ARE CHIMNEY SWEEPS STILL CLEANING UP?

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The story behind a low-investment bootstrap business.

I'm sure most of you have seen the advertisements (in MOTHER and elsewhere) extolling the many benefits of becoming a chimney sweep. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Longtime readers of this magazine may also recall our article on the subject, which appeared in issue 49.] Well, all of the claims—the high income, the plentiful vacation time, the freedom to be your own boss and to set your own hours while you perform a useful service—can be true. It really is possible to write your own ticket to success and happiness as a sweep. As the editor and publisher of sweepdom's only independent trade journal, SNEWS, The Chimney Sweep News, I can personally attest to the rewarding careers of many "soot scrubbers".

But I also know that sweeping, like any business, has its pitfalls, too. The ads, for example, don't mention the parts about the job being terribly dirty and demanding . . . about freezing your tail off in the dead of winter (and baking on a hot roof during the summer) . . . about the long hours spent on bookkeeping chores and phone calls . . . or about getting bitten by a raccoon holed up in a smoke chamber with her offspring. You can spend hours scrunched in a fireplace, trying to remove and replace a rusted damper . . . there's always the risk of falling off a client's roof . . . and you may face some definitely lean times during the off-season. And as far as "freedom" goes . . . remember, that's a relative term. You may be your own boss, but your customers are your living. So when that emergency call rings in, you grab your brushes and go, whether it's convenient or not!

Still, as one sweep friend of mine put it, "You don't punch a time clock. You share pots of coffee in cozy kitchens with friendly folks you never would have met otherwise. Plus, you see the world from an entirely new perspective, and there's always that anticipation as to what the day will bring."

And yes, you can make very good money. But the field has become highly competitive these days, so only the fittest—those with the most know-how, business sense, and motivation—survive. According to one estimate, there were only a few hundred sweeps in this country in 1977 . . . today, there may be as many as 8,000 working part or full-time. A lot of people are jumping onto the bandwagon . . . and many of them are falling off—disillusioned and out of money-a few short months or years later.

"But it doesn't have to be that way," says former college professor and onetime chimney cleaner "Sooty" Bob Daniels, who is now a sweep-equipment wholesale supplier, as well as an instructor in business-building and advanced techniques at chimney-sweep conventions and schools. "If you look at almost any kind of small business in America," he says, "you'll find more failures than successes. But it's the other way around when it comes to sweeping. There are many more successes than failures."

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