On this episode of the Huge Transformations Podcast, Sheila Smeltzer sits down with Gabe Salinas, founder of Window Ninjas, to talk about what it really takes to grow a home service business beyond the owner. Gabe started cleaning windows at 17, built a decades-long career in the industry, and eventually launched Window Ninjas, which has grown into 12 locations across the Southeast.

This conversation is especially valuable for business owners who are trying to move from “running around with their hair on fire” to building a company that can actually scale. Gabe shares how systems, SOPs, training, accountability, leadership development, and strong relationships became the foundation of the Window Ninjas franchise model.

Sheila and Gabe also talk about hiring, delegation, EOS, scorecards, technician training, family leadership, franchise growth, and the importance of creating time and financial freedom. The biggest takeaway: if you want a business that can grow without consuming your life, you have to develop leaders who can carry the mission forward.

Resources:

Window Ninjas

Window Ninjas Franchise

Gabe Salinas

Window Ninjas LinkedIn

The Huge Convention

The Huge Insider newsletter signup

The Huge Insider action guide

The Huge Mastermind info page

Facebook Group

Transcript:

Sid Graef: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Huge Transformations Podcast. I’m Sid Graef out of Montana.

Gabe Torres: I’m Gabe Torres here in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sheila Smeltzer: And I’m Sheila Smeltzer from North Carolina.

Sid Graef: We’re your hosts and guides through the landscape of growing a successful home service business. We do this by interviewing the best home service business builders in the industry, folks that have already built seven- and eight-figure businesses, and they want to help you succeed.

Gabe Torres: Yep, no fake gurus on this show, just real-life owners that have been in the trenches and can help show you the way to grow profitably.

Sheila Smeltzer: We get insights and truths from successful business builders, and every episode is 100% experience, 0% theory. We are going to dig deep and reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our guests will share with you the pitfalls to avoid and the keys to winning. In short, our guests will show you how to transform your home service business into a masterpiece. Thanks for joining us on the wild journey of entrepreneurship. Let’s dive in.

Sheila Smeltzer: Welcome to the Huge Transformations Podcast. This is your host and contributor, Sheila Smeltzer, based out of North Carolina. And today, I have invited another fellow North Carolinian. His name is Gabe Salinas, and you may know about Window Ninjas franchise. Gabe is a 34-year window cleaner. He’s 51 years old, and he is now in 12 locations in the Southeast. He originated in Wilmington, North Carolina, and has built out a franchise model, and he’s done it through developing leaders.

And this is really a lot of what we talk about today. We talk a lot about building the playbook, building the systems that are required, along with leadership, to be able to grow and scale your company.

I really enjoyed this. Gabe is a friendly competitor of mine. He’s in my market. We’ve known each other for a long time, and it’s just super fun to be able to sit down and have such an engaging and relatable conversation with somebody that you know so well, and you know their company through firsthand experience.

This is a great, great episode. I know that listeners will gain so much from it. He just has a certain style that I think you’ll appreciate. I can’t wait for you to listen to this, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Sheila Smeltzer: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Huge Transformations Podcast. I am your host and contributor, Sheila Smeltzer out of North Carolina, and I have another North Carolinian on the show today, Gabe Salinas with Window Ninjas. Hello, Gabe.

Gabe Salinas: Hey, Sheila. How are you today?

Sheila Smeltzer: I’m doing awesome, as always.

Gabe Salinas: Good. It’s good to be here with you.

Sheila Smeltzer: Yeah. No, I love that you have joined us on the show because you are 100%—you’ve been in the industry longer than I have, and you’ve actually scaled your company into a franchise, and you’re a local competitor of mine, and you are not in the Huge Mastermind. So this is super cool. I love this.

We’ve got so much to talk about today, but why don’t you tell our audience about you, how you got started? You’ve been in the business for 34 years.

Gabe Salinas: Yeah, I mean, you wake up one day and you’re like, “Wow, 34 years.”

Sheila Smeltzer: Yeah.

Gabe Salinas: It’s a long time. Over three decades. But I started when I was 17. It was a summer job before going to college when I got out of high school. I graduated when I was 17, and I have a late birthday in the year.

I went to college after cleaning windows for a summer, and college wasn’t for me. I just knew it wasn’t. I knew it going into it. So about half a semester in, I just came back. Then I got my job back, picked up my squeegee, and I just never stopped after that.

Sheila Smeltzer: Okay, so this all started in Wilmington, or where are you originally from?

Gabe Salinas: No, I grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. My dad was in the military, so I basically grew up in a military household. I was around all those elite fighter guys.

My older sister had gone on to school at NC State. She’s about seven years older than me. When I graduated high school, she called me and said, “Hey, you’re not going to sit on your butt all summer and do nothing before you go to school. You’re going to come to Raleigh and live with me for the summer so you can basically make some money, because you’re not going to be able to make money when you go to college.”

And I was like, “Okay. Cool. Sign me up.” I’m very good at listening to my elders, so I was like, “Gina called me. I gotta go.”

She introduced me to a guy that she had been cleaning windows for over the summers while she was at NC State. We jumped in a van the first day, cleaning windows somewhere on Hillsborough Street in downtown Raleigh.

Sheila Smeltzer: Love that.

Gabe Salinas: Yeah, it was easy. It was a little weird and easy, too. You look back at things and you’re like, “Okay, we’re four dudes jumping in a van, jumping out of a van, washing some windows. They’re giving me these orders of what to do. ‘Hey, grab that bucket. Pick up that pole. Hey, dum-dum, don’t pick up that squeegee. You want the other one.’”

That was all in the first hour. I didn’t realize it then, and most of us don’t, the first time you pick up a squeegee and you’re doing your first job, you’re just like, “Okay, this is how it is.”

But what’s unique, Sheila, is probably about a month ago I was thinking of that. We had a new batch of window cleaners that we recently hired. I don’t really get to interact with those guys very often, but I was in the back one morning and one of the new guys came in. We got to chit-chatting and it made me think, “You know, these guys really get trained well.”

Our managers really show them everything from, “Here’s your bucket. These are the tools. This is the proper way to utilize them.” They go through this systematic way of training. I was like, “Dang, I didn’t get any of that back in the day.”

Somebody was throwing a T-bar at you and saying, “Pick that up and start scrubbing the glass.” No formal training, no training manual, none of that mess. Those were the early days. We just kind of learned how to do it by winging it.

Sheila Smeltzer: Well, I mean, here’s the thing. I’m sure a lot of people listening, this is still what it looks like. Either they’re out there figuring it out, they’re watching YouTube videos, they’re in groups online or social, they’re watching people do stuff. They’re going out, trying it on their own. It’s trial by error and figuring out, “Okay, that didn’t work. I gotta go back and watch some more YouTube videos.”

Or I promise there’s many companies listening right now that don’t have any formal training in place, that are hiring people, maybe the first one or two people that come in that respond to the ad, they’re throwing them out there in the truck on day one. And they’re complaining after day one that that guy sucks.

Gabe Salinas: Right. You’re so right, Sheila. There’s probably a lot of people out there that are doing it. It does cost a lot of money to bring somebody in and train them and teach them. It’s time-consuming and it is costly.

Sheila Smeltzer: It is costly, and thanks for saying that. I remember Jim Willingham, the late, great window cleaning icon who was one of the founders of IWCA. I was luc...