Loading summary
Transcript161 lines
- [00:01]
A
This is the million dollar business in your backyard. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle show. It's the entrepreneurship podcast. You can actually apply. And I've got an incredible story for you today. Today's guest went from zero to 350 recurring customers in his first three months in business, starting as a side project and racked up over $3 million in revenue last year, all from the not so glamorous service of pet waste removal. And if that wasn't enough, he says, you know what, there's so much opportunity in this space. I'm going to teach other people how we did it. And that's turned into another almost million dollar a year side hustle. From swoopscoop.com and the poop scoop millionaire community, William Milliken. Welcome to the Side Hustle show.
- [00:47]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me Nick. I appreciate it.
- [00:49]
A
You bet. It has been quite a journey from this little side project idea to cleaning a quarter million yards, couple hundred thousand yards at this point. But it is late 2020, you're working in digital marketing and you come to this, this realization that I could be making way more running the kinds of businesses that were hiring you for marketing help than just being the hired marketing help. What led you to the pet waste niche?
- [01:16]
B
Yeah, so my, I guess my first home service company was in the trade. So I have electrical company, I got a garage door company and I had a buddy from high school that I grew up with. We elementary school, middle school, high school, grew up down the street and he wanted to start a business with me and started investigating. Said, what kind of skills do you have? Do you have any like trade skills? He had basically no skills. Couldn't do plumbing, couldn't back up a trailer, couldn't do like lawn care. And at the time my wife was pregnant and I was busy working on the businesses, so she had hired a pooper scooper. They just weren't doing a very good job, not very professional. Didn't show up a lot of the time. The billing was weird. No uniforms, anything like that.
- [01:49]
A
Yeah.
- [01:50]
B
And I thought maybe we give that a shot and just kind of see what happens. Which I honestly wasn't expecting much because when I get into a new industry, one of the first things I do is I check to see how much like Google search volume there is just to get an idea of demand. And there's pretty much no search volume for this service. So I said, eh, we'll, we'll give it a shot and see what happens. Anyways, and I'm glad we did.
- [02:08]
A
So you didn't let that be a red flag. Like nobody necessarily. They don't know it's a thing. They don't know to look for it.
- [02:13]
B
Exactly. So that's actually how we ended up ending up growing was not with a lot of Google at first. It was just trying to find ways to get in front of people and let them know that that service exists. And once that started happening, things just started to snowball from there.
- [02:25]
A
Yeah, that's interesting to say. People aren't necessarily going out proactively looking for it, but I still think there's some demand. I mean, you, your wife had hired a service so you knew there was at least some kind of demand. People looking for help here.
- [02:38]
B
Yeah. Nobody likes picking up dog poop, so at least I don't, I don't know about you.
- [02:42]
A
No. This was because we've done a few episodes with Erica Kruipen from Krupen's Poop and Scooping and similar. She's like, this was a pain point for her. And so the light bulb goes off and says, well, if it's a pain point for me, other people probably don't like doing it. Maybe there's a business there.
- [02:57]
B
Absolutely. And there's some other things that were really appealing about it too. Like it cost almost no money to get started, which was a big one. You don't have to worry about hiring like journeyman electricians or people with 8,000 hours and all these crazy licenses. Like when you want to scale it up, it's a lot easier to hire people. You don't have any cost of materials. You just got like trash bags. You're not buying a bunch of home service equipment.
- [03:16]
A
Sure, sure. Okay. So checks the box. Low specialized skills required, low startup costs. And despite no search volume, there's some. I feel like there's some demand out there.
- [03:26]
B
Yeah.
- [03:27]
A
And there was other service providers doing it and maybe interestingly they weren't doing a great job like they were. Despite their lack of branding and lack of effort, they were still getting business.
- [03:40]
B
Yep, yep. 100%.
- [03:41]
A
Do you do anything else pre startup phase, like in the idea validation or competitive research?
- [03:46]
B
Honestly wasn't a lot of information out there. You had your local competitors, so you can kind of get an idea you had. Erica Kruipen was one of the OGs, had a YouTube channel. So basically that was the only information we had. My business partner runs the ops, so he didn't even have a dog. So I remember when we were first Getting started, he threw a bunch of rocks out in his backyard and he was sweeping up rocks to time himself to see how long he thought an average yard would take. Okay, so there's a lot of trial and error, especially when we were starting off.
- [04:11]
A
That's funny. You picture the guy with the stopwatch like any kind of sports montage movie.
- [04:17]
B
Yeah, yeah, we should go back and make that. That's a good idea.
- [04:20]
A
So what happens next in terms of launching and getting first customers here get.
- [04:25]
B
The idea, Kind of come up with a basic service pricing, come up with a basic kind of service system, because there's definitely things that you want to make sure you do, like spraying all your equipment, like chemical grade disinfectant, so you're not spreading like Parvo or other illnesses. So that was one thing that was really important to us. And honestly, at first, I kind of made my business partner grind it out. So he was door knocking, trying to network with vets and putting up door hangers and stuff like that, probably till we got our first 15, 20 customers or so. And once that happened, I said, okay, let's start to throw some real money behind it and see what happens. Google, as I mentioned, not a lot of search volume, but once we started running Facebook ads kind of went semi viral. People were just signing up left and right and it got pretty crazy because we went from an idea we didn't even know that was going to work. Then we had to start buying trucks and hiring people within the first couple months. So it was a pretty intense time.
- [05:10]
A
Yeah, no kidding. All of a sudden, if we get this in front of the right audience through the Facebook ads, we prove out the demand in a hurry and all of a sudden we're off to the races. Did your partner get positive response from the vet offices, from the door knocking, or is it kind of like, how big of a dog do you think I have? This is fine. It's not a big problem.
- [05:32]
B
Yeah, I think it was a little bit hit and miss. And honestly, another thing that he was doing that I forgot to mention too, was he was posting in the free, like, buy, sell trade groups on Facebook or like dog owners of Spokane, Dog Owners of Seattle, that type of thing. Okay, I'm just making those free organic posts in those groups. So between that door knocking and just really grinding it out, that's how we got our first, I guess about $1,000 a month in revenue.
- [05:52]
A
What kind of posts do well in those organic groups? Is it, can you come in straight up self promotion and be like, hey, we're starting a company is called Swoop Scoop. You know, look for the bright blue T shirts and you know, we're going to take good care of you.
- [06:06]
B
It depends on the group. All the groups have like different rules, so you'll want to make sure that you read the rules. A lot of them have different posting schedules. So like businesses, you can post once a week or you can post on Fridays. So just, just follow the rules. As far as what works best. What works best for us now is anything that has like a real person in it. So like one of our employees, it's wearing a branded uniform. If they're standing in front of a wrapped vehicle. Tends to work the best. But when we first started, I think our best performing ad of all time, I literally just took a picture of a bag of dog poop like in the sn and that, that thing crushed it for us. We're getting leads for like six or seven bucks closing. One out of three, one out of four of them. So it was, it was pretty crazy. I wish it still worked like that.
- [06:42]
A
Yeah, let's talk about some of the economics here. So 6 to $7 per lead early on, maybe. Best case scenario, 30% close rate. What's that process flow? Like this is filling out a form on your website, like a request for a quote. What happens after this? Lead form?
- [06:59]
B
Yeah, so we've modified over the years, so now everything goes to the website. But at the time I wanted as little friction as possible. So we were actually just running Facebook ads to send us a DM on Facebook.
- [07:09]
A
Okay.
- [07:09]
B
So we don't have to worry about them going to a website. We don't have to worry about page speeds. We don't have to worry about any like technical issues. It was just like the lowest friction. They send us a message, we try to reply as quick as possible with some pre formatted messages, get them a quote and get them on the schedule.
- [07:23]
A
Okay. How do you figure out how much to charge per yard, per dog, per week, Anything?
- [07:30]
B
Yeah, it kind of goes back to the reverse engineering. So the scooping the rocks in the backyard to kind of figure out how long it would take to do a yard. And then once we started getting some customers, it was a lot easier to validate that and see what actually is going to happen. So one tech can typically handle between 150 or 125 to 150 customers on their route. So they're doing 25 to 35 a day, depending on route density. So as the business scales, it's been a lot Easier to kind of reverse engineer that. But at first it was, see the competitors are charging, charge a little bit more, be more professional, try to time yourself to get some guard rails. And at the beginning it's really just selling labor. Yeah, like I said, there's not a lot of cost of goods sold and whatnot. So it's more forgiving if you screw that up at the beginning.
- [08:09]
A
Was there an hourly rate you were shooting for with the rock pickup practice rounds?
- [08:16]
B
Probably around the. Trying to shoot for around the seventy, eighty dollar range, I think at the time. Now we want to be like well over 100.
- [08:22]
A
Yeah, it's wild that there's demand for that at $70 an hour. It's like, yeah, it sucks, but I can swallow my pride. I can go out and do it for that price. Yeah.
- [08:33]
B
So you don't tell people you charge us $70 an hour to pick up dog food for 120 bucks an hour?
- [08:37]
A
No, no, no. It's packaged a little bit differently.
- [08:40]
B
Yeah, exactly. And over the time too, there's been little tips and tricks. Like instead of telling people what the monthly price is, if you give them like the per visit price, that tends to convert better. So there's a lot of tips and tricks you learn along the way. It just makes the business compound more and more over the years.
- [08:54]
A
Pricing on the website today says between 65 and 125 bucks a month. But then you break it down as well. It's only 25 bucks a visit or something like that.
- [09:05]
B
Yep, exactly. If you go to the quote tool, you can have different pricing. So pricing is based on how many dogs you have, what service frequency you want, and then it's just based on the average size yard. So somebody has two acres, obviously we're going to charge more for that, but everything's up front and transparent right there on the website, which I think is important as well.
- [09:20]
A
Yeah, they got two acres, they got a bunch of horses out there. You're like, well, this is not part of the deal.
- [09:25]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [09:27]
A
Do you find most people go for that recurring monthly service and that's just kind of. They add it into their budget, makes it easier for them.
- [09:34]
B
Yeah, I'd say definitely the majority of customers will do that depending on the season. So this business, the seasonality of it actually was pretty surprising to me. Everybody expects that summer is going to be the busy time, but it's actually usually the first quarter of the year. So when the weather's the worst, it's peak demand. And if you're in A market that gets snow. Like, first market was, once that snow melts off, I call it peak poop pain season. And things just go crazy because they got three, four, five months of poop that they haven't picked up. And they don't want to mess with it. They want to go out and mow their yard or whatever, but it's just. It's nasty.
- [10:06]
A
Got it, got it. Okay. I saw a note about switching from monthly billing at one point to quarterly billing for certain customers. And the. Maybe just like the psychological impact of reducing that decision fatigue of like, well, I got to sign up for this thing again.
- [10:21]
C
Again, Again.
- [10:22]
A
It's like, oh, no, no. Just make it fewer decisions or fewer charge points.
- [10:26]
B
Exactly. Yeah. So every time you charge somebody's car, there's a chance that that doesn't go through. Right. Whether the card number changes or whether they want to cancel services and whatnot. So we decided to offer an additional billing frequency option. We actually have two now. So you can either be monthly or you can be quarterly, or you can also pay annually, which is something that we just rolled out. But we found that people on quarterly billing are about 72% less likely to churn than people on month. Kind of, as you mentioned, they have that look back, period. If you're only getting billed once or four times a year versus 12 times a year, there's just less opportunities for them to kind of think about that and decide if they want to cancel or not. Kind of from a psychological perspective.
- [11:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. They're pre committed to this in a way, and just. Yeah, they see it less frequently. Do you offer some like, oh, it's 10% off if you opt for the quarterly plan or something like that?
- [11:13]
B
Yeah. So we do just kind of a standard 10% off. Kind of the way that we did it. When we roll it out for the first time, we usually do an annual price increase just to kind of keep up with inflation or whatever else is happening. As the service gets better, as we get more overhead, we naturally have to charge more. But when we first rolled it out, we did about a 10 price increase. But we said, hey, if you sign up for quarterly billing, we knock 10% off. So you're essentially locking in the same rate for the next year.
- [11:35]
A
Got it, got it.
- [11:36]
B
Pretty good take rate between annual and quarterly. About close to 40% of our client base is on those higher billing frequencies.
- [11:43]
A
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, you get pretty good opt in for those. Like, yeah, I want to save the money. I love the service. So let's keep doing it 100%.
- [11:50]
B
So that was one of the best things we did too. And also timing that strategically because as I mentioned, we acquire most of our customers during that first quarter of the year. So we do that December. We're able to we pre bill everybody so we're able to pull forward all that cash so we can use it to grow the business faster.
- [12:06]
A
What are you mainly investing in? William's answer plus his mind blowing customer lifetime value coming up right after this.
- [12:14]
C
When I started the Side Hustle Show, I had no idea what I was.
- [12:18]
A
Doing, but I did have a lot.
- [12:19]
C
Of what ifs, what if nobody listens? What if I embarrass myself? What if no one cares? But what started as a little experiment in the corner of the living room has completely changed my life. When you're ready to face down those fears and hesitations and what ifs in launch your thing, whatever it is, it helps to have a partner like Shopify in your corner to help. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. From household names to dozens of side Hustle show guests. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build that eye catching high converting online store. Plus, Shopify helps you find customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And if you get stuck, their award winning 24. 7 customer support is standing by. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.comsidehustle go to shopify.comsidehustleen that's shopify.comsidehustLe in the next 60 seconds, 23 entrepreneurs are going to find their next team member on Indeed. I'm excited to partner with Indeed for this episode because when you need to find amazing candidates fast and you need the powerful matching technology and unmatched reach of our sponsor Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites and get the help you need fast. Plus, Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire even faster. It'll make your post jump to the top of the page for your relevant candidates and the proof is in the results. Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed get 45% more applications. That's why for my next hire, I'm using Indeed. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed side Hustle show, listeners will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com Sidehustleshow just go to indeed.com Sidehustleshow right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com Sidehustleshow terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need.
- [14:27]
B
The main thing, especially for that time of year, is going to be marketing. Marketing. Marketing. Marketing is where most of that extra money is going to go. So you definitely have to keep a close eye on, like, your customer acquisition costs. You got to keep a close eye on, like, what your customer lifetime value is going to be. Obviously, make tweaks as you go, but once you have those things kind of dialed in, you can see how aggressively you're able to scale the business in any particular market.
- [14:46]
A
It's one of these things where in my head, it's probably a pretty sticky service once somebody gets used to the luxury of somebody owned by, I don't know to deal with this anymore. I got a team for this. The swoop scoop people are coming. I don't have to deal with it. And it's like, whatever they charge is fine. Imagine the LTV tends to be pretty good. Do you have those metrics?
- [15:06]
B
Yeah. So gross revenue, it depends a little. It's a little bit different per market. So in our Seattle market, it's a little over $3,000 LTV on gross revenue. And then Spokane is closer to 25 to $2,600, kind of in that range.
- [15:17]
A
That's wild. That dog in the yard is worth quite a bit.
- [15:21]
B
I know. I'm going to start just buying people dogs. I think that might be the next thing.
- [15:24]
A
Yeah, Like, I thought it was going to be high. Like, that's a lot higher than I expected. And so you've got now some leeway to go spend on customer acquisition. And of course, there's labor costs involved in delivering the service. And so maybe we'll switch gears and kind of talk about that side of the fulfillment side. We've got the demand side. Okay. We can run these Facebook ads and get customers in the door relatively predictably. But now we got to go out and deliver a rockstar service. Otherwise, people are going to cancel. They're never going to materialize into that $3,000 LTV. Earl, I think you mentioned, like, okay, one service provider can cover 125, 150 yards in a week, but, like, they might not have that many early on. Or they're like, okay, I got one customer over here. I got somebody else the other side of town. It's kind of messier in the early days. But talk to me a little bit about the Fulfillment side.
- [16:12]
B
Yeah. So on the fulfillment side, it's all about efficiency. So as you mentioned, you don't want to be driving from one side of town to the other. So we'll split up our week by different service days. So we'll have different, different zip codes or different clusters. So we only service that particular day on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever that might be. That's kind of the main thing that you want to do when you're first getting started. And then as far as fulfillment goes, it's also important to have a standardized process. So we send the customers a 60 minute on the way text. We get to the house, we have an app that has all the gate codes, notes, all that kind of stuff. They'll go, they'll walk the yard in a specific pattern to make sure that they don't miss anything. At the end, they take a picture of the closed gate, send it to the customer so they know their dog's not going to be let out, and then they spray all their equipment down with the kennel grade disinfectant. So just having that standardized process and having good training around that, it's not like rocket science. But you definitely want to make sure you're not missing any steps, otherwise it's going to hurt your service quality.
- [17:01]
A
And it sounds like you had to go out and hire helpers almost right out of the gate because you're like, well, shoot, we're not going to be able to do this ourselves anymore. Maybe the intention was to never do it ourselves, but we got to bring in some people here. So what are you looking for in a professional pooper scooper?
- [17:18]
B
In the early days, I'll admit it was pretty, it was pretty rough. I remember we'd hire somebody and like train them for 30 minutes and then we'd hire like three more people and then have them try to train them. So it was definitely pretty rough in the early days, but now we're very selective about who we hire. We'll probably, every time we post a job ad, we get hundreds of applications because people just find it interesting. We pay pretty well, we get benefits, those types of things. Now we'll filter through 100, 125 resumes just to get a handful of ride alongs and maybe hire one or two people. So we're very selective about that. There's different things that you can look for. You don't necessarily have to have outdoor working skills, outdoor working history, but definitely people that can work hard. It's going to be important. People that are okay Working alone, people that are okay, working outside in all kinds of weather conditions. We also prefer to hire people that already have a job because they have some skin in the game. Right. If they have to put in their two week notice, I think that's always a good sign for us because they're going to be more committed to the role as well.
- [18:09]
A
Yeah. And right now you're looking for full time people. You're like, look, we got enough yards to keep you busy.
- [18:15]
B
Yep, there are quite a few people. I think there's close to 40 something people in the company now.
- [18:19]
A
Okay, is there a way that you think about the unit profitability, like per yard or per route? I don't know. I'm trying to think of, okay, if I'm charging a customer 120 bucks a month, I know roughly it's going to cost me 60 to fulfill that. I don't even know how to phrase it. But how do you think about the labor margins?
- [18:36]
B
Yeah, so gross margins, we're trying to be around 70% gross margin. So that would include your employee full in costs between insurance and taxes, all that stuff, and then basically the garbage bags and everything else that it costs to fulfill the service. Sometimes you end up in the high 60s, but we've increased prices again, so we should be above that 70% mark that I like to shoot for. And then we're also going to be moving our scoopers to a pay for performance model. So instead of just getting an hourly wage, they'll actually get a percentage of the revenue that they fulfill. That'll probably land in the low 20%.
- [19:06]
C
Okay.
- [19:07]
A
Is it considered an hourly, like what's, what's a typical hourly rate to pay people right now?
- [19:13]
B
So it depends on the location. It costs a lot more to hire people in Seattle than it does in North Idaho. But generally I like to look and see what all the other landscapers are paying. What like entry level jobs at like Amazon, FedEx, all those types of places. And I like to pay a couple dollars an hour more than that just so that we get the best pool of people. So I mean, that could be anywhere from 20 to $25, depending on the location.
- [19:32]
A
That's right. And then that goes back to the. Well, we're shooting for 70 bucks an hour on the customer side with some degree of open opacity. So yeah, talk to me about the decision to go full like branded trucks, because I assumed I've seen your trucks around town and like, I assume this was like a franchise thing and you're like, no, no, no, it's all company operated. We want to maintain some level of control and process. It's like, okay, you know, I'm just curious about the infrastructure and like building trucks and providing those to workers too.
- [20:03]
B
No, it's definitely a harder way to go. I think that's something I learned kind of from the other home service companies I had worked with. When you have brand new vehicles, not only is it good for marketing, allows you to charge higher prices, it makes you seem more professional, it's going to help your conversion rates. So that goes a lot more beyond just the marketing side of things for the wrapped vehicles. And I'd say that's kind of a core pillar of our business. But I kind of go into it, especially this one. I wanted, I saw how bad some of these other companies were doing and I just said, I want to do everything better. I want to make sure we have uniforms, I want to make sure we have a standardized process. I want to wrap vehicles, which we weren't able to do right away, but within the first year we definitely started getting our vehicles wrapped up. Now that's just a standard process. Every time we buy a vehicle, the first thing we do is go and get it wrapped. And it just starts to compound over time because as I mentioned, when we first started, there was no Google searches. Now on our peak months, there might be 8, 900, 1000 searches a month just for our branded terms. And I think our truck wraps and our other marketing has a lot to do with that.
- [20:57]
A
Yeah. People see you driving around town.
- [20:59]
B
Yeah.
- [21:00]
A
What was that company again? Yeah. So very consistent, very professional. And. And that's what I guess I would have assumed, like, oh, somebody bought this territory. But it's like, oh, no. We just had demand and so we hired somebody to go out and fulfill it.
- [21:14]
B
Yep. And we also want to position ourselves as a premium service provider because I mean, somebody's high school kid could go out there and scoot poop for half the price that we're charging. Right. So we want to just make sure we're upholding that image and that professionalism that other companies really can't replicate and really reduce the risk for the customer, that they're hiring a professional company with background, checked employees and that we do everything the right way. So there's a premium to that.
- [21:36]
A
Yeah. How are we going to justify our premium positioning? Our premium prices all goes into that. It's all part of it.
- [21:42]
B
Yeah, 100%.
- [21:43]
A
What's next in terms of expanding geographically? I imagine people asking you like, oh, could I Bring this to my town or something like that. It's like, well, you can. And we'll talk about that in a minute.
- [21:55]
B
Yeah. So next step for us this last year is really about building kind of that next layer of management. So we have an ops manager, we got a marketing manager, we got a finance person, we got office manager, we got scoopervisors is what we call them for each location.
- [22:09]
A
Nice.
- [22:09]
B
So we really went out and built out that infrastructure. Really tried to dial in our numbers. So now that we can just go out and kind of copy paste new locations. So we're in Spokane, we're in north Idaho, we're in Everett, Seattle, and then in Tacoma. And then we'll probably be looking to add some locations and some neighboring states later this year.
- [22:27]
A
Yeah, I think the maybe broader idea is here, like here was a service that already existed, but nobody knew who to call.
- [22:33]
C
Right.
- [22:33]
A
There wasn't like a clear market leader. It was very fragmented, like onesie, twosie, mom and pop type of operators. You're like, look, there's an opportunity to come in here and become that number one player and really swing for the fences. And it's really impressive what's been built. Yeah.
- [22:49]
B
Thank you.
- [22:50]
A
Customer wise, is it a mix of residential and commercial or park service? I don't even know who would be on the commercial side, but like larger apartment communities or something where they don't want to deal with this.
- [23:01]
B
Yeah, you definitely can't have a mix. So the typical target for like the commercial is going to be homeowners associations and apartment complexes. You can try to get like government contracts and stuff. It's not really something that we've looked into so much. So that's going to mean we'll install like those pet waste stations that people pull the bag out and they pick up their own poop. We'll maintenance those, we'll do common area cleaning. But really the commercial side is almost an entirely different business from residential. You have to go out and you actually have to shake hands and you got to network with people to try to get these contracts. You're usually on like a net 30 or whatever as far as payment terms go. So you're not pre billing. It's completely different as far as like actually getting the clients and like the client management side of things. So I intentionally focus more heavily on that. Residential for us.
- [23:46]
A
Are there any tools or technology that you rely on to figure out where everybody is going on any given day?
- [23:54]
B
Yeah, so we have a routing software. So there's a ton of different softwares. And CRMs out there. Probably the most popular one. We use Sweep and Go. A lot of people use Jobber. Some people just use other like Google map type tools. So depending on the size of your business, there's definitely a lot of options out there for people.
- [24:09]
A
Yeah, Jobber is one that's been recommended. You mentioned Sweep and Go. This is like a software, like built specifically for pooper scooper companies.
- [24:18]
B
Yeah. Somebody built a software just for pooper scoopers specifically. So that's the one that we use right now.
- [24:23]
A
Is it your software?
- [24:24]
B
No, no, no, no.
- [24:25]
A
Okay.
- [24:26]
B
Yeah. Building software is a whole nother thing.
- [24:29]
A
Maybe that's the next side. Hustle. Yeah. Bring it in house. Okay. Anything else? Tools and tech wise, that's the main thing.
- [24:35]
B
Tools. I mean it's really simple. We just use like a Corona garden rake and like a lobby dustpan and then we just throw a bag in there. And that's pretty much all you need as far as tools go.
- [24:43]
A
Yeah.
- [24:43]
B
One thing that is kind of an interesting debate that people always try to decide on is if you want to buy trucks and actually take the pet waste with you or if you want to buy fuel efficient cars and just leave the pet waste in the customer's trash cans. So that's a big cost factor on how you run your business.
- [24:59]
A
Also, I take it you take it with you.
- [25:00]
B
We do it at our first location because I want to do everything like as premium as possible when we opened up in Seattle. So that's just trying not to take it and see what happens. And we've had pretty much the same growth trajectory, which was kind of interesting.
- [25:11]
C
So.
- [25:12]
A
Okay.
- [25:12]
B
I think Erica even mentioned she used to take the waste and she stopped taking. And she had about 10% of her clients drop off. But it wasn't catastrophic.
- [25:19]
A
Oh, okay. Yeah. It's like, I don't know, the garbage can sits outside on the side of the house anyway, it's gonna smell bad no matter what you put in there. And then you gotta take it to the dump or someplace. Where do you take it all?
- [25:31]
B
So we have a deal with waste management in our area. So we just have a roll off like trash can so they'll come pick it up a couple times a week. Last year things were super crazy. We had like a 20 yard like construction dumpster that they'd have to come and pull off site every week. So yeah, we had some pretty big dumpsters. And that's another benefit to not taking the waste is you don't have to deal with all that. That starts to add up over time. And you spend.
- [25:51]
A
Yeah, no kidding.
- [25:51]
B
Three, two, three, $4,000 a month on waste disposal. Plus you have to have a location to actually put the dumpster. You got to buy trucks that are 30, $40,000 instead of a $10,000 car. So there's a lot of benefits to not taking it on the business side. And if most people don't care, might as well save the money.
- [26:08]
A
Yeah, it's just, I don't want to step on it when I go out onto the grass and just what happens to it after the fact, that's fine.
- [26:14]
B
Exactly.
- [26:15]
A
Okay, any, not necessarily horror stories, but anything that comes to mind, you know, that people ought to be aware of if they go out and try and start something similar in their area. Whether it's. Yeah, I guess it's dogs and people. Like things can happen.
- [26:28]
B
Yeah, it's definitely dogs and people and a lot of driving. So when people are driving, especially for us, we got I don't know, 25 plus vehicles that are out there rolling around anytime. So there's gonna be car accidents that happen. There's occasionally dog bites that happen. It's pretty rare. I want to, I'll have to check what the numbers was. I think it was like one out of every like 12 or 15,000 yards will have some kind of a dog incident. So it's pretty rare. And most of the time those only happen. You could do take every precaution. You can make sure the dogs are inside, you can do whatever. But typically like 90% of the time it's some kid just lets the dog out while you're back in the backyard when they're not supposed to. Yeah, but it's pretty rare.
- [27:02]
A
Like I said, okay, let's transition to teaching this business to other people. You say, look, dog poop has been very good to me. I think there's an opportunity here. You started the poop scoop millionaire community. This is hosted on Skool at the moment and there's hundreds of members, other people doing the same business. And you said, look, I can only expand so fast in the northwest, but hey, I'm going to hand you the keys. You go do this thing on your own wherever you live. It seems to have gotten a really strong reaction, a really positive response over there.
- [27:37]
B
Yeah, I mean honestly with the community, I was just as surprised surprised as that taken off as I was that the poop scoop business took off in the first place. So that was a whole nother journey. That was pretty interesting. But kind of the whole thing started is I did a podcast with Erica. First time I'd ever been on camera or anything. I had probably dozens of companies reach out to me and kind of ask how we had been doing things. Wanted some like one on one time with me. I didn't really want to do it so I threw out like a crazy number. So okay, I'll talk to you for 1500 bucks. I think I ended up making close to 20 grand in a few weeks.
- [28:06]
A
Turns out a lot of other people are interested in starting a pooper scooper business and they were willing to pay to learn from William. More on that and how he became.
- [28:14]
C
Almost a spokesperson for the industry in just a moment. Small business life means hustling and figuring it out as you go a lot of times all on your own. But you don't have to spend your evenings guessing at tax forms or tracking down onboarding docs. Our sponsor Gusto handles all of that so you can spend your time on the parts of your business that you actually love. Gusto is the online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one. It's remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, workers comp 401, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. You can process unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. Try gusto today@gusto.com sidehustle and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com sidehustle G U S T O gusto.com sidehustleen when it comes to leveling up your life and your business, it's wild how much the basic stuff matters, like how you talk to your customers, how you keep your team on the same page. A cleaner, more modern setup can make everything feel smoother. That's why I'm excited to partner with Quo for today's episode. Spelled Q U O, Quo is the modern alternative to run your business communications. In fact, it's the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews. More than 90,000 businesses, from solo operators to growing teams, already rely on Quo to stay connected, stay professional and be consistently reachable. Quo works wherever you are, right from an app on your phone or computer and lets you keep your existing phone number. You can add new numbers or teammates in minutes, sync with your CRM, and rely on seamless routing and call flows as your business scales, make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.comsidehustle that's quo.comsidehustle. no missed calls, no missed customers.
- [30:29]
A
Yeah, if they say yes to this, I'll do it. Yeah.
- [30:31]
B
Yeah. A lot of people said yes. And I was like, okay, maybe there's something here. I was a big follower of Alex Hormozi. He had invested into the platform at the time. He's doing something called the school games, which I had no idea at the time what that even was. It was kind of confusing to me. But eventually I got on there, kind of figured out what it was all about and built out the boop scoop millionaire community. Like you said, hundreds and of hundreds, hundreds of people in there. We got 7, 800 people in there right now.
- [30:52]
A
What's inside, what's behind the paywall?
- [30:54]
B
So yeah, when you join, it's $69 a month. And there's a big community forum so you can ask anybody questions. There's a ton of six, seven figure pooper scoopers in there that are very active on there. And we also have a classroom. There's probably over, I think there's over 30 hours of material now. So we walk people through everything from what tools to buy, what software to use, how to use the software, how to set up your pricing, how to do marketing. So we have classes on how to run Facebook ads, Google Ads, other marketing channels that are effective, how to hire people, how to do commercial services. Pretty much A to Z is laid out there in the school community. Everything you need to get going.
- [31:23]
A
Yeah. And for just 69 bucks a month versus charging the $1,500 consulting fee or a higher ticket entry point.
- [31:30]
B
Yeah, exactly. Or if we were going to sell franchises, we could charge people 50, 100 grand to open a location or like whatever. But it kind of defeats the part that's really exciting about the business is get started for a couple hundred bucks, right?
- [31:41]
A
Yeah. What's been driving membership growth over there or like even just the first few members?
- [31:47]
B
Yeah. So I think it was from that there's some Facebook groups that we were a part of that we kind of let people know. And then we just kind of started talking about the. We got a small YouTube channel with about 10, 11,000 subscribers. Just started talking about things on there and over time it's just been compounding and really for me, it's just not really holding anything back. We just, we Tell people what they need to do and it's up to them if they want to do it or not. And it kind of ends up being a win, win. Even though some people say we're creating more competitors or this and that, what we're really doing is creating more industry awareness because people weren't really searching for that service. But now that there's all these new companies popping up, there's all these people doing advertising, there's a lot more Google searches in there than there's ever been. I mean, it's double, triple, like year over year, which I think is going to be good for the industry, which is ultimately going to help us going into new markets because that's one of our strong suits and also gives us a lot of options. Yeah, but we could franchise later if we wanted to. Somebody doesn't like doing the business anymore, maybe they want to sell down the road. That gives us an opportunity if we want to buy a route or something like that and open up in a new market. So it really gave us a lot of optionality and it was kind of a win, win, win for everybody. The industry, the people in the community, and then us.
- [32:50]
A
Yeah, that's a really interesting angle. 1. We can start to create broader awareness and search demand around this by almost like crowdsourced, community driven. Like, okay, we'll have a bunch of these startup all around the country and more people become aware of it. That kind of brings up a second point. Somebody gave me the stat, I think it was Nick Huber gave me the stat about, well, 20 years ago, nobody had a landscaping service or a lawn mowing service. And now it's like 40% of all families hire this out. It's like just like the pie continues to get bigger for these niche home services where it's like millennial homeowners, like, I don't want to deal with this. Or even elderly homeowners. Like, I'm not getting up on a ladder to clean the gutters or wash the windows or something. Somebody else can come by and do this. So the pie continues to get bigger. And I think this pooper scooper example is very small toe in the door, kind of a wedge. And then now we can start to pry it open with some creative branding and marketing.
- [33:47]
B
100%. So I think it's just getting started. More dog owners than ever. Right. People like to spend money on their dogs, so I think it's definitely a great industry to be in, especially if you get in early.
- [33:57]
A
Yeah, nobody can afford to have kids, so they get A dog. And then, okay, here's the logical next thing. Going back to the poop scoop millionaire and the YouTube content. Like, is there a video or two that that has popped off or that has driven awareness and signups more than. More than the rest?
- [34:13]
B
We have a few. I think our top video is basically how to start a $100,000 pooper scooper business. So it basically walks through kind of high level, over 20, 25 minutes, everything to get started. Other people might want to join from that. And then also just doing podcast shows like this. We've been on upflip. I've been on. I was on Alex Hermosi's channel for like 30 seconds asking him a question. We were on Cody Sanchez. We were on some, like, bigger places.
- [34:34]
A
Did you do a starter story one or maybe it was the upflip one that I saw.
- [34:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, we did. The upflip one was probably the biggest that got, I think over 3 million views or something.
- [34:42]
A
It was really well produced.
- [34:43]
B
Yeah, that one was definitely big on driving awareness for the industry. So. And then we also do a. Just kind of interesting. We just started doing a once a year annual event called ScoopCon we did in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho. So we had everybody. We had over 100 people fly out and just hear us talk about dog poop, which was pretty cool. That kind of made everything real for me. It took me like over an hour and a half just to like walk through the hotel lobby because everybody was like coming up the dock.
- [35:05]
A
Me? Yeah, you're like the celebrity in this space.
- [35:07]
B
This is kind of weird. So been a good journey so far.
- [35:10]
C
That's crazy.
- [35:11]
A
There was enough demand to have your own industry event and to spearhead it and to say, look, come to Coeur d' Alene and we're not going to go to Vegas. We're going to come to Northern Idaho.
- [35:20]
B
Yeah, exactly. So this year we're going to be in Texas, a little bit more central for people, so you expect to have a bigger turnout. But this whole thing's been totally crazy and has blown my mind from. Like I said, I was expecting to make an extra thousand bucks a week, a month or something with the poop scoop business. Now we got multiple locations doing millions in revenue. We got this online community, got this event. So it's been pretty surreal. Just grateful for everything.
- [35:42]
A
Where do you divide your time today between operating the service business, the community content, outreach, the conference event, where do the hours go?
- [35:52]
B
It's a pretty big mix. So right now I've tried To build the business where I don't actually have to do anything necessarily right. So we have an ops manager, we got the scrupis, we got an office manager, I got my partner who's technically like the VP of operations. So it's a very, very rare that any like operational issue comes to me on that side. I'm just looking at little tweaks that we could make to do things better. Whether that's quarterly billing, annual billing, modifying like our standard operating procedures. So it's not super intensive on that side. And then on the Poop Scoop Millionaire side, I've kind of tried to replicate that as well. So we have other like Poop Scoop content creators that make videos on the, on our channel. So it's not just 100% dependent on me. We got other people that are kind of community leaders, have sizable Poop Scoop businesses within the community. So something happens to me and I get hit by a bus or whatever like the community and the business is going to be okay. So really kind of thinking through that and then it's really just at this point asset allocation. Right. So we have all these labor assets, we got this capital. So what's going to give us the best return on our other time or money investment?
- [36:49]
A
Now was there any live coaching component to the, to the community or it's just kind of on demand. You get the community access plus the educational content.
- [37:00]
B
You get the community access. You get the educational content. And then we have two to three live events every single week. So we have one on Sunday called Sunday Scoop Sessions where it's basically for newer companies to come in and they'll ask like a more experienced person any questions they have about the business. I personally try to do one Q&A at least per month. And then we have another event called the Oops Scoop Millionaire Power Hour where people can get questions answered and there's different topics and things like that. And then like I said, I'll personally try to do one Q&A a month. And then we also have have coaches within there. Somebody wants a one on one time with somebody that's not me, preferably they can book that there as well.
- [37:32]
A
Yeah, the branding is on point all across the board with, you know, the Scoop session.
- [37:38]
B
You gotta have fun with it, right? I mean, yeah, we all gotta do something to make money, but you might as well do something that's kind of fun and gets people excited. And I think having a cohesive branding experience and coming up with those funny names, the Scoopervisors for our supervisors, all that Kind of stuff just makes it a little bit more enjoyable.
- [37:54]
A
Yeah, definitely. I mean, Erica did the same thing with the bright pink branding. It's like, yeah, it's about poop, but we're trying to make it more fun and colorful and I think you've done a good job of that.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, we got the baby boy blue color of that. So we're like the boy version of our business.
- [38:10]
A
What's surprised you the most over the last five, six years of running this thing?
- [38:14]
B
Big things that were surprising was one that it kind of took off the way that it did. The other thing I kind of mentioned before was the seasonality of the business as well. Expecting it to be high summer demand when that's actually the lowest demand of the whole year. That was another thing that was surprising. Other than that, I don't know if there's anything that was super shocking that stood out, but it's just been exciting to see how the industry's been growing. There's been hundreds of companies that have been popping up and our goal's kind of been to make it a mainstream industry. I think we're doing a good job of accomplishing that goal so far.
- [38:44]
A
Yeah, I've seen your stuff driving around. So some people are definitely taking advantage of the service. What do you do on the seasonality side when you got full time w two people on the books and all of a sudden, well, now you're down to 70 yards a week instead of 150. And it's got to scale this back.
- [39:02]
B
Yeah. So kind of the way that it has worked out is we'll peak usually March and April, and then over the summertime we'll probably churn down maybe 15 to 20% of whatever that peak was. So during the busy season, what we actually do, so we don't really have that issue, is we'll hire a weekend team, make up for all that excess demand. And so then everybody just leaves their trucks at the office on Friday. Weekend team work Saturday, Sunday. They're just seasonal part time employees. And that way we don't have to buy twice as many trucks. And then we also don't have to worry about like laying a bunch of people off over the summertime.
- [39:31]
A
Okay. So hiring for the steady state or for the lower side and then ramping up with demand for the peak season versus hiring for the peak season and then being like, well, now we got bloated payroll.
- [39:42]
B
Yeah, so we will have a bloated payroll for couple, couple weeks. Obviously, as we're getting people trained up and that Type of thing. But I'd rather be overstaffed and maintain the premium image than have a bunch of issues.
- [39:53]
A
Fair. Well, what's next for you? Where do you want to take this thing?
- [39:56]
B
Yeah. So I think next step is we kind of have the team, the infrastructure in place to start kind of copy pasting new locations. So we're going to be opening possibly two locations later this year. One for sure. So that's going to be the main thing. Continue doing our ScoopCon event. Continue growing Poop Scoop Millionaire there. It's just been a. Yeah. Kind of a compounding vehicle from there. So we'll probably just keep slowly expanding.
- [40:16]
A
Well, very Good. It is. Swoopscoop.com We've got the Poop Scoop Millionaire community. I will link that up in the show notes for you. Or you can Google that as well. It's hosted on Skool. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.
- [40:33]
B
I'd say it's just go out there and start actually taking action. I see a lot of people that they gotta have the perfect website, they gotta have the perfect logo, they gotta have the perfect business card. And they don't actually take the steps that is required to go out there and grow a business which is really getting sales and getting revenue in the door. So I'd say just go out there and get started. There's definitely a lot that you need to learn, but it's not rocket science and a lot of people have done it before and there's no reason that you can't do it yourself. So that's what I would say.
- [40:57]
A
Yeah. Why not you? If other people can get it done, why not you? So just take action. Takeaways from me. Number one, talking to, thinking about the labor margins, kind of building with the intention of not. Not doing the work yourself, but building in kind of a layer of management and branding such that other people can kind of slot in and do the fulfillment side for you. I think that was really interesting. I still think there's a big opportunity in branding these kind of fragmented industries where there's no company comes to mind. When you think of this service, maybe you could become that company. I think that's a really big thing. In fact, I have A list of 101 service business ideas as your free listener bonus for this episode. You download that for free in the show notes for this one or just follow the link in the episode description. It'll get you right over there just to get the creative juices flowing. Okay. William's got the pooper scooper thing on lock, but maybe there's another opportunity for you to do something similar. Follow the same playbook for so again that's the free listener bonus 101 service business ideas that may be you could start today. Big thanks to William for sharing his insight. Thanks to Erica Kruipen for the intro. Big thanks to our sponsors as well for helping make this content free for everyone. Side hustlenation.comdeals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. Fire off that text message. Hey, did you know you can make Wadi doing this? Until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle Show. Hustle on the.