← The Scoop With Erica Krupin
The Scoop With Erica Krupin
Ep 196. The Longest Spring Rush Ever: Lessons from My 8th Year in Business
00:38:20
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What's Up Scoop podcast? I'm your host, Erica Kruipen, and on today's episode, it's going to be another spring rush recap because we're still in spring rush. This has been the longest spring rush of my career. This is my eighth year in business and it just, it blows me away. So if you're interested in hearing all about that, stay tuned.
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Welcome to the Scoop with Erica Kruipen. Your host is the owner of Kruipen's Poop and Scooping. She's built a six figure dog waste removal business and loves talking a little crap with like minded folks. Starting and growing a small business can be scary, but Erica wants to share some tips and tricks that she's picked up along the way as she continues her entrepreneurial journey. She hopes this podcast will educate and inspire you to think outside the corporate box and do something a little crappy like scoop dog poop. And now, here's Erica.
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If you're watching this over on YouTube, I look crazy. My hair is in a bun. I think this is day two bun. I don't have time to look cute and gorgeous. I can worry about that after Spring Rush. I'm already starting to like, mentally prepare because I've been so focused on growing this business that I haven't been focused on anything else. I do have a nail appointment scheduled for Saturday. We're gonna do that. I'm gonna get a facial scheduled. I need to have a massage because. Because sitting here at this desk, like hunched over, signing up all of these customers, it's really taking its toll on me. Seriously, sitting does. My neck hurts really bad and my arm hurts, but not as bad as like when I'm out scooping. Each position in the company has its own set of issues. And I'm also going to start back with my personal trainer starting tomorrow. I sent the message. I have been setting my alarm, I've been setting my alarm to wake up at 4am to go train and I shut it off every single day. So I decided, I decided today. I said, nope, we're going to get the trainer back. We're going to get back on track. Because here's the thing, we're high achievers, right? If you're watching this, you're probably a business owner. You're either a high achiever or you want to be a high achiever. You're just trying to figure out how to do that. And what I've learned throughout the years is every bucket can't get all of your attention right now. My business bucket, my croupin's poopin scooping business bucket, growing the recurring services has gotten all of my attention. So therefore my other businesses, pretty much everything else, has really kind of taken a backseat. And now it's like, okay, things are starting to slow down a little bit. I can regroup. Where do I need help at? Clearly I'm having a hard time getting to the gym, so that's where I need help with. So I'm hiring an expert to bring it in. We have to do this in business and in life and there's nothing shameful around it. Do not be ashamed that you need a little bit of help. Okay? Even in business. For those of you that are not part of the Poop Scoop Millionaire community over on school, that's a wonderful community with coaches, with resources, all sorts of things in the business to help you. And not even just resources, there's also the community members where you can lean on and you can learn so much information from. So if you're not a part of the Poop Scoop Millionaire community, go ahead and check it out. Tell me what you think. If you are already part of the community, let me know what your. What, what are you working on this month and next month? Like, where's your focus at? My focus has been hiring. We put out a lot of yard signs. We did so much marketing. What have we talked about? We've talked about so much through this spring rush. So I'm going to kind of just recap all of that and then go through like the numbers and some stuff that's top of mind. But yeah, if you're not part of the poop Scoop millionaire community, it's. It's really not that expensive to invest into your business and to get around like minded people. I will definitely go ahead and include a link down below. Also Jobber. Jobber is a sponsor of the channel and of the podcast, as you know. And Jobber is where I do all my routing, my customer communication, my invoicing. All the good stuff is done in Jobber and I am so grateful for it because there's just so many moving parts. There really is. And now that I'm starting to grow my team, I really like that, like on the request form we can put notes on the side. I should show that to you. I should show you so you can see what I'm talking about. I'll do that when we hop over to a loom video because we're going to do a little bit of loom and go through my Jobber Again, but we can put notes. So my team, because I have a team now, I have somebody that is actually working leads. Actually I have two people that are working leads. I have one person that's working leads just via text message because they're not good on the phone. That's not really their jam and that is during the day. And then I have another woman that is working leads but she loves to hop on the phone and she has a smile on her face and you can literally hear the smile. You can literally hear the smile on her face. And she's working those leads primarily in like the afternoon and evening which is super helpful. When people are home, they can hop on the phone, they can have a conversation and she is, she's doing a really good job. So I'm so appreciative of that. So if you don't have a CRM yet and you're kind of on the fence, just give Jobber a checkout. You can get a 14 day free trial with my link. Okay, I need to take a sip of water really quick because clearly I've been drinking too much coffee. Okay, I'm back. Where are we at? What is today? Today of recording? This is March 26th. It's a Thursday. What I've really been focusing on really for the first quarter is marketing. Marketing, marketing, marketing. And I really started doing this last year and I just learned something like top of Funnel marketing when I've been putting out my yard signs, having the branded vehicles, having my flyers and my brochures at other local business places, being out in the wild, out in the community in my branded uniform. Really is that top of Funnel that's creating the awareness that we are a company, we're just here. That stuff isn't going to get conversions. That's just like letting people know, screaming from the rooftops. I was at the meat market getting my, my weekly food cuz I meal prep every week and this woman comes in and she comes up to me, she goes are you the one with the pink truck? And I said I am. She's like, I could tell cuz I had my pink shirt on, I have my pink nails and I had a black jacket with pink on. So it's very much so. Like that brand awareness, that brand recognization. Now I'm not, I'm not expecting everybody to paint their nails pink. Like I'm fully invested, right? I'm, I'm all in. But wearing your brand, like wearing your branded uniform is so important. Just think when you step out and you're wearing a Nike or Adidas or Jordans or whatever name brand, whatever other name brand stuff you want to wear. You're promoting their brand. So why don't you just wear your brand all the time? Like your brand is so important. Get yourself a nice polo, get yourself a nice fitted shirt. Get yourself a nice workout outfit. Rock your brand. Be so loud and proud with it. Seriously. Why not? Why not? So that's just something to think about. Okay. Because that's all top of funnel. That's just creating the awareness. This is just planting the seeds so people can know that you're available when they need to check you out and when they're ready to make that purchase. So that's why I've really spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of money. I don't know. Have we talked about how much money I've spent on ads so far? Not sure if we did, but let's just go hop into Jobber and check Jobber out and show you what the month of March has looked like. Here we are. We're in the Jobber screen. If you're listening to this on the podcast, keep listening to the podcast, but when you get a chance, go over to YouTube so you can see the visuals. So we're going to go through my Jobber dashboard, what it looks like right now. We have six requests in the queue. We have one quote that is approved. I worked six or seven approved quotes this morning and got those onto the schedule. And that's the, that's the reason why. Mr. Producer, hi. That's why I am late with my episode. There's always something. There's always a reason why. But what's awesome is I was able. Actually, I don't want to just give you fake, fake information. Let me go ahead and actually look at Jobber really quick to give you the actual details. So for Saturday, let's see. Charles. Okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I had to convert eight approved jobs over to visits that were going to happen on Saturday. And out of those eight, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Five of them are signing up for recurring service already. So that means we have three people that we have to convince or have a conversation with educate to have them convert over to weekly service so the work isn't done. We still have some room to grow. But the cool thing is is this morning, that's what I was really working on. And as we know, those customers that are converting over to weekly services, those are gonna be our bread and butter. That is what's going to give us that recurring money every single month. That is so good because we're not having to start at ground zero. That's the nice thing about this industry is the recurring model. And usually 12 months out of the year because the dogs don't quit pooping. So what? What? We don't quit scooping. I know it's cringy. Back to my screen. So we have six new requests. Those are being worked on and then quotes will be sent out. One quote has been approved for 180. That is a one time cleaning. Because right now our prices for a one time cleaning small yard is 180 active jobs. We have 319 active jobs right now in the amount of $33,900. I have five action requireds. That means the technician is out doing cleans right now. She's actually has six one time and initial cleans, a little variety and she has already done $646 worth of cleanings that I need to handle by the end of the day or by the end of day tomorrow. Then we come over here to the invoices. I have $302 of invoices and I do have some past due invoices which I need to work on. And then I have five invoices in the drafts. Those are probably for April. I'm not going to click on those just because I don't want to show any customer information. And the more I click on stuff and show customer information, the more editing that May has to do. And since I'm kind of late uploading this episode, I don't want to do that. Okay, so what are we going to go to? I want to come over here to the right hand bar and I want to go to Insights. Let's click on our Insights. Let's just click on the month of March to see what we have going on. I really love that Jobber has these features now. It just makes knowing what's going on in the company easier. Okay, so the overview from March 1st to March 31st. Remember today's the 20, the 26th. So we have had 287 leads. I'm down 4%. New requests are 335 and I'm up 16%. I think I need to ask Jobber what the differences between new leads and new requests are. I'm not exactly too sure what the difference. I know that I want to say new requests is everything. Everything that's coming through Jobber. And then even the phone call leads that we're putting in manually But I need to get clarification on that because I'm not clear. Converted quotes. 86 converted quotes were down 32% from last year from last March. 79 one off jobs. That means. But it's showing that we're down 27% from last year. We have converted 59 of those one off jobs to recurring job visits. Remember, that's our bread and butter. That's what we really, really need. That is up 79%. So the difference is last year we had more one time cleans but this year we have converted more recurring and that is more important than those one off cleans because one off cleans. We have to keep reaching out to them. We have to keep marketing. We have to keep filling that. But with the recurring it set it and forget it until they churn out, which we're going to talk about. Churn here in a minute. And I've invoiced $41,000 this month and so it's up 32%. So if we come down to our revenue thing, it shows that this so far this year we've invoiced $86,300, which is amazing. Last year in March we invoiced $31,021. This month is $40,988. And we're going into, we're going into April with $30,000 of recurring recurring service revenue, which is crazy. So this will be the highest, this will be the highest that that's ever happened. I put a lot of money into ads. If we look at my lead source from. Let's just look at February. So the lead source from March 1st until May 1st. I want to say that this is kind of accurate, but I'm not really too sure. We've been doing our darndest to update the lead source in, in Jobber, but I'm not, I'm not really too sure if it's pulling correctly. But what I will say is right now most of our customers are coming from Facebook, then it's Google, then it's yard signs, then it's vehicle wrap, then it's referrals and lead sources. I would really like to get the referrals up at the top because that you don't have to pay money for that when you're paying for like Facebook and Google and yard signs and vehicle reps. That stuff's expensive. But those referrals, those are very low cost. I kind of want to do an experiment really quick. I want to click over, I want to look at April of last year. So if we go to April 20, 25 and just do like a range from April 1 to like April, let's say April 12. That's so we do our billing the first of the month. So I want to see how much revenue was brought in within like that first. Actually, it really should be that first week. So let's just do the. Yeah, let's just go to the eighth apply. How much money was brought in. So $18,400 was brought in and I'll let you know at the next podcast after, after the first of the month billing has ran through. But I think we're going to be at 30. Yeah, we're going to be at like 30 something thousand just for recurring revenue. That's a, that's a huge start. So if like last year I was starting April at 8, like 18,000, this year we're starting April at 14,000. It's just, holy smokes, I'm pumped up. I'm pumped up. And I'm looking at an Excel spreadsheet that I have, but I can't show you that because there's just, there's just too much information on here. But what I will say from the 1st of the year to the 19th of this month, which was March, I have picked up 119 new recurring customers. And it's a variation of like Facebook, returning customers, yard signs, Google. And what I want to tell you is what I have spent on ads so far. So, so far since January 1st, I have spent $16,167.87 on ads. And that is current to March 19th. And that has been a mix between Facebook, Google and wrapping a new car because I got a truck. Actually I just wrapped a new truck and wrapping that truck cost me $3,650 to wrap that vehicle. What else are we tracking right now? So I'm tracking, I'm tracking the money spent on ads. Specifically. What I did was, is I had one credit card that I actually got a 0% interest credit card. I specifically went, opened up another bank account. I went and opened up another bank account with another bank, a business account, and I got a credit card and they gave me a $20,000 limit. So I knew I had $20,000 to work with 0% interest for a year. And all of my advertisement, everything is going on that credit card. So it's so easy for me to track all of my Google, all of my Facebook, my ads, management fees, the cost of the wrap, any marketing material that I purchased. So anything that had to deal with marketing is going on that credit card that is specifically for that. So I've been able to track all of it. I've also been tracking the customers that we are losing. The first, I can talk about that in a minute. And then the converted clients. So I'm tracking new converted clients, how much they're being charged per month, and the lead source. Then in the lost customers, I'm tracking the date that they canceled, their name, their monthly price, why they canceled. Then I'm tracking the amount of money that I'm spending, the date that that payment hits and then what, what platform I'm spending that money on. So then this way I can take all of that information and I can, I think I can share, I think I can share this. Hold on a second. Do you want to launch or grow your pooper scooper business? If you answered yes, then you have to check out the Poop Scoop millionaire community created by Will Milliken, the president of a seven figure dog waste removal business, Swoop Scoop. You will gain access to same strategies he used to scale his business from zero to over 2,000 reoccurring customers in just three years. Community members will receive exclusive access to his community forums with industry leaders, business courses are running, Facebook ads, commercial services and so much more. You'll get downloadable pooper scooper documents, live coachings and trainings, and access to verified one on one coaches and vendors that is a perfect fit for you. Including a gold level Google product expert that can help you with all of your Google troubles. Space is limited so please join Poop Scoop millionaires today@school.com or click my link down in the description. You can see in this sheet the ad spend the amount of money and then the different platforms. So this is what it looks like and then this is my recurring KPIs. This right here at the end of the year this snapshot is going to be so helpful for just the business and I don't even really know if I should be sharing this kind of stuff with you. This might be too much information for all my competitors and all the people, all the haters, but I don't care. I hope it helps somebody. Whoop. Just dropped my lid because this is the way I look at it. You know, I'm just figuring it out. I'm trying to help you. I feel like the Lord's gonna bless me if I continue to help other people because this business has just helped me so much. So I'm gonna just keep sharing. So anyways, ATP is my average Ticket price right now, I need to get that up. It is lower than I want. I think my bi weeklies is dragging that down. I have much more bi weeklies than I anticipated because I have them priced too low. So we're bumping that rate up. January, we started the, we started the month with 152 recurring customers. We lost one. We ended with 160 customers. At the end of that month with all of that information, we're at a 60.066 churn with a lifetime value of $15,900. We got 13 new customers. My historical revenue max would be $206,000, $206,700,000. If nothing changes my customer acquisition cost. My CAC was at $180 per customer that I signed up and we did five one time cleans and our actual revenue ended with $18,681. Now this lifetime max is crazy. Like that's crazy high because I only lost one customer in January. That is a very, very low churn. And the churn is going to increase. Especially like in the summer months. We're going to start churning once people start going out into their yard and the new hires people are, you know, there's going to be complaints, there's going to be issues, there's going to people that are going to cancel, there's people that aren't going to pay their bill, there's people that are going to move all sorts of stuff. At least now I'll be able to track it. Like I'm going to have a nice snapshot of what my business looks like. And this is so sexy. This is what I've been spending all winter doing just getting to this. I spent the last like six months, Charles Nelson that I met at the LCR summit with through Naylor, he helped me so much and he like dumbed it down for me. Like so stupidly simple and just answered questions that he was probably like, girl, what are you doing? I didn't know. I didn't know. So these are the, these are the numbers that you're gonna want to track. This is the stuff that you need to figure out. And if you are using a jobber or you're using a sweep and go, you can pull all of this information. And there's other CRMs, more robust ones that track all of this stuff in it for you. It's just jobber does not, but it has all of the information to where you can plug and play it into a document like this. Okay, so then we go To February. My average ticket price is up a little higher. We, we started with 179 new recurring customers. We lost four. And then I've documented over on the other side of the sheet why we lost them. What happened? We ended with 211 and we lost. How many customers did we lose? We lost 4. My churn rate was at a 2.23% so that drops my lifetime value down to $4,775. Your churn rate greatly impacts how how valuable a customer is to your company. Which over in the Poop Scoop Millionaire. Levi specifically talk. Not Levi, sorry. William specifically talks about this in the pooper scooper 101. What I did was is I went into the Poop Scoop Millionaire and I pulled everything that he had talked about, put it into this sheet and then I went and calculated it all myself. What I got to do is I have to write SOPs on how to calculate this each time because like I don't remember the full process of like calculating these different percentages. Once I have the numbers from Jobber, I'll have to go back and watch the videos again. But I'm going to write an SOP to remind myself so I don't have to keep doing that. But anyways, we had 70. We gained 70 new customers. 70. So if we go over to. Let's see if I can just scroll over here really quick. This is for the month of February. So if I just deselect. Let's go to February and see how much I spent. So the month of February I spent $5133 on ads and I was able to get 70 new recurring customers. My historical revenue max. If nothing changes, this is the most my business could make is 300 with. With recurring revenue. $334,000. My customer acquisition cost is at $84 for the month of March and we did 45 one time cleans ending the month out at $26,591. I do not have the information for March yet because March isn't over. So stay tuned. A huge shout out to today's episode sponsor channel Jobber. The number one operations management software for home service business owners. Jobber is the software I use to run, grow and manage my small pooper scooper business. Jobber helps me handle the admin tasks quicker so I can focus on growing my business and getting more me time back. From creating custom quotes all the way to getting paid my money, Jobber has my back. Yeah, we're pretty much best friends, but if I had to choose my favorite feature, I'd say the mobile app. I can create the quotes, edit the jobs, communicate with customers and keep my eye on the staff right from my phone. If you're a home service entrepreneur looking to level up your business, look more professional and save time, head over to jobber.com crouppen to start your 14 day free trial and get 20% off your first six months with my special link. Now let's get back to the scoop. All right, well, I appreciate you hanging out with me and letting me show you behind the scenes, pulling the curtain back. It's, it's honestly, it's real numbers from a person that is investing real money into their business has gone through real bad times. My business, I almost lost my business. My business almost closed back in 2000. What was that, 2024? After those vehicle accidents, I was fed up, I was out of money, I was out of patience, I was out of time, I was out of energy. I was just done. But I'm a fighter. I'm not going to give up. And the people that win are the ones that don't give up in business. You're going to get beat up, you're going to get pushed around, you're going to feel less than, you're going to feel like you're not doing enough. You're going to feel like you're doing too much. You're going to think, why am I doing all of this? Each person has their own why. And your why will consistently change over, over, over the years. And I used to sit here and be like, what is my why? What is it? Like what? Like what is it? And Charles, this is what Charles said to me, Charles Nelson, he goes, why not? Just why not? Why not be successful? Why not have a good life? Why not see what you're capable of? So that's what I've changed my why to why not. And when I talk about getting around people that are positive, people that are good influences that want to see you do well. Because conversations, dinners, napkin moments can be so impactful and so powerful in your business. And all the little inputs that you're putting in that you don't even realize, you do not even realize what is happening, it all comes together. All the time that I have spent with William and Levi going over behind the scenes stuff and the information I'm supposed to collect, the conversations that I had with Charles Nelson where he showed me, he really slowed it down. Step by step by step. He told me, I'll give you every other week for 30 minutes for like three months, and we stuck to it. And now look. Now look. Now I was able to afford to be able to hire somebody like Nicole. I'm going to talk to you guys about Nicole. She is doing things that I've been beating my head against the wall. And the reason why I met Nicole is because I went to a Brian Fullerton event. Fullerton Unfiltered My Landscapers. If you're listening to this, I'm sure you've heard of this. And I specifically went to this event because I was listening to a podcast with him interviewing Tricia Dork. She's the one that sold Brian his property that he lives on now with his house. And she was going to be a guest speaker there. And when I heard her speak, I said, I want to meet her. So I remember telling my husband, Josh, I said, we're going to this. We're going to go to the pre event. I'm going to go up to her. I'm going to introduce myself to her. I'm going to tell her, good luck. I'm going to watch her presentation afterwards. I'm going to congratulate her, and I'm going to develop a relationship with this woman. It sounds very stalkerish. You have to be very intentional when you want something. You cannot, I repeat, you cannot just think that things are going to happen and go with the flow. You have to create the flow to get what you want. There's a lot of things that go into it. Prayer, confidence, dedication, putting yourself in rooms with those people, having the conversations with the people that you want to have conversations with. It's incredibly important. I wouldn't have Mr. Producer right now if it wasn't for the Brian Fullerton podcast and having the relationship with Paul Jameson because of those two people and Andrew Martinez being on me, being like, you should start a podcast. You should start a podcast. I'm like, why do I want to start a podcast? I don't even want to listen to myself. I don't even like my own voice, right? So then I reach out to Mr. Podcast or Mr. Producer, and we're years into this podcast. I have a conversation with Paul Jamison. I come home and I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior. And completely, completely, people don't even recognize me. People don't even recognize me anymore because of how I carry myself. I am so different. And it's not. I don't really see it, but other people are seeing it and other people are saying it. But because of all of that and putting myself in the rooms and having the conversation. I developed a relationship with Trish. Trish and I, we started. She built that together. And she was really good friends with Nicole and brought Nicole on. And we were having some conversations, and I talked to Trish. I was like, listen, you have this skill set. I have this skill set. Neither of us have Nicole's skill set. I think we should bring Nicole in. We should bring her in and so she can help us. And then we were sitting at a table when she built that, and we were talking about stuff. Trish was on the phone because there's something to do with a deal, because she does, like, big, big real estate deals. She's like, you know, she's that girl doing, like, big deals. And I just looked at Nicole, and I essentially said I was like, hey, I know this is kind of, like, weird, but I really need help in my business. And I don't exactly know what this looks like, but I just know that you're supposed to, like, help, and you're supposed to be a part of this. I don't know. I don't even have the words. I don't even know what this is going to look like, but do you want to come in? She starts bawling her eyes out. She had a moment. She had to regroup. We didn't know what it was going to look like. I had no idea. But bringing her in, I am just very interested to see how this year is going to go. But collecting the data and having the information and doing the drive and doing everything that I needed to do is allowing this to happen. And sometimes you don't know. You don't know. You don't know what it's gonna look like. And all you can do is pray for the best or hope for the best. I pray for the best because I prayed it. I pray to my Lord and Savior because I don't know. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna wrap this one up. Yeah, that's really what's going on in the business. Truthfully, I brought a lot of people in. I hope I can have enough money to pay everybody. If not, I'm gonna figure it out because that's how I'm gonna go further. That's just how I'm gonna go further. I can't do all this on my own. I'm exhausted, so I'm gonna head out of here. I appreciate you hanging out with me during this real journey through the real experiences. And basically, this is, like my diary. This. This right here is my behind the scenes diary yeah, I'm not out in the field anymore. You know, you guys got that content when I was out in the field. Now it's I'm not working in the business. I'm working on the business. This is what it looks like sitting here. Spreadsheets, data collection, communication, refining the processes, looking over everything, analyzing it, putting people in the right places, rinsing and repeating. It's not sexy. My back hurts, my neck hurts, my hair is a mess. But them numbers are looking real nice. So until next time, bye.
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Thank you for hanging out with Erica Kruipen. She is so grateful and honored you decided to tune in to the Scoop podcast and hopes the information you heard today positively impacts you moving forward in business and life. Follow Erica on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok at Crupin Poopin Scoopin. And don't forget to follow the show in order to get notified when the next edition of the Scoop drops.
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