Kyle Ray has been waiting for the table and bartenders to pay his bills for years.
In 2014, about seven years after landing his first client (a massage parlor at a strip mall in Houston), he earned plenty of money from a side gig called Geek Window Cleaning and quit his job in service.
The different manufacturer was SEO. Around 2013 he began to pay attention to search engine optimization and began learning how to use it to increase traffic to his site. By 2015, if Google had Googled “cleaning Houston windows,” we had appeared in the No. 1 position,” the entrepreneur told Business Insider. “Then we started to get really busy.”
Nearly a decade later, the strategies that helped turn Ray's business from side hustles to full-time gigs are essentially irrelevant.
“We fired the SEO company we used before. We no longer care about rankings on Google. That's not a problem because searches are very fast and zero clicks,” he explained. “If you google something, Gemini will tell you anything that has the answer right there. You won't scroll down the page and see what's there.”
With AI progressing over the last few years, Ray has committed to mastering it, just like how he worked on SEO in the early 2010s. He's already seen the results. He generated six revenue figures in 2024, and according to Servicemonster Dashboard, he was on track for the first time in 2025 to over $1 million.
“We use software and AI as much as possible when it makes sense,” he said. “Our tech stack is kind of wild.”
Related Stories
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
He rattled the few AI and software tools he uses to save time and money as a small business owner – embracing usewhale.io, chatgpt, ingage, canva, calendar, priceguide.ai, chiirp, paive, servicemonster, zyratalk, clickup, and mainandmeister.
Ray, founder of Geek Window Cleaning, serves hundreds of customers in Austin and Houston. Courtesy of Kyle Ray
ServiceMonster manages customers. Ray said that by moving to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, he has moved his business more than any other tool, extending to hundreds of clients across Houston and Austin, leaving him organized.
For years, he used carbon copy paper to track the history of his clients. “It's in a folder and you always say, “What happens if my office sets on fire and loses all this data?”
Now, using ServiceMonster, he said, “We can pull up your account history, what we did, and the notes we have in your home.” He offers even the smallest details, such as the name of the client's pet, what he calls “irrational hospitality.”
ChatGpt for almost everything. Ray said he uses ChatGpt every day to feed ChatGeek's P&L and ask how you can increase your margins, from asking what new AI tools to use as business owners in the home service industry.
Thanks to ChatGpt, he feels he has access to his leadership team without hiring anyone.
He uses “AI CFO” or “AI COO” for basic questions.
Chiirp and Zyratalk for customer communication. “I want our phones to always answer, and I don't want to go to voicemail,” Ray said.
Chiirp, a text messaging software, can handle basic conversations with customers, while Zyratalk is an AI voice assistant who answers calls and speaks to customers like a team.
By training these two AI tools, “there is no need to have a complete team of customer service representatives,” Ray said. “A small business like me, that's difficult. I can't scale at that speed or hire and train at that speed, but I can train AI voice bots to answer calls when people are making calls.”
PriceGuide.ai and Calendly to create frictionless customer experiences. Ray wants prospects to book window cleaning as seamlessly as possible. To do so, he uses PriceGuide.ai. This helps service-based companies create pricing estimators to streamline their citation process early.
Once a new client receives a quote, you can schedule your first cleaning through the scheduling platform calendar. So, “You can go from start to finish without talking to anyone,” he said.
Ray said he is constantly testing a variety of software tools to determine which one is best for him and the nerd. He believes that all entrepreneurs should consider leveraging AI.
“No matter what business you are, if you're not playing AI games, you'll be left in the dust in a few years,” he said. “AI can be overwhelming, but if you play with it and know how to use it with it, you can do something really fast. And money loves speed.”
