doing it now for about two and a half years.

Okay. Launch in 2024 timeframe?

We had some friends. It was after a big freeze here in Austin and trees were down everywhere. And we were seeing that people were really cleaning up on just having a trailer and a chainsaw. And we were like, okay. Well, what what could we do that could be simple, like, just play money? Mhmm. We thought cleaning a few driveways with the pressure washer that we already owned. We did a lot of free jobs at first for

friends, for family, and just trying to, like, build our brand, kind of get exposure, and get some five star reviews. Uh-huh. Once we did that, we figured out what the pricing was gonna be, and it grew from there. Anybody can pull out their pressure washer and clean a window, but the service element that we can provide, it really elevates our services and makes us more of like a white glove luxury service to provide.

How much money did you guys make on your first job?

$100.

A $100. Do you remember what total revenue was in 2024?

Yeah, we did 175,000 in 2024.

Did that surprise you guys or it's what you expected?

No, we just wanted to clean some driveways and have some extra money and pay for my golf habit and travel and food.

And are you guys now full time on the business? No. Part time side business.

It's always It's

been part part time.

Nights and evenings for us. Yeah, it always has been.

So why have you not said, okay, let's go all in on this thing?

I have another business. I manage money for a living. I'm financial planner, money manager, so it's a side for us, but we've brought on a new partner, Eric, who you'll meet. And Eric is full time on this right now.

Oh, I see.

So that's why I've been able to grow a little bit more and do jobs during the day is to bring in more revenue. 2024 was $175,000

What was $2,300 last year, little bit over that. Okay. And what do think you'll do in 2026?

We should do $400 or 500,000 this year.

It's about 40 jobs a month.

Okay. Right now, what the guys are doing is we had a house wash, driveway cleaning, and window cleaning today. They've done most of the house wash. So right now they're putting some soap and a little bit of sodium hypochlorite, which is a pool cleaner. Same thing that's in your pool, hot tub, kills algae. And so they're spraying that across the driveway now. We'll let that sit. That'll kill all the algae. A driveway like this

one, what would you charge on average to do this?

A standard driveway is $2.50 and it includes the front walkway to the front door as well.

Okay.

And if you have a public sidewalk sharing with your neighbors, it includes that. We price the house wash and soft wash by square footage of the home. So for a home like this, I think this, this including the mother-in-law suite in the back is about 2,600 square feet. It's between $40.45 a square foot. Yep. If you don't need any solution, say for like a brick house that doesn't have a lot of organic growth on it, we can go closer to like a 35 to 40.

Most of the work that we do now is with realtors and property managers, which has allowed us to do a lot of homes right before they go to listing. So a lot of pre listing cleanings for photos and things like that. So we're generally doing big package deals with the full house wash, sometimes roof cleaning, solar panel cleaning, gutter cleaning.

All in for a job like the one we're gonna sort of tour today, what would this cost all in?

So this one's $1,200. It's driveway cleaning, window cleaning, then exterior soft wash. And we also threw in some cleaning of pavers complimentary.

And that matches to what you said earlier, is you're doing about $40,000 a month. Each job is about 1,000 on average. That's how you get to the math. Right. Very cool. Let's talk about the cost of starting a business like this. This truck doesn't look... I mean, maybe it's just a regular truck and then you like really outfit it, but what did this cost you to get going?

This truck itself is like a $30,000 truck, but this skid that we put in is custom and that costs about $30,000 too. Wow. We didn't start this way. So we started out making sales and when we would sell a job, we would go buy the equipment we need or rent it to complete the job. For a while we were rolling around pressure washers and soft wash behind us and pulling out of the back of a trunk.

Oh geez.

We always meet competitors, talk to people, share ideas. I met one guy and he became kind of a mentor for a while. One day he called me. So he said, I'm getting out of pressure washing. I'm going to sell my trailer, my truck, my CRM, all my clients and my website. And I said, we're too, it's too early for us. We're not going to do it. And he said, no, no, no, hear me out before you

say no. It's like dirt cheap. And we bought it. We made all that money back in like two jobs. Then he gave us his website, which we still use today. We've just changed the logos around, but it was Grizzly Powerwashing, but we bought Grizzly. We were already doing Casa Washa. Our website wasn't as good. So we just took his website, put our logos on it, kept Grizzly running for a while and his phone calls came in there. We were running kind of two businesses.

I see.

This is Eric Pittman. He joined us in October of last year. He had another business he was running. While he was starting that business out, he said, Hey, why don't I come with join you guys? And we'll just kind of share ideas, that kind of stuff. And eventually we brought him on full time and he owns half the business now and is running operations full time.

Hey, that's a big deal. That's not some paperwork. That's like 50% of your baby. How does that negotiation go down?

The fiftyfifty to fortyforty, that was pretty much just always set in stone. There were other clauses and things that we wanted to work through on how we were going to grow the business, who has what responsibilities, etcetera, things that should take time. That's where we took the time.

Okay. And why don't you introduce your fourth partner over here?

Yeah. So this is my amigo, Freddie right here. What's up, Freddie? He has been with the business since its inception. When I was getting on my feet, he was helping me learn the ropes, even though it was kind of partner anyway. But yeah, he's been great, very reliable and my amigo.

Freddie, do they pay well? Yes? Yeah. Good. What is the total team? Is it just the four of you? What's the total team size today?

Yeah. The the exterior cleaning crew is generally these two guys and Connor will join Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Mhmm. And we're about to double that up since we get another truck here in the next month or two. Interior cleaning is Ezekiel and his crew. And then if we need to get out there and help out, if we're busy, we'll we'll get out there and get our hands dirty. Today, we're cleaning a house, for Diane Humphries, a realtor here in Austin with Moreland Properties. And she was nice enough to let us film while we're on-site. This this beautiful house.

That's not a quiet thing. Did neighbors ever complain? You just have to deal with it as you go along?

No, I mean, it's honestly, it's a good opener, you know, because they may come out or we may knock on their doors and say like, Hey, you probably saw us or heard us in the neighborhood. By the way, this is my name's Eric. This is what we do. And that just really opens up avenues for business.

Is that how most of your

growth is coming from? Typically our growth is coming from realtors. That's one of our sales funnels. And then out on jobs too, we'll knock on doors, we'll put out door signs.

What are the other growth plans? How do we go from 500,000 a year of sales up to 1,000,000 a year of sales?

We need to add trucks. So this summer we're planning on buying another truck and we're adding more people to the team. Right now we really have one team for exterior cleaning and they use the truck you saw today. So if we have a huge job, we usually bring on maybe one of our competitors and things to help us out, but we want to do more on our own. And so we're going to be adding a truck this year and to do that and driving up sales, we've just put a billboard for the next thirteen months out by the lake at one of the busiest intersections at 620 And 20 Two-twenty 2.

Take me into the met ad strategy, the paid ad strategy.

So paid ads, we're going to go very localized. Instead of hitting up all of Austin, which we service all of Central Texas, where that billboard is, we're going to go pick up addresses for about 20 residences of the ideal residences and properties that we want to work on and put that in our system for meta ads and say target a mile radius around each one of these 20 properties. These paid ads is brand new for us.

Interesting. Yeah. We do a lot of stuff with realtors. We'll go out to realtors brokerages and like on a Friday we'll buy the whole team lunch and talk about what we do. If the realtors use us, we'll send them masseuse to their office, a chair masseuse, for about two hours to say thank you, and people can get fifteen minute massages and they'll never forget us. That's awesome. We come in, give them a Chick fil A card. Everybody loves Chick fil A. Either they can buy lunch or buy their kid some food on the way home.

So you're experimenting with billboards. What else are you experimenting with?

Property managers, gyms, restaurants have requirements for how clean they have to be. So we'll just say, Hey, you're already using these services. We're going to give you better service. We're from Austin. We care about our reputation. We're chosen by the top realtors and property managers around. There's more of where this came from.

Told us at the beginning that each truck costs 30,000 for the truck, 30,000 for the skid. Is that sort of the ask? Are you looking for $60,000 for a new truck?

We've always just thought we'll buy something new when we have enough money for it. And the next idea, next step is to get a new truck. But we do want to be in other cities. And so that's the long term goal is to have several trucks, maybe three or four in each city that's growing and going after cities that are growing like Austin, where it's just growing too fast to fail.

But who's going be you in those cities going in physically shaking hands, smiling, building personal relationships, sending in the masseuse, sending in the Chick fil A. How do you get the demand in all those other regions?

So the way we're scaling this is I'm teaching Eric everything that I know on the marketing side and the operational side, and we're transitioning things to him week by week. And we do two meetings a week as a leadership group. As I'm handing off those things to him, he's starting to hand off some of those things to the people he's hiring to become lead techs and run the operations. And then he and I will go to these other cities and go to these other hubs to set up shop. I'll be there for a little bit of time. He'll stay a little bit longer and set up the same thing that we've set up here in each one

of those I guess what is the ask? Is it $60,000 for a new truck to open in Houston? Is it to open up here because there's so much demand?

200,000 to open up in a new city that gets us truck, marketing, running contractor salaries while we get these or contractors pays while we get these things up and running. We'd have to talk to Eric, but coming in as a partner and owning a big chunk of the business, I don't know what percent would make sense to you, but I think 200, somewhere around 30 to 40% of the business. I could give up some of my shares because her and I are, we're 51% now, but we're getting married and we have other Thank

you. We, we invaded that part of the story. I was like, how do I ask this? Okay. So what came first? The proposal or the business?

The relationship came first. Yeah, we were about a year and a half into our relationship. And we, like I said, there was that freeze and we were like, what could we be doing to just get a little bit more pocket money? And so we started this up and we've been doing this for the majority of our relationship.

Super cool. And you opened with selling a major chunk of the business. Are you two wanting get out of the business?

We don't necessarily want to get out. We don't know yet. At one day, mean you start a business to make money and then maybe exit at some point and maybe hopefully keep a piece of it and have some revenue coming in. But we both have other businesses and my other business I'm still buying from my partner. And it's revenue is at 3,000,000 a year and we're trying to grow that.

Your money management business?

My money management business. We manage 300,000,000 for about 200 families and some businesses as well. A year ago we said, look, we're spending too much time on this. You got to pick one for now. Fill one cup up. Let's just focus on your investment business and let's focus on growing this to sell it. Then Eric came around and said, Well, do you really want to sell it or what if someone else was doing all the jobs

and we could take that off your plate? Would you want to still do this? And we looked at each other and said, Yeah, we really didn't want to sell it right now. It's our bay that we've built. It's hard to give it away but we got to focus on this other business. I have employees there, I have clients I got to take care of so I just can't be spending this time here. Need my day to day focus there but I can do the marketing that... The marketing that we've been doing, I can do in the evenings and while I watch, you know, FIFA game.

What do the profits look like today?

This year is our first year that we're really going to drive a big profit. We've just reinvested everything into our business. Right now, we've made $70 EBITDA. We've invoiced over 200,000. We still have 50,000 in receivables to be paid to us.

So what does that normalize to on a monthly basis? You're getting about $10,000 of profits per month, something like that?

We're through about six months, yeah, about ten to 12 so far. Now, if we got paid that $50 tomorrow, that could turn that 12 to closer to 20.

Why not just use the profits to open in a new location or use the profits to pay yourself out larger dividends? Why do you need an external third party investor to come in to do that?

We don't, we don't need one. Yeah. We don't need one at all. I think it'd be, it'd be a great thing to work with someone. If this could be something we, we gain a friend and a partner and grow faster than we'd love do that. Cheap. I'll take you out

to a thousand dollar dinner. That's much cheaper than a $200,000 check. We can be friends all day long. I mean, the, look, the thing is with, I'm not convinced the business works without you two driving the top and middle part of the funnel yet. So I'd be very nervous about me coming in and taking such a massive chunk and then having you guys go focus on something else, which frankly is a much bigger business. The other business is making 3,000,000. We know where your time is going to go.

But once we add a truck to this business, this goes from a 500,000 a year to maybe we could get to $7.50 next year. We do another location that can change things too. Now we've created some partnerships and a lot of realtors are using us exclusively now, started middle of last year. As that grows and more realtors know about us, our business is gonna grow. We've had to turn away a lot of jobs. I envision being

part of the company and marketing for a long time. Tim, in the first twelve months, it was no question, it was a side hustle. Now it's a business we do on the side, but we have meetings and we run this like a real company all the time.

Being a Founder is so difficult, right? I mean, you've got to be all in there. People don't want to crush you. All your big competitors in Austin, they're dominating your SEO keywords. The daily struggle. They're bringing sushi instead of Chick fil A, right? Instead of massages, they're taking people out on yachts on Lake Austin. I mean, it's a hustle. It's a grind. And if I'm in your shoes, yes, you say you want to sort of be

in the business. But if I know that if I've got a chance to spend an hour getting more clients for my washing company or an hour to go take a call to potentially add a 100,000,000 of AUM to my fund, I'm always going to go do a 100,000,000 AUM to my fund.

Yeah. Yep. And I've created some systems there to allow my younger staff and younger advisors to do the same things that I've done. And now they're bringing in new clients too. So there's oversight and there's things I need to do and I need to be there and I want to be there but it's thirty hours a week and I can do other things.

Yeah. So $200,000 to own what I guess you're saying 30, 40% of the business. Again, I'm just not convinced I've seen the playbook where this is going to run without you guys. So is there a ask for maybe one truck instead of $200,000? Maybe it's one truck to double down and dominate Austin?

I do think there's some things here that once we tell you about some of that maybe you say, hey look I do see the growth in that and I want to be a part of that. We just signed a deal with a company called Roadie Pro which is a water fed pole company so that system you saw him using, those are $5,000 apiece to $10,000 apiece. We just signed a deal with them to not only get their equipment for 30% off but we have an affiliate link and we're gonna be bringing in commissions there. We also wrote a book that a lot of our competitors and friends in the industry use to start their cleaning business and use as an internal handbook. And that's on Amazon.

What's the book called?

It's called No Money Home Service.

It's a very popular playbook to have a dentist that went to school for dentistry, run a successful dental practice, write software for themselves, then write a book to say, look, because of the great software I built, I make more money in my dental practice. And then they sell the book, then they're selling their software and they're opening up multiple practices and the whole thing works together. But like, I don't see connective tissue between the Casa Washa business and the AUM business to that same degree. It actually helps you launch more competition. You're teaching people how to do what you did.

But as far as driving sales to Casa Washa, like bringing in jobs, it actually will. And here's why. Other pressure washers are starting to see that. Use it, promote us, and it's helping SEOs. Once he's transitioned and we're doing the things, the marketing, we're gonna ramp it up like crazy. And as soon as we have another truck, we can fill that truck, at least fill half the jobs probably tomorrow just by not saying no.

So why don't I just fund the truck? Why don't I make you a $40,000 offer? You pay me back as a percent of sales on the business.

We have access to capital if we wanted it. If we were going to, I think working with you and having a partnership long term and you having some skin in the game and a year or two from now, when we're in other cities, think it's something where you go, wow, look, this thing that I threw a couple dollars at is really growing and

it's No, I would get the relationship angle. It's just, this is a business again, founding a business is difficult. You've got to be in it. You've got to do the scalable stuff like programmatic SEO, meta ads, etcetera. But it is so much relationship based as well. People do business with people they trust, they love, they want to be around, they want be at a picnic with. I think, look, where I'm at right now is I can be a customer. I'm a big investor in apartment complexes. So I can be a customer of Casa Washa but I don't think I can be an investor today.

Let's continue talking about the debt deal because I think maybe down the line we may be able to convince you to do more once that works out.

Well so here's my question I would make you a debt deal but you're not going like the interest rate right? I'd give you $50,000 at a 15% interest rate, you pay it back over two years. You're gonna tell me rightly that you can probably go get bank debt for much cheaper. So the only reason you give me that premium return is if you believe I can add significant value to the business. Yeah. Which I'm not going to be in this business every day running. Can give some pointers.

If you did that at a decent interest rate and then brought us some of those apartments that you're investing in and we closed some deals that makes Do a huge

you cover San Antonio? Yep. Yep.

I mean a single apartment complex is 30 to $50,000. We could pay you back pretty quickly if that was the case.

Okay. I'll make you an offer. I'll offer you $50,000 collateralized by your assets, the trucks, right? The use of funds will be to get a new truck so that Ali doesn't have to keep saying no all the inbound that you're already driving. That should hopefully increase the business by what? 2x hopefully over time as you know Eric keeps expanding his role. And they pay it back over two years.

Can we pay it early?

If you wanna pay it early, we'll charge no prepayment penalties. Okay. But I'm gonna ask for big rent. Mean, because I have such a big opportunity cost on my capital, There's so many ways I can places I can put it. Yeah. So I'll ask for a 15% interest rate.

Can you do 10 and bring us apartment complex and then we'll pay you commissions on those two? 10 what? 10% on on on the debt and then bring us some of those apartment complexes that you are invested in and we'll pay you a 6% commission on all those sales.

So bringing in the apartment complex in San Antonio, I mean it's a 34 unit building, right? So I'm basically committing and I'm taking $50,000 out of profits over there, putting it in your business to go do that cleaning.

And I don't wanna be on the

hook for $50,000 over there when I don't absolutely need it. It's already fully leased. Cranking. It's doing really well. That's my concern there. I don't wanna commit to something I can't follow through on. Right. So the offer I'll make is $50,000 paid back over two years at a 15% interest rate. That enables me to put some, you know, you buy a little bit my attention that way. So of course we can brainstorm, we can do dinner, we have the relationship. Okay. But that's the return that I would need on my money to get involved here.

Okay. But you're willing to make a commitment that this is gonna be of interest to you or we can talk about some of those things that you're an expert in that we're not yet.

I'm happy to brainstorm through those things with you guys. Yes.

Okay. I'd like to do that. Yeah. Guys are. Pending, pending, pending Eric says that he's he's okay with it too. He is 49% owner. Let's do it. Okay. A year from now, he's going to go, I want to invest in equity and we'll go from there.

He really wants me to put all my money in the fund. He's going up for the AUM game. I see what's happening here. It says, I'm playing checkers, and you're playing three d chess over here.

I don't know about that. I just want to know what you know.

Yeah. All right. So we have a deal?

We got a deal.

Alright. Let's get to work. It was really good to meet you guys. Really good you. Congratulations. Thank you.

When's the wedding?

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