Build a seasonal gutter cleaning route

  1. Map your target streets house by house
    1 hour 30 min

    This step produces the territory sheet — the one list every later step reads: the door-knock log, the route, the season calendar. Its job is to replace “I know this neighborhood” with a count you can bet on. The tricky part is honesty: a house without gutters is not a prospect, and a three-story house is a different job from a one-story one, so each house earns its own row.

    Pick one contiguous area of your city with mostly one- and two-story houses, then work through it street by street:

    1. Choose two to four residential streets and walk or drive both sides of each.
    2. For every house with gutters, count the stories — judge by the main roofline, not a dormer.
    3. From the sidewalk, tag the gutters: clogged, OK, or none. Mark “none” as not a prospect.
    4. Open a spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) and give every house one row: Address, Stories, Gutters, Notes.
    5. Close with a per-street summary: houses total, houses with gutters, houses with clogged gutters.

    Name the file like “territory-2026” — the same sheet becomes the door-knock log two steps from now and the route plan later. If you want a quick size check on your city’s housing stock before you walk, the Census QuickFacts page for your city lists total housing units — a sanity check, not a substitute for walking.