$2.4M/Year Business You Could Start Tomorrow! ($174 Startup)

This guy turns dog poop into $200,000 a month. And the crazy part is, it all started with him working less than 10 hours a week. I could disappear for six months and this business would still make me money. But who pays for this service? Yuck! You'd be surprised just how much demand there is. We had 350 customers within just three months. Man, that's amazing. How much do you need to start? I did the calculations and it only cost about $174 to get started. That's it? And it's reaching six figures as easy as he says. You

only need to acquire two customers a week to make over $100,000 a year within your first 12 months. What? This business is just so easy to scale. It's easy to get employees. It's easy to get clients. It's so simple. We're here to smell and see the success for ourselves. All right, Will, it's good to meet you. Before we get into the unfortunate hands-on training, tell us a little bit about what Swoop Scoop is. Yeah. What Swoop Scoop is, is it really as simple as just picking up dog poop or is there more services that you

guys offer? Yeah, honestly, it is just as simple as picking up dog poop. So we'll sell customers on a subscription basis based on how many dogs they have, how often we're going to come out, and we just come scoop the poop and leave, move on to the next house. What? That's it. Interview's over. Too easy. Give me an idea. If I have three dogs, I call you up, what does it cost? Yeah, so basically you can either call us up, you can go to our website. We have an instant quote tool there. So based on

the number of dogs and then the service frequency, so we'll either come out twice a week, once a week, once every other week, or once a month, and then we'll give you an instant flat rate price based on that. So for me, I want a once a week, three dogs. What would that cost? One, ten a month. So we quote people on a weekly basis because it has a higher conversion rate, and then we will charge them on a monthly basis. What kind of equipment are we working with? What's the bare minimum you need to

get started in this business? Honestly, it's not much. It's about $175 worth of stuff. Not a lot. We have tested a ton of different tools, and this has been the best set up for us. Okay, so we have tool one. Tool one. So this is the Corona Garden Rake. So we basically use this. Yeah, don't touch that in. And then we literally just have a lobby dustpan, and this is what we use to scoop the poop. One thing about the lobby dustpan that is important to note is we'll actually flip the handles backwards so that

it's more ergonomic because one of the most common injuries for pooper scoopers is their wrists. Really? You're right, because you'd be holding it this way. Yep, and it puts a ton of strain on your wrist. So we flip it backwards. Good trick, guys. That definitely feels a lot better, especially if you're doing this all day. So what about that bucket there? Yeah, so after every cleanup, we will disinfect all of our equipment. So we just have like a little one-gallon garden sprayer. So really, you just need one, two, three, four. Yeah, one, two, three, that's

it, and then we just got a bucket to kind of keep it organized. And you've got yourself a business. That's incredible. I can't believe it. I'm excited to find out more about this business. I know our audience will be, too. It's really unique, and it only takes about $175 to get going. Yeah. Guys, we're going to ask Will later on in the interview, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Does work-life balance exist for entrepreneurs, or is it just purely a myth? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. All right, Will, well, I'm

not here just to interview you. I'm here to help, so let's get to work. We've got a big yard to do, and I can help you out. Perfect, yeah. With all these tools. Yep, I know. It's a big, heavy load, so let's get after it. Let's do it. So we've just located Poop A. I'm not complaining or anything, but like how long would all this take? Because this is a big yard. Yes. A big yard typically takes between seven and eight minutes. Seven, eight minutes. So this is a little bit bigger yard than we would

normally clean up. Yeah. But there we go. All the good stuff. This is too gross for the camera. In the bucket. So seven or eight minutes per customer, and you're off to the next. Yep, off to the next house. I mean, what else is entailed as part of that pickup as far as pricing goes? So, the service goes: We'll send a 60-minute on-the-way text message, so the customers know when to expect us. Nice. We'll come in; we'll walk the yard. We walk it every three feet or so. It's kind of our service. It's kind of

our scanning radius. Like you just do a zigzag? Yeah, just do a zigzag, and that way we don't miss any waste. And then after that, we'll finish the cleanup. We'll take the waste, put it in the truck. We'll close their gate and take a picture of it, and we'll actually email it to them so they know that one, the service was completed, and two, the dog's not accidentally going to get let out of the yard. Yeah. And once we're done with all that, we'll go and just spray down all our shoes, spray down all our

equipment with that kennel-grade disinfectant so we're not spreading barbo or any other kind of illnesses from dog to dog, and just move on to the next yard. So in all, probably like 15, 20 minutes, you're out probably? Ah, yeah, probably less. Pull in? Probably less than that, honestly, yeah, probably around 10 to 12 minutes. What percentage of your customers are on the $100 a month weekly? Is that everyone? So the $100 is an average between all of our clients, whether they're on twice a week or once a month or if they have four dogs or

one dog. Our most popular service is weekly cleanups, and most customers have two dogs. So as we're walking your grid pattern and looking for these nuggets, call them whatever, what is this business bringing in for you as of today, and what do the profit margins look like? Yes. Right. Right now, around $200,000 a month, kind of at the peak season. That's pretty sick. And then during the summertime, it slows down a little bit, but right about now is where we really start to ramp up and get ready for that spring rush where things get pretty

crazy. What are the profit margins then? Yeah, so we try to shoot above 30%, like net margin, and that's with us not working in the business, we're not answering calls, we're not going out scooping. That's like the business is running. So you can take off, and the business will still produce money. Yep, so we're right around 20 employees right now, which will swell the closer to four, thirty during the spring rush, but yeah, we got people to take care of pretty much all the day-to-day jobs right now. Oh, we got one right here. Yep, let's

get that. You're the boss, man. Get that in there. All right. I'll scrape that. How did you come up with this idea? Did you have an entrepreneurial background as well? What can we learn from that? Yeah, absolutely. So we actually got started because my wife was pregnant at the time. I was growing another business, and we didn't have time to do the chores, so she actually hired her own pooper scooper. And when me and Levi were trying to brainstorm what business to start, we looked at that service, and we realized they weren't doing a very

good job. They didn't have any systems. They didn't show up half the time. They had really bad communication. Their billing was a mess, and we figured we could do a better job. What about your background? What were you doing before this idea came about? Yeah, so my background's in digital marketing, which was a pretty good skill set to have going into a local service-based business, so I was able to use those skills and partner with Levi, who had good operational skills, and really blow the business up quick. All right, I think we're done here. So

what's next? Yep, so next step, we'll just go, we'll walk through that gate, we'll take a photo for the customer, and get ready to move on to the next yard. All right. Let me go. Get the door for you. Yeah, thank you. So once we're done, yeah, job well done for sure. Perfect. So before we leave every yard, this is a really important part of our service, is we want to make sure we take a photo of the closed gate. I see. Make sure it's latched. Okay. And then we're going to upload this to our

customer portal and email it out to the customer so they know, one, the service got fulfilled, and two, that their dog's not going to get let out accidentally. And if you look at our reviews, probably a third of our reviews actually mention that gate photo being taken, so a super important part of the business. Interesting how that one little thing can make a difference. It can really make you stand out. So I'll drop the bag. We're really careful about not spreading germs from yard to yard. That makes sense. Yeah, that would be horrible. Okay, put

that in the back of the truck. Stinker in there. And then we'll grab the candle gray disinfectant, grab our tools. So the first thing, we'll usually spray down the rake and the bucket. The rake here? Yep. Probably just. Yeah, go ahead and give it a little spray. Get it all the way up. It's friendly on the grass, guys. Don't worry. Yep. Spray the backside. Okay. And we'll spray the bottom of this bucket here. Well, before we get into that. Let me pause for a second and ask you about monthly overhead. What does that look like

for my business considering its size right now, four years later? And where's money going? Can you give us an idea? So, yeah, overhead's going to change drastically from being a one-man show to being an actual business. Right. So now we've got things like office space. We've got our labor - field labor and office labor are looking around 30% to 35%. And then from there, we've got our trucks, obviously, maintaining the fleet. There's some costs there. We've got some software costs with our sweep and go software. Okay. So I'm guessing, based on the numbers you're sharing,

best month at $200,000 revenue, my expenses would be then what? Yeah, we're going to be around $140,000 in expenses kind of on that. That's peak season, though. That's when our marketing's going full bore. We've got the most employees of the year. So we've got a lot of money coming out. Okay. What are we spraying down next? So we sprayed this thing. Yep. We've got the rake sprayed. So now we're just going to clean the bottom of this bucket. Gotcha. Yeah, because you always. Yeah, because you might be dragging it on the yard. You want to

make sure it doesn't have any germs on it. All right. Well, before we spray down, whatever else is next. Next, you had 350 reoccurring customers in the first three months of the business. How did you achieve that? How can others replicate your success? Yeah. So when we first started, Levi was kind of out by himself, grinding it out, knocking on doors, putting up door hangers. We probably got 15, 20 customers from that. But it wasn't until we started flipping on paid Google and Facebook ads where things just went crazy. So our service doesn't have a

lot of search volume, right? There might be 10 to 30 searches a month. So we had to find a way to actually get out in front of people. And we did that with Facebook ads. So I think our first ad, we literally took a picture of a bag of dog poop. And we just put $50 to $100 a day behind it. And we were getting customers for $7 a lead. And we're closing like one out of three of those in the early days. So it was basically a money printing machine. Obviously different now, right? How

should we factor those changes in Meta? Yeah. So the marketing space on Meta is a lot more competitive than it used to be. Ad costs go up every single year. So you gotta be a lot more strategic about what you're doing. So things like having a good customer hook. So saying, hey, are you a dog owner in Spokane? Are you a dog owner in Seattle? Okay. You kind of hook people in. Yeah. And then using images of real people standing in front of an actual branded vehicle. Those tend to do the best. So, you got

somebody in uniform; they got their scooping bucket in front of a vehicle. And those always tend to outperform even the super expensive high production videos that we've tried in the past. Oh, wow! And so we've got this. We got the bucket. I'm guessing your shoes next, right? Shoes are the next thing to disinfect just in case you stepped in anything that you shouldn't have. Okay. The other one. What were your biggest operational challenges in the early days? How did you overcome them? Yeah. So for us, it was actually growing really fast. So one person could

typically handle about 150 yards on their own. And we went from zero to about 350 in just a couple months. So we needed to go out and hire people. And we also needed to buy more trucks. So it was really getting talent and really getting the capital that we needed to actually buy the trucks to perform the service. Was that your approach? You just wanted to scale ASAP? Because not everybody's going to approach it that way. It sounds like you were like, no, we need to grow. Well, we honestly had no idea what we were

doing. And all I knew is that we had over 100 customers a month that wanted to sign up. We wanted to sign up for services. And we needed to provide that service for them. So that tsunami of new customers hit you, and you're like, 'What in the world is happening? How do I handle all this?' Yeah. Levi's maxed out. In the hot seat. So then it just went to go time. Good for you. Look at where you are today. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's go to the apartment complex. Because you're not only handling residential

units, but you're also doing apartment complexes. Yeah, absolutely. The apartment thing is a big market. Yeah, for sure. All right. So we are at the commercial client of yours, right? Yep. How does that side? How does that side of the business compare to residential? Yeah. So for us, the commercial side is a much smaller part of the business. But with that being said, it could be a really big, big part of the business. Just because there's so many dog owners and they're moving into apartments. And it's probably one of the biggest complaints from property managers

is they got tenants that have their dogs and they're just leaving the waste out and other people have to deal with it. So small percentage, are we talking like 5%, 10% of the business? Yeah, probably in between 5%, 10%. Just getting started. Yeah. Well, it's almost an entirely different business. Because instead of being a business-to-consumer, you're a B2B business. Yeah. That's right. So, you're having to hit the pavement and you're having to network with property managers. And it's, I mean, totally different the way you quote. Like, almost nothing's the same about this side of the

business other than there's dog poop involved. Gotcha. What about the profit margins? Are they very similar or? Yeah, they're similar. We try to maintain that kind of 30%. But honestly, with commercials, you could bump that up a little bit more if you really wanted to. Gotcha. And you have how many clients as of right now? Over 2,000, right? Yeah. Yeah. We're sitting around around the 2,000 mark. Gotcha. Wow. And 19, 20 employees. How many actually go into the job side? So one employee can typically handle about 150 clients, kind of at our size and our

route density. Per week? Per week or per month. It kind of works out to be the same if we're coming out every week. Wow. Yeah. Lots of driving around Spokane, Spokane Valley, right? Yeah, Spokane, Spokane Valley. And then we're also in North Idaho too, right across the border. When something doesn't smell right, I'm the one who sniffs it out - crime, corruption, dog poop you name it. But it doesn't take the world's worst superhero to know that if you're not generating the kind of business you should be, then it might be time to smell the

truth. Your website stinks. Luckily, with Hostinger's AI Website Builder, you can instantly freshen up your online presence by creating the website of your dreams. You just enter your business name, description, select your type of site, and let the AI do its magic designing everything from content to layout in the blink of an eye. And with our drag-and-drop feature, fixing your site is quick and easy with Hostinger's Business. Plan, you get everything you need to grow your web presence from e-commerce features to AI tools for every problem stuck on content. Their AI router will help generate

the perfect message. Need a logo that strikes fear into the hearts of your competition? Hostinger's AI logo maker has your back! Don't let a stinky website hold back your business, head to hostinger.com slash upflip and use our exclusive coupon code upflip to get your site ready for action! What systems and processes have allowed you to maximize profitability? Give us the specifics. Yeah, one thing that I think really stands out is our client onboarding system. So, because our customers can literally just go to our website, enter how many dogs they have, enter the service frequency they

want, they can get an instant quote then they can actually sign up for services right there without even talking to anybody. What's the best form of communication? Email, text, phone - seems to be the best form of communication. And then on that onboarding form, one thing that we rolled out is if somebody signs up, they get a quote but they actually don't sign up for services, you have them on a SMS text message trip so we're able to recapture a ton of clients that way is that the best way to recapture via? SMS, yeah, that

you're saying then by far like compared to email now or with the labor involved in making those actual phone calls, like the text message seems to be the way to go. If you're digging the inside scoop of this business, do us a huge favor. Hit that like and subscribe button. We'll bring more amazing entrepreneurs like Will. It's not going to be all about poop. So take a second, hit that like and subscribe button. Hope you're enjoying it. This station looks pretty good. Let's go change the other stations. Make sure. How many you got? We got

three stations at this property. Three here? Okay. All right. Let's go check it out. What are we looking like? Let's get this one changed here. So it looks like we are out of bags in this middle section here. So let's go ahead and pop this open. We try to keep them all filled up. So it looks like these two are pretty full. So we literally just pop it right in the middle in that slot there. Man, your job is easy. Close it up. But we're still sweating, you know? Yeah, we're still, we're still sweating. And

that's really all there is to it. Easy breezy. Well, on that note, I'm curious how you go about when it comes to sales, like how do you convince someone to pay for this kind of service? Because I think it's really a premium. It's a luxury. I figured if you have a dog, you're, you're going to be ready to pick up after it, but it doesn't seem to be the case. No, the service actually for basically everybody. We have all sorts of demographics, even some of the low-income areas. Those are busiest routes, believe it or not.

So it's a total, total mix. People are willing to spend 26 bucks a week to not touch the poop of their pet. Yeah. They don't want to deal with the dog poop. It's literally the most hated chore of all time, I think. So, so there's really no convincing going on. Like if you get a lead, they want it. It's just a matter of follow-up communication. I think, for the most part, I mean, there is a little bit of sales that go into it, but for the most part, they're going to sign up. They're going to,

a lot of people are just checking it out because they're curious about it. They're like, oh man, I didn't even know this was a service that existed. And I realized it's only around a hundred bucks a month. I never have to deal with the dog poop again. And we just have a ton of people that just flood in and sign up because of that. It's time with Will. Let's do this. What's your favorite and least favorite dog to pick up from? We prefer to pick up for big dogs because it's easier to scoop the poop.

I thought you'd say the opposite. No, no, definitely not. All right. In the comedic goldmine of dog doo-doo, what's a particular funny moment you've had since starting the business? Probably Levi picking up poop with white pants on because stepping in poop's a rookie move. That's funny. All right. What is something that every dog owner should know about cleanup after their dog? That they should do it and they should hire Swoop to do it. Easy answer. Single most important piece of financial advice you've received? Don't blow all your money. That's a good one. Can anyone be

a successful entrepreneur or does it take a certain type of person to succeed? I think anybody could be successful if you have the right mindset. How many dogs do you have? What breed? I have one dog right now. He is a Mastiff Pit Bull. Whoa. He's very big. Some big dogs. Yeah. All right. Last one. What's your go-to vice or indulgence after a long workday? I like to eat. What kind of food? What's your favorite? Pizza. Pizza? Pizza. Okay. Oh, man. All right. That's a wrap. What's your advice to those watching who want to start

but they don't have a lot of money, especially money you need for ads, right? So how would you go about it? Yeah. So there's a couple of good ways to get customers without spending any money on ads. Number one, this is how we got our first 15 to 20 or so posting on Facebook groups. And you look up buy, sell, trade, plus your city, Greg's list of my city. There's a ton of free groups in there. And the thing is consistency. You want to post in each group two to three times a week. So if

you're in 20 groups, that's 40 to 60 posts. It's a lot of posts going out, but that's what you need to do to actually get those customers coming in. The second thing I would recommend for people is to get a free Google business profile. So it's going to be the profile that shows up where you could see all your customer reviews. If somebody's looking for a pooper scooper service near me, you're going to be able to show up in that map section of Google. And that's where most of the Google traffic, business industry gets directed.

So great way to get customers. And then the third thing I tell people is to do what I like to call the free trial method. So I would reach out to friends, family, let them know you're starting this business and let them know that you're willing to give them a free two to three week trial. No expectations, right? You don't want to be pushy or anything like that. Just get their feedback. That'd be nice. Yeah. And you say, you're actually doing me a favor by letting me give you this free trial. So you can give

me some feedback. If I do a good job, you can either sign up for services if you want, or at the very least, leave us a Google review and that'll help your Google profile show up more. What would you say is the most stressful part for you and Levi in operating this business in general? Well, I'd say for the most part, this business isn't really too stressful just because of how simple it is and how easy it's been for us to get customers. But with that being said, there are things that can happen in any

business where just like crap will hit the fan. For example, earlier this year, we had four of our trucks get totaled within three weeks. So having to deal with situations like that, that's crazy. Maybe you have three or four or five employees call out sick one day. So being able to scramble and still make it work for your customers. So things like that, they'll come up that are stressful in the moment. But as far as like, big picture and the overall strategy, I think we're doing pretty good. What kind of workload are we looking at

for you as of today? Yeah. So for this business at our size coming up, I probably spent less than 10 hours a week getting this whole thing built up, taking it to that eight-figure mark. So it's taken a lot more time investment from me, just setting up all those different systems and strategies and hiring that higher skill level of employee. But on the buildup to get to this stage, it didn't really take that much time on my part. So what makes it possible that you can take off for a month or two at this point

and the business still going? Yeah, I think it's the team, it's the systems. Yeah, if it's the team, it's the system, it's having a good business partner that can kind of pick up any slack that might happen. So yeah, if you're all by yourself, you don't really have a lot of options. I think it's fair to say this isn't a very glamorous job, right? Yeah, absolutely. Share with us maybe about a perception that you had and how you overcame it. How do entrepreneurs overcome limiting beliefs as well? Yeah, definitely. Well, I know when I first

started this, I didn't have a ton of expectations for it because we're just literally going out and picking up dog poop, right? And a lot of the people we talked to when we first started also kind of had those similar thoughts. Like if you can't pick up after your dog, maybe you shouldn't have a dog. So, that was pretty common in the early days. But now, a couple of years later, that's almost completely gone away. How would I as an entrepreneur qualify an idea and not stop myself with that limiting belief? I think it's one

of those things where you're not really going to know until you actually go out and you do it. I know when we first started, people would see our wrap trucks and they would point and laugh at us. And those are the same people who, a couple of years later, whose laughing now? Yeah, whose laughing now there? They say, 'Oh, I knew that was going to be a great idea.' So you really don't know until you actually get into it. But you can just look at our story and stories of other entrepreneurs that maybe went into

a new industry that wasn’t super developed and see that it is possible. What are some biggest mistakes you made early on in the business? Yeah, probably the biggest mistake we made was not knowing the actual seasonality of the industry. So we had it completely backwards. We figured the summertime was going to be the busy time of year. Kind of makes sense. Right. But it's not that way whatsoever. It's the wintertime and then the first quarter of the year. When all the snow is melting off, that's when things get really crazy. What did you learn from

this experience? Obviously, you overspent money. How much did it cost you, if you remember? Yeah, probably cost. I mean, between the years and the tens of thousands of dollars range of burning through cash. But we found out pretty quick that, hey, customers aren't coming in anymore during the summertime. So we really need to tone that down. What would you do differently if you could go back and avoid that mistake? Yeah. So one thing that I would do, it wasn't necessarily available to us in this industry, but I like to look at Google search volumes, which

you can just do on like a free Google AdWords account. And you can see how much search volume there is on any particular month. And you can kind of plan your business marketing around that. If this poop-to-profit story proves anything, it's that starting and running a revenue-generating business may be easier than you think. That's why Uplift Academy has teamed up with William to give you free access to everything you need to launch your own poop scoop empire. I'm talking about having free access to William's startup checklist, powerful marketing strategies designed to bring you customers without

spending a dime, an inside look into sales presentations responsible for 20,000 sales. $50,000 contracts swoop scoops, proprietary pricing calculator that makes quoting a breeze and 77 more lessons and tools that cover everything from finding your first customer, performing the services all the way to scaling to six figures and beyond. If William's story has inspired you, I highly recommend clicking the link in the description and claiming your free access to the Uplift Academy while you still can. Question I have though, like since we've been spending the day talking about this, what's one or two things that

you think make you really different and better from others? Yeah, so a couple things, I think it's having the brand, having the systems, having the good customer service, obviously all those things are going to be important. And I think also our strategy, because I'd rather have one location with a thousand or 2,000 customers than 30 locations with 150 each. So really building that, that route density and being strategic with how we're expanding, I think is going to give us a competitive edge over everybody else that might have a hundred customers and think they need to

go out and start another location all of a sudden. All right. Time to go check out the office. Let's drive out there. Yeah. Let's take a look. All right, well, so this is your HQ. This is the HQ. This is where all the magic happens. You got the call center, obviously. Yep. We got the call center. So we got office manager and then we got two customer service reps over here. And then this is kind of like the private office if we have to do hiring or firing or any of that kind of thing. So.

Gotcha. So you have over 500 five-star Google reviews picking up poop, which is phenomenal. What's your approach to customer service that has propelled your reputation, success, et cetera? Well, I'd say probably the first thing that helped propel our good reviews is that picking up dog poop is probably the most hated chore of all time. And so there's a pretty big pain point for people when it comes to actually going out, dealing with the dog poop. But as far as the business goes, it's really about having a good system about how we do everything. So as

you saw earlier, taking the gate photos, making sure we have good communication with the customers, having online options, having an actual call center staff, that's a real person that can actually pick up the phone. And then the other side, I think has a lot to do with like the process. So, I mean, it's consistent every single time. So. Wow. And you communicate all that to them. They see it, they know, well like, whoa, blown away by it. What's your monthly average spend and what are you mainly spending on? Which platforms? Yeah. So our business is

somewhat seasonal. So in the winter time, there's a lot of snow and a lot of waste builds up. And then as soon as all that snow melts, it's kind of, I call it peak poop pain season. So. Peak poop pain. I like that. Yeah. Peak poop pain. So that's when we have the most demand for the service and we'll really ramp up our advertising spend right around then. And we'll spend upwards of $30,000 a month. During those seasons. Okay. We'll also acquire 70-80% of our clients for the whole year in this location anyways, because of

the, of the snow. Interesting. So you're doing what Facebook, Google are the main two? Yeah. Top three are going to be Facebook's number one, Google's number two. And then our truck wraps are number three. So during the summer season, we kind of pull back because our customer acquisition cost goes up quite a bit just because there's less demand. People are on vacation. Gotcha. People are in their yards every single day and we might only come out twice a week, but they want it cleaned up every day. And we're not able to handle that quite yet.

So demand kind of goes down during the summer. And then once the weather gets bad, people don't want to go outside and pick it up. I see a lot of cool things on the screen. Can you walk us through a little bit what's going on? Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, this is my co-owner Levi right here. Good to meet you, Levi. Nice to meet you. Likewise. Awesome. Yeah. Can you walk us through what you are working on? Yeah. What's going on on the screen? Looks like a lot of clients or poop or what's that?

Yes. So this is actually our entire service route for Spokane in particular. We have something like 1,500 customers every week that we service here alone. So what I'm doing right now is just kind of the route, making sure everything looks fine. There's a lot of colors here. What's important is I know what's going on. Yeah. So I want to check out your merch here for a second before we dive into the next question. How important is this for the business? Is this just kind of a giveaway? These are just for our staff right here. But

super important for the brand at large, because people want to see a professional company coming out. Everybody's wearing uniforms. They know that they're actually with the company and there's not just a random stranger in their backyard. Well, talking about people, let me pivot to the next question. And that is, hiring the best talent that's out there. What's your approach? Some would say, man, employees are the most challenging thing to find. Sounds like you have a little different perspective. Yeah. For us, finding employees hasn't been too big of a challenge, at least for the entry-level kind

of people, like management and above. It might be a little bit different story. But as far as the entry-level kind of pooper scooper position, we try to be really competitive on a couple of things. So we look at all the lawn care companies, we look at Amazon, FedEx, and we try to pay a couple of dollars an hour more than all those companies, the best of the best when it comes to that entry-level labor pool. And then it's really important to us that we take care of our employees. So we also pay for benefits. So

they got health, dental, I think life vision. So that's super important to us as well. Helps attract better employees and also helps with retention. So I know a common misconception. A lot of people think it's going to be an easy job, but it's not necessarily an easy job. We're out there in all different kinds of weather. People are cleaning up around 30 yards a day, so it can get pretty intense. So we do a ride-along when we hire new employees, just so they can kind of see what the job's all about. Let's go check out

your yard, get some fresh air, and continue the conversation. Yeah. Sounds great. Let's do it. Let's go. All right, man. These trucks, by the way, look pretty sick. Awesome. Yeah. Appreciate it. Good job on that, guys. Appreciate that. What's each wrap cost me here in Spokane? So these wraps, they're probably around $3,500 nowadays. So they've been going up year over year. So when we first started, they were maybe $2,600. So looking back on how far this business has come, what's more shocking to you, the level of success you're seeing today or specifically how you've achieved

it? Talk to us about those early days and kind of what was going on. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So when we first started this business, I actually didn't even know if it was going to work or not. I was looking at search volumes. There wasn't a lot of demand. My expectations were maybe I'll make an extra thousand bucks a month kind of a thing. Nothing too crazy. And fast forward a couple of years, we're going to do over $2 million this year, picking up dog poop. Amazing. But I think what's going to be most surprising is

what we do over the next three to five years, because I think we can take this thing a lot bigger than we have. You're going to go hockey stick? Yeah. This business is just so easy to scale. It's easy to get employees. It's easy to get clients. It's so simple. Do you have any regrets? Like in retrospect, would you do anything different? Can you think of anything specific? Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. So when we go into any business, right, you're paying down in ignorance debt over time. So now that we actually know what we're doing, if

I were able to go back in time and implement some of these things, spend way more money, I'd put way more of my own personal time into this business. And I think we could have come a lot further than we already have. In other words, you weren't investing everything you had early on. Yeah. I wasn't all in on this business. It was just a little side hustle at first, and it became a bigger and bigger and bigger business. And now I really see the potential, and we're going to take this thing. It's a good point

you bring up because a lot of our viewers do struggle with not knowing when to leave their 9-to-5 because they have been doing a side hustle, right? So that's kind of sounds like what you're hinting on. Can you speak to that a little bit more? Like what's your advice? I have a full-time job, but I have this nagging opportunity and so I'm on the fence. Yeah, absolutely. So with this business, it's something that you can start as a side hustle. So if you can do about 30 yards in a day, I think that's making you

close to three grand a month. Yeah. What has financial success afforded you just for fun? Like what do you enjoy doing? We hear a lot of times experiences, cars. What's it been for you? I mean, obviously having more money means you can buy more cool stuff. So I mean, we got the cars, we got the house, we got that kind of stuff. That's cool. But it also affords you opportunities. So we're able to take bigger risks within our business if we want to try to grow it faster. So a lot more options with money. It

gives you the ability to spend more time with your family. It gives your kids more opportunities. So really, options is kind of the big thing. That's cool. You get a chance to enjoy the fruits of your hard labor and it's going to be what, four years at the end of this year? Yep. Basically? Yep. Definitely. I got to point out that M3, I don't know if it's in the shop. That is a good looking ride. Good for you. Good choice. Yeah. Appreciate it. What do you think is the biggest misconception that a lot of entrepreneurs

may have about specifically starting and growing a business? Yeah. Probably the biggest one that I see is that people think everything needs to be perfect before they start. But in reality, you just got to go out there and start making money. So you're not going to know what's broken until you actually go out there and you try it. So I see all that. All the time. It's kind of that paralysis by analysis and people just never end up starting when they could pick up the phone and be making a thousand, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 bucks within

a couple of months. So. That's awesome. The advice is good. Just get started. It's going to be messy. Yeah. It's going to make some mistakes. Yeah. But it's going to happen. Absolutely. Out of all the metrics you've mentioned, customer lifetime value seems to be the key. So tell our audience, what is it? How do you find it? And how can this metric really be a game changer for any business? Yeah, absolutely. So customer lifetime value basically tells you how much revenue each customer's going to bring into your business over the lifetime of their subscription. So

with a subscription business like ours, it's really easy to calculate. You take your average monthly ticket and you divide it by your churn rate, which is the percentage of customers that leave every single month. So in our case, we charge around $100 a month on average, and we lose about 5% of our customer base every month. So you just take $100 divided by 0.05, and that would give you a customer lifetime value of $2,000. Okay. Which means you could spend however much you need to spend to acquire that customer. What's your threshold? Usually a good

rule of thumb is if you spend around 10% to acquire a customer, you're in a good spot, but it really depends on your business and you really want to take a good look at your profit margin. So if you're only making a 10% profit margin, you have less wiggle room there. Gotcha. So you spend $200 on a customer, but your lifetime value is $2,000. Well, quite the return on your ad spend. Oh yeah, absolutely. Tell us a little bit about how you go about training team members, delegation early on, right? You have a lot going

on yourself, then eventually you hire someone. What are some things that stand out for you in your journey so far? Yeah, so definitely it's come a long way from when we first started. I think it was literally, we just hire somebody and train them for five minutes and throw them in the truck, because picking up dog poop is really not that complicated, but running a really systematized business that provides really high-quality can be a little bit more complicated. So nowadays we have a full online training platform where people can go through; they can see the

employee handbooks; they can see how to walk the yards. All the different protocols are going to be right there. And then as far as actually training, we have about a week long now where they'll go out with another technician and they'll show them how to do everything from using their app to cleaning the yards efficiently. And they'll be together for that one week until they go on their own? Yep. Yep. From there they'll go on their own. We just have one person per truck. Gotcha. So you're not training anybody, neither is Levi training anybody. It's

all within the system you've created. So we have a location manager for each one of our locations, and then we have actual lead technicians below them. So each lead will basically have a pod of three scoopers that report to them. And then the manager will kind of oversee everything at the particular location. It's not rocket science, but how did you learn the ins and outs of operating a business like this? Yeah, absolutely. So when we first started, there was not a lot of information out there, but there were two main sources that we were able

to kind of leverage. So number one was a shout out to Erica Crouppen from Crouppen's Poopin' Scoopin'. So she was one of the first YouTubers in this space and the biggest YouTuber in the space. So we were able to learn a lot from her. That's cool. And then the other thing is we learned from the software that we use, which is called Sweep & Go. So they built it just for this industry specifically. So we were able to, sign up with that software before we even had any clients and kind of learn the ins and

outs based on, kind of reverse engineer the business based on how the software was set up. So they have the resources for you to get going. Even if you have no business, sign up, use there as a resource. Yep, absolutely. So we knew, okay, a big part of the software was the gate photos. So that's probably something that we should do. So we were able to learn a lot from that. Why do you think it's important for entrepreneurs, really, you guys watching as well, to actually not be secretive about the way you do things, but

actually share it with others? What do you think on that? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's even more important. Within this industry, just because there's a lack of awareness, people don't even know that service exists yet. So I talk to people all the time and they don't even know that we're a thing and they end up signing up with the first company they hear about. So the more companies that are out there, the more people are going to be spending money on advertising and the more it's going to bring up that market awareness kind of

all around, especially with those Google search volumes, those are starting to go up, which is super important. For sure. What are two more cheap, but highly effective marketing strategies that anybody can implement? Yeah. So I'd say probably the two most effective are going to be SMS and email marketing. So SMS has been great. So if we have somebody that goes to our website, they sign up to get a free quote and they don't sign up, we collect their information and we actually put them on a remarketing drip. So we're able to get a lot of

customers from that. And then we'll also send out monthly promos through email and through SMS. So whether it's a school special or a Halloween special, whatever that might be, we just basically repackage it and send it out every month. And then as far as for beginners, this is going to be the cheapest because it's free. You are going to have to spend your time, but if you're not making any money, your time's not really worth anything. So we like to go and do a free trial method where we give somebody two to three weeks of

service for free. And at the end of that, they can either continue service or give us feedback on how we can improve and leave us a Google review. That's a great idea. All right. Since you've started, you've already expanded to multiple locations. You have a fleet of vehicles. A couple of questions. When did you know it was time to go ahead and start scaling? And when you look at new markets, what do you look for? What are some indicators that you know it's going to be a successful location? Yeah. So for us, we kind of

started scaling right off the bat. Not necessarily on purpose, just because of all the demand that was coming in. And then we got to a point, we were two, three years in before we decided to open our second location. That's just because this growth wasn't, we weren't, we're basically doubling in size every year and then we didn't quite double. So then we thought maybe it's time to open a new location. How did you acquire the fleet? I mean, any tactics there, approaches that have worked well? So when we first started off, our fleet pretty much

sucked. We were buying like $2,000 like Ford Rangers from like farms outside of town, just to get something to be able to actually do the work. From there, we took on quite a bit of personal risk. I think me and Levi had like seven or eight personal like truck loans just to make the business work at one point. How do you feel about that looking back? I mean, I guess I could see working as a tool if you're willing to handle that risk in the payment. Yeah. Well, it's also wasn't a ton of risk because

you still have the asset, right? You still have the truck. So if things didn't work out, you can just sell it off. And then the risk was also mitigated because all the revenue was coming in on a recurring basis. So that was also kind of another factor that we took into account. Yeah. The recurring definitely makes a big difference when you approach a bank and say, 'I got X coming in every month.' Yeah. The bank loves us now. They'll give us whatever we want. Yeah. So why specifically Seattle? In a nutshell, what are two, three

things that stood out? You're like, man, we're going to go there. So, a couple of things. One, that's the closest big city to where we're at right now. Number two is that they are one of the top 10 most dog-friendly cities. Oh, no way. I didn't know that. Yeah. So that was a big, big consideration as well. And then we also look at kind of like satellite imagery and we want to see how close the houses are together. And we want to see how big kind of the average yard size is because that's a huge

factor of profitability. Interesting. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. What's your advice to those looking to get into partnership with someone else? What do they look for in those people? Yeah. Probably the most important thing when looking for a business partnership is to have somebody that has a different skill set than you or brings a different value to you. So whether they have more time, maybe somebody has more money and you don't want to be coming to the table with the same thing. Otherwise, you're redundant and not necessary in the business. So yeah. So it's a big

reason why we've been so successful. I have a big marketing background. Levi's got an operational background. And so we've been able to kind of merge those skill sets. And with both of us, we've been able to grow a lot faster than just one of us could alone. So you and Levi, how long have you been in business together? So we started at the very end of 2020. So we're going on our fourth year. And you guys go way back? Yeah. We actually went to elementary school, middle school, high school together. We grew up right down

the street. You guys go way back. Yeah. Can you think of a moment in the business growth where having Levi and that partner helped tremendously, right? Because I can only imagine you only have so many hours a day, right guys? So I'm wondering if you were alone, would you be where you are today? Or the partnership is really what got you to this point as well? Well, I'll be honest. I probably wouldn't have even started this business if I didn't have Levi as a partner and kind of threw out the whole thing. Being able to

bounce ideas back and forth has really accelerated the growth. We each have our own area of expertise that we're able to kind of lean on with each other. So that's been super helpful. I will say that one downside of a partnership is you have to make twice as much money to make the same amount of money. Yeah. Not a bad thing, but when you're making 10 million or more, right? Yeah, exactly. There's plenty to go around for sure. So getting a bigger pie is kind of the goal there. How would you describe your leadership style

as a business owner and an employer of almost 20 people? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the number one thing is I try to be fair with everybody. And we also try to systematize all the positions so we have really clear expectations. So I think that has a lot to do with being fair. So people know exactly what to expect. They know what their job duties are. And if they do them, they're going to get rewarded. They're going to get rewarded for that. If not, they're not going to get rewarded. Can I ask you to like

elaborate what being fair means? Yeah. So I know one thing that we like to do is we offer like attendance bonuses for people. So those people that come in and they really put in the effort and they're showing up every day, we're able to incentivize them and actually kind of give back more to those particular employees. What does that look like, the incentive? So if they show up every day of that month, they get an extra $250 for the month. That's good. I think it's important to have these incentives, right? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. How can

others position themselves to succeed as leaders in their businesses? What would you say? Yeah. So for us, I think it comes down to value-based leading. So we're not the type of company and I'm not the type of leader that wants to go and micromanage people on every little thing that they're doing. So we have a specific kind of value system. So our three values are 'winners win', right? So we want our people to go out there, we want them to find solutions, we want them to do what is necessary. If something bad happens to them

that day, we want them to be able to overcome and kind of show that resilience. We want people to be humble, number two. So we don't want people going out and being boastful because it's really easy to get knocked down a peg. And we really try to embody that within the company. And then number three is we want people to have swift solutions. We want them to actually take the time to find the solution and then be ruthless with the actual execution of that. So on all levels of the company, whether you're just a scooper

or in the management level. That's cool. You've mentioned that anybody can generate an easy six figures revenue in this industry, right? So what makes it stand out? Why is that possible? Elaborate a little bit. Yeah. So there's a couple of things that make the pooper scooper industry stand out from other industries. Number one, there's not really any cost of goods sold. So you're literally just selling your time for the most part, right? We got our equipment here that you can get for $50 for just these $275 for the whole setup. So that's probably the number

one thing. That's a big deal. Yeah. The second thing I'd say is that it is almost all recurring revenue. So you're going to know exactly how much money you're coming in. You know how many customers you have, and you're going to be able to make projections out based on that. Because it's all subscription-based. Is that the idea? There's no one-timers. Hey, can you come out? We do have one-timers, but we make it pretty expensive for them to do a one-time. I really want to incentivize people getting on there. That makes sense. What else? How many

customers do you think I would need per week to get to a hundred thousand as fast as possible? Yeah. So if you do the math, so our average customer pays us about a hundred bucks a month on average, right? So you're only going to need about 85 customers to make that happen. Wow. You can either get two of them per week or get half of them in the month. That's crazy. Yeah. So if you, over the course of a year, if you just acquired two new recurring customers every single week, at the end of that

year, you're going to have over a hundred customers. Some of them might turn off, but you're going to be around. That hundred customer mark making close to $10,000 a month in gross business revenue, right? But there's not a lot of expenses other than really your transportation, your insurance, those kinds of things. And once you're set up and you've got your route as big as you want it to be, you don't have to keep like advertising anymore because you've got recurring customers, you've got word of mouth working at that point. In your opinion, what do you

think is holding up most people from starting this business? Just your take. Yeah. I'd probably say confidence. People don't have the confidence. They don't think that they can do it. But when you're really looking at like the, like the pooper scooper business, like it's not going to get any easier than this industry. So like, if you're not even willing to start a pooper scooper business, you're probably not going to start a business ever. You're not a franchise. It doesn't sound like you're planning to become one, but you've got locations in Spokane. You have locations in

Seattle. The question that I have is how did you set up the organization in a way where it can run as an independent unit? What's the key to that? Yeah, absolutely. So each location has its own, I guess, kind of a location supervisor, a location manager, then underneath them, they'll have leads depending on the size. And then underneath them, they'll each have two to three scoopers that report to them. And we try to set it up. So most of the, I guess, business activity happens at HQ. And so we do all the routing, we do

all the billing. We talk to all the customers, everything happens there. And at each location, literally the only responsibility of the manager is to make sure the service gets fulfilled. And that means hiring, firing, training, but that's their sole responsibility. Why is having a brand story important for a company that picks up poop? Do people really care who does that for them or do they care more about the price? Yeah, I'd say that brand is important no matter what industry you're in. And I think, you know, even more so in the dog waste removal industry,

because as you've seen, there's a really low barrier to entry when it comes to actually starting this business. So I've seen a lot of times these newer companies, they come in and if they're just a one-man show, if they're out sick, they're not going to be reliable. So, really reinforcing that brand, not only with the imagery, but also with the reliability factor that we're always going to do the right things, that we are maintaining high safety standards and high service standards, even though we might be more expensive than our competitors. So there are competitors, lower

prices, but obviously they don't match up with customer service quality. Yeah, no, having a brand story, just speaking with you is clearly an absolute must, right? Especially in this industry. Yeah. Well, in this market specifically, as I kind of talked about, there might've only been 10 to 30 searches for a Pooper Scooper service. During our peak season last year, there were over 800 searches a month just for our branded terms. Yeah. People associate us with the service rather than just looking up the service itself. So we get almost every customer in this market. Amazing. Good

for you guys. Yeah. Knowing what you know, Will, I'm curious what your take on would be why most entrepreneurs fail, regardless of what industry they're at. Yeah. I'd say there's probably two major reasons. One, they're not taking action, right? They have kind of that analysis by paralysis and they're not doing the things that they need to do. And that kind of brings us into the second one, and that's focusing on the wrong things. So when you're in a business, especially when you're first starting off, you need sales to actually make the business work. So if

people are focused on getting the perfect website or the perfect logo or the perfect business cards, they're not taking actions to actually generate revenue right now. And that's what will make a business succeed in the short term. In the short term and in the long term. For sure. So now that you guys have reached this level of success, and do you have an inclination to maybe take the foot off the gas as an entrepreneur to follow up? How do you stay motivated? How do you stay focused and continue to scale? Like what's driving that for

you personally? Yeah, I'd say it's actually kind of the opposite. So we were able to get to this level without me really working in the business full time. So I kind of see the potential of the industry. So I'm more inclined to put my foot on the gas. I think we're going to be able to take this thing to eight figures over the next couple of years. Wow. What else? Are you a family man? Yep. I got two little kids, married. So I want to show their kids that their dad is cool and can do

cool things. So I just gotta keep going, right? Yeah, absolutely. How has your definition of success shifted as your business continued to grow? Can you speak to that? Yeah, I think when we were starting off, success is, okay, cool. We're making money, I could pay my bills. And then it turns into, okay, now we can maybe buy some nicer things. But now success to me really means how much value are we actually providing back to society, whether that's through our employees, well, sure, back to our businesses. And that's really shifted my goals too, to where

we're actually going to be able to take this business. So instead of just having one location, we want to bring it regional. We want to make it a big business that a lot of people can benefit from. That's awesome. Yeah. So that mark or that ceiling continues to expand with success. And that's how your definition continues to evolve essentially, right? Yep. Absolutely. If you're interested in more money-making businesses that practically run themselves, you have to check out episode 154, where a vending machine mogul, Adam Hill, brings in $50,000 a month, working just two days a

week. Appreciate you watching, like and subscribe. And of course, we'll see you next time.