Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Blechta
Mike, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I spent my 20’s living in Uptown Minneapolis playing in bands, delivering pizzas and cleaning windows in the summer while deliveries were slow. In 2015 I decided to go full-time window cleaning with the intention of learning all angles of the trade in order to start my own business. By 2017 after being an independent subcontractor for close to a year, I registered Blechta Exterior Cleaning as an LLC and went truly solo. In July of 2018, while cleaning 60s era (incredibly degraded) tint film off of a flimsy insert pane, the pane broke in half and severed an extensor tendon on the top of my right hand requiring stitches and rendering my hand useless for the remainder of the season. In that time (while subbing my work out to another cleaner) I took to the internet and learned about something called Soft Washing. By the time I had healed, I knew the right solutions and equipment to introduce the service to our repertoire. Fast forward 7 years with a few more employees and trucks added, soft washing and pressure washing now makes up for over half of our business and we are one of the few companies in the area that have perfected the technique. Soft washing is what we use for our house washing and roof cleaning services since the major culprit for staining or soiling is blue-green algae and soft washing kills algae at it’s source. Our signature product is what we call the Curb Appeal Package which is a full house wash followed by an exterior window cleaning – essentially it’s a car wash for your house. Our other top services are underground/covered parking cleanouts for multi-family housing units and commercial-grade holiday lighting later in the season. Over the past 8 years I learned how to lead a team to success, build strong relationships and also to be a dad and support a household. I also love networking within my industry and lending my expertise to other up and coming business owners in my area. The way I see it, there is no such thing as competition, only colleagues that can support one another and thrive together rather than competing on price and driving each other to the bottom. I love contributing to the pressure washing industry in any way and leading others to success both in my company and beyond.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Absolutely not. You don’t get to where you want to be without failing numerous times first and I’m no exception. I was introduced to failure early on in business when I injured myself little more than a year after I started, taking me out of the field as a solo owner/operator. After that I started to hire and soared the business to new heights but it was not easy. Covid wound up helping us with the amount of business we were getting but my main employee kept getting exposed to someone with covid and would have to quarantine, leaving me doing twice the work. At the same time, the phone kept ringing and tasks were piling up. Luckily I was able to enlist my wife into helping with the phones after she lost her job being as a server due to covid. We were doing well but the overhead was increasing as well which made winters harder on us considering we were both in our offseason instead of just one of us. At one point we hired a bookkeeper we met at an industry convention out of state only to find out during tax season that she had totally botched everything. Our tax preparer also wasn’t having us pay in quarterly so we got stuck with a huge tax bill at the same time. The following year we had to hire a new bookkeeper and pay her extra to fix our books and also file our taxes so we could pay quarterly (on top of paying what we owed for previous years taxes periodically so we were essentially paying double tax all year). Somehow we recovered from that and learned a few more hard lessons along the way but for the time being it’s been smooth sailing.
We’ve been impressed with Blechta Exterior Cleaning Services LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Well it seems like I may have answered much of this in one of the previous questions but we are a mobile pressure washing, soft washing, window cleaning and holiday lighting company that services the metro and much of the greater metro and some of western Wisconsin. We specialize in our soft washing services and are one of the few exterior cleaning companies that offer full roof treatments on asphalt and barrel tile roofs. We can essentially make any asphalt or barrel tile roof look nearly brand new depending on what shape the shingles are in. We get hired a lot by people listing their homes, realtors and even insurance agents who require roof cleaning before assessing roofs for storm damage. Since I started the business doing mainly just windows, I have have always been moved and captivated by the notion of taking something that’s sordid and grimy and transforming it into a clean, clear and satisfying result. Every year we are met with new challenges that I take pride in overcoming and what we gain in new knowledge about tackling different stains on different surfaces is invaluable. Also since we have many affluent clients who we have been servicing for a long period of time, my crews are always strongly vetted and trained to only provide top notch service with the utmost quality in both cleaning and holiday lighting. Our business model is very much a quality over quantity and our results make that very much evident.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
Well I can sum up our city with my experience as a know-it-all twenty-something who wanted nothing more than to do away with the twin cities after growing up in the west suburbs. I spent time in the UK when I was 20 and moved to Montana when I was 22 and at that point my family considered me to be the lone wolf who would travel and probably settle somewhere far away to live some exotic life. After 2 years in Montana I realized I needed the city life and decided to give into my parents pleas for me to come back home. After moving to uptown and living there for about 6 years I decided the cities had everything I needed and wanted. Sometimes I still feel like a tourist in my own city – going to Saints games, Twins or Vikings games, checking out new amazing restaurants or old legendary ones I hadn’t yet been to, discovering new parks or patios to enjoy in the summer. Minneapolis/St Paul is the place to be and that’s always been the truth. Plus there is this indescribable joint feeling of happiness when we get our first bout of sunny warm weather in the Spring that is hard to pinpoint but we all connect in that moment. Pretty phenomenal
Pricing:
- Our services start at $300 and a typical 2-3k sq ft home can average around 6oo-1200 depending on what’s being done.
- We offer 50% off exterior window cleaning (up to $150) when added to a house wash
- Our holiday lighting packages start at $800 and can average around $1200-1500 for a 2-3k sq ft home.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://blechtaexteriorcleaning.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blechta_exterior_cleaning/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blechtacleaning
