A+ Entrepreneur Advice from the Poop Scoop Millionaire

0:00You are listening to and watching the Builders podcast where I interview CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders about building their business and their career. William Milliken, aka the Poop Scoop Millionaire, joins me today. This conversation is seriously 20 minutes of gold for anyone that is trying to figure out how to start a business and scale it. We talk category creation, LTV to CAC ratios, prioritization, voice of customers. It's really great. And like me, William lives in Washington State, another Pacific Northwestern. If you loved this episode and want some similar takes and vibes. I would also recommend episode 54.

0:37It's about growing a financial planning business. Thanks.

0:46Hi, William. How are you? Good to see you. I'm doing good, John. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Glad you're glad you're here. So let's go back to let's go back for a sec to COVID. People all over America were getting pets. We're getting we're getting COVID pets, COVID dogs, huge phenomenon. Maybe you did too. I'm not sure, but you also took a different approach, which is what you describe the audience, what your business is and maybe tell the origin story. Yeah. So I have a business that basically goes to people's house. We pick up their dog poop and we leave. That's probably one of the most simple businesses that you could possibly have.

1:19Everybody loves having a dog, but nobody loves cleaning up after them. So we decided to tackle that pain point. And honestly, it almost happened by accident. So I have a couple other home service businesses. I have a electrical company. I have a garage door company. We kind of started most of them kind of around the COVID time, believe it or not. And I was just so busy working on those businesses. My wife had hired a pooper scooper service at the times because we weren't taking the time to do it. And they were not professional. They didn't show up on time. They built everybody through Venmo. I think I could see all their clients' payment history.

1:50It was pretty bad. I had a buddy from high school that wanted to start a business with me, but he wasn't a plumber. He couldn't do HVAC. He couldn't back up a trailer to do a lawn care business. So we figured, let's give this business a shot, kind of see what happens. I didn't really have many expectations about it. Maybe make an extra couple thousand bucks a month. But it turned into my biggest company, a multi-million dollar company, picking up dog poop. I love it. And I know you have other ventures, both in the pooper scooper space and others. But when you talk about maybe your biggest business, I'll call it your core business, how much has it grown since then?

2:25You gave sort of a revenue figure, but talk about how it's expanded, where it is today. Yes. When we first started, we had no idea what we were doing. I think my miss partner, Levi, he had rocks, he threw them out in the backyard and he timed himself to see how long it would take to actually clean it up so we could figure out our pricing. So first couple of months, we didn't make that much money. But as soon as we started investing into paid ads, we went from zero to about three, 350 recurring clients like pretty quick. I think first year we made between 250 and$300 ,000. Next year, we kind of figured things out some more.

2:57I think we made seven or$800 ,000. Next year, 1.5 million. Last year, we're 2.2 point something million. And then this year will be between 2.5 and 3 million. That's really cool. um maybe if you could talk about some of the some of the areas that you had to figure out scaling you sort of figured you had to figure out pricing because everybody would want you know wants their house clean their yard clean their their their yard mode but there's but there's a there's a threshold yeah which there's sort of like a magic probably a magic number there but other things in terms of um hiring scaling when did you decide to buy your first truck You have branded trucks.

3:35We both live in Washington. But if you live in Washington State, I think you've expanded beyond Washington State. You might see the trucks everywhere. When did you buy your first truck, et cetera? So, yeah, it's definitely a bit of a journey. So, yeah, how to figure out pricing, how to figure out how to fulfill the service, which is probably the easiest part, right? Because we've all been picking up dog poop like our whole childhood, right? Yeah, figuring out pricing, figuring out how to get customers. That was kind of the first bottleneck. and then also putting together a system that was consistent and reliable for our customers.

4:06So we have automated routing. We'll send our customers like a 60-minute on-the-way text message so that they know we're coming. We'll show up to the house. We will walk the yard in a specific pattern, grab the waste. We'll take a photo of their aid that's closed before we leave so they know that we completed the service. They know their dog's not going to get let out. We also spray all our equipment down with like a kennel-grade disinfectant so we're not spreading farro or other diseases or anything like that. Once we kind of dialed in that system, it was just trying to replicate it as many times as possible.

4:34So obviously, most new companies, their bottlenecks are going to be getting customers. Opposed to my other companies like Electrical Garage Door, those were really Google-heavy. There's people, if something breaks, you Google an electrician, right? Nobody was Googling Hooper Scooper services because nobody knew that it was even a service. A lot of people still don't even know that it's a service. So we had to find a way to get out and get in front of people. So we started running Facebook ads. That actually was kind of our first big break to get us our first couple hundred customers within a few months, which then caused all sorts of other issues because one person can typically only handle around 150 clients.

5:07We had 350 clients within a couple months. It's like, man, we've got to figure out how to buy these trucks. We've got to figure out how to hire people. It all happened way faster than I was expecting it to. So it was definitely a bit of a journey. Did you know that Builders is sponsored by business.com? I'd love to tell you about a new free membership from business.com for small business decision makers. It's called business.com plus, and it's designed to address the pain in selecting new products and services. What is the pain you might ask? It's things like knowing which vendor is best for your specific business, negotiating pricing, having access to someone who can answer questions for you.

5:47The new membership, Business.com Plus, handles all of that with a dedicated advisor, pre-negotiated pricing, and solutions tested and reviewed by experts. Check it out at business.com slash plus. That's business.com slash P-L-U-S. Did you ever kind of have, because I know it's kind of a fun word to say, kind of a pooper scooper, picking up poop, et cetera. We're along the line, whether it was telling your parents or getting a loan at the bank or where someone was like, wait, what is this? Yeah. I have a ton of pushback. Personally, just because my other businesses are successful, they're all doing a couple million dollars a year as well.

6:35So people are kind of like, ah, Will's just going to do his thing. But as far as the customer base goes and kind of the public perception, definitely when we first started, it was a lot more negative than it is today. People would say things like, oh, you shouldn't have a dog if you can't clean up after your dog. How lazy do you have to be to hire a service like this? Kind of et cetera, et cetera. While at the same time, people are hiring house cleaners. They're hiring people to mow their yard. They're going out and getting coffee through the drive-thru. So it just took a lot of, I guess, educating people, letting people know that the service existed.

7:05People would kind of laugh at us at first. But it doesn't really happen anymore because we have like 20 branded trucks rolling around our little spoken eastern Washington area. So now we're kind of more of a mini, like mini celebrities over here. Just kind of funny. We're the dog poop people. I love it. One of the interesting things that you've done is it seems like you're extending your business through education and community. And so not necessarily saying, I might be wrong, not necessarily saying we want to be the business that goes all across the US, but actually educating others on how to do it.

7:46Maybe you could describe that program. I'm also hoping you can answer the higher level question, which is, are you teaching your future competition? And how do you think about that? So as far as the community goes, we do have an online community that teaches people how to start a similar business. It's a great business, especially for your first business. One person that can make a six-figure plus income if they're willing to pick up dog poop themselves, you don't have any employees. It's all recurring revenue, super low startup costs. It's a great business to get into as like a solopreneur. And it's one that also scales up, especially in comparison to my other companies.

8:18There's no cost to get sold. I don't have to hire a journeyman electrician with 8 ,000 hours. I can pay somebody whatever, 20 bucks an hour to go pick up Doc Boop. So I think all that is great. But the big issue that we run into is just that people don't know that the service exists. So I think of it more so as we're competing against kind of that market awareness versus each other, right? There's whatever, a hundred million plus dogs in the United States. So there's plenty of business to go around. And that was kind of my thoughts with that. And then it's also going to open up opportunities for us as well.

8:46So if we want to continue to grow, if we want to do roll-ups or we want to acquire other companies, there aren't really any other companies that were worth acquiring. There's a couple of people with maybe a hundred customers here or there, but it just really wasn't worth the effort to try to acquire that small of a company. And then if we didn't want to franchise in the future, we're just building goodwill with the community so people know, like, and trust us. So if that is something that we want to do in the future. It definitely has opened a door there, but then it also makes pretty good money for the online community as well.

9:12Yeah, it's great. The education seems like a really good business model, a way to extend what you're doing. So as you described the business, I was going to say struck gold, but that's not really what I mean, but you had a lot of success out of the gate once you figured out how to create a category. I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and startups that are struggling and maybe as a way for them to empathize with you or vice versa, whether it's for this business or the other businesses, the HVAC, Garage with Electricity. Could you highlight maybe one of the big mistakes you made or one of the things that you look back on?

9:52You're like, how did I not figure this out sooner? And then how you overcame it? Well, we made a lot of mistakes because, like I said, we had no idea what we were doing. A couple of big ones for this industry specific is not giving customers like arrival timeframes. Otherwise, it just like will destroy your routing and profitability. So we have close to 2 ,500 customers that we service every week. If we gave each one of those, like we're going to show up between 2 and 2.15, it would just totally crush us. So that was one. Not pre-billing customers was a big one. So now we pre-bill all of our customers on the first month.

10:22They don't pay us. We don't show up to provide service. So that's a really big one. And then probably the biggest one, probably the most important metric that I look at is your, what I call the CAC to LTV ratio. So what's your customer acquisition cost? What is the lifetime value of each customer? And you can kind of apply this to every single business. So you figure out how much it costs to get a customer, figure out how much that customer is worth, and you can just dump money into ads as long as that ratio is strong and grow your companies fairly quickly. CAC to LTV. Now you're speaking my language.

10:50Yeah. One of the big questions I get is when you're starting, when you're starting to scale, how do you truly know what your LTV is? And how do you think about that? At the beginning, it's kind of tough to know if you don't have any data. So what we do now is we basically just take our average monthly churn rate and we divide it by our average monthly ticket to kind of give us a ballpark LTV as far as gross revenue goes. And then you just take out your fulfillment costs out of that to see kind of what profit you're going to be making back on that. Many of your businesses are like solopreneur adjacent, solopreneur inspired.

11:27And so when you hire, are you thinking about employees who can learn how to do this on their own? Or is it people that want to work on something that they enjoy doing and aren't concerned with going out on their own? Or do you not even think about that? Like what's kind of your recipe for hiring and scaling? Yeah, I don't really think about that necessarily. It's going to depend on the job position, right? So we have a different profile for people that scoop dog group versus managers or kind of those higher level positions, obviously. For scoopers, the way we tried to design it was to make this the best possible entry level labor job that somebody can get.

12:02So we typically pay 20, 25 bucks an hour. We provide benefits. We let people take their truck home. They're working Monday through Friday. They can kind of pick what time they work as long as they get their route done. So a lot of flexibility. You could pay a couple of dollars an hour more than on the lawn care, Amazon, FedEx, kind of those types of jobs in our area. So that really helps us with that scooper profile. And we try to be as picky as we can because we offer such competitive pay and benefits. We get over 100 applicants every time we post a job opening for a scooper position. And we basically filter through over 100 people before we dial in on the person that we want to hire.

12:33As far as those higher level positions, we're getting to the point now where we're getting out of the, I think Hormozy calls it the swamp. So we're getting past that$3 million mark where we can start hiring some higher level people. So I'll bring in an office manager, bringing on marketing manager, internal HR, internal finance. those type of people. I'm looking for talent that's worked at a company of a similar size or a little bit bigger than us. That's kind of where we've been there, done that. They know the playbooks. We just want them to run those plays for our company. So that's kind of the next level for us is hiring that next layer of management and bringing that talent in.

13:04You answered the question I was about to ask, which is sort of like, what's your first full-time position after the founders and the partners? But maybe I'll ask sort of a different version of it. So you have multiple companies with similar-ish business models. Have you thought about rolling them all up or having somebody who does HR for all of them, et cetera? And then also kind of related, do you think about outsource? There's a lot of sort of chatter right now about whether it's using AI or outsourcing everything kind of thing as a way to scale. What's your point of view on that? Yeah. So as far as the companies go, I'm actually probably going to liquidate everything other than the scooping companies just because it has the highest, I guess, runway for scaling.

13:55I think this could be a$10 million plus company in the next few years, like pretty reasonably. If I were to keep them, yeah, definitely having like a fractional HR, fractional finance type person would definitely make sense. And even for us right now, we probably don't need a full-time person in some of those positions. So I need to outsource that. But once we get a little bigger, my preference would be to have people that are in-house. I was reading on LinkedIn, your degree, people might think it was business or think something like that, but it was in social work. What prompted you to want to be an entrepreneur?

14:31And was that always in mind? What was your passion in college versus what's changed now? I think a lot of people would be curious. Yeah, I kind of fell into it. So I used to be kind of like a, I just call it like a dirt bag. So I was into like backpacking and skiing and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, man, how do I get paid to just like do cool stuff? I used to be like a whitewater raft guide. My uncle worked at a children's home as like a director and they had all these outdoor programs where they'd take people rafting and stuff. So I figured I would try to get paid to do that. So I went to college for social work of all things, which people laugh at me now because my personality is kind of the opposite of that.

15:04Got out of college, people offered me like 12 bucks an hour and I was like, that's not going to work. So I ended up pivoting. I started an MBA program and ended up finishing that. But I got pretty lucky. I met a friend of mine on a ski trip, and he was a super digital marketer. So he kind of took me under the wings, showed me how to do digital marketing, ended up getting a job at a big advertising agency. We eventually ended up leaving, starting kind of a micro agency. And then I realized I'd make way more money if I actually own these companies versus just advertising for people. That's kind of what stemmed into these other businesses.

15:40So I would partner with somebody that was an operator, like an electrical company. This guy's an electrician for 30 plus years. He didn't know how to do marketing, didn't know how to set up a CRM, any of that stuff. So I took care of all that. He took care of all the ops and hiring. And that's how we were able to grow up all of these as quickly as we did. That's really cool. For people who don't know, we both live in the Pacific Northwest. I'm in Western Washington, Williams in Eastern Washington. And we would say something like dirtbag kind of lovingly, I think, because we have like the most amazing outdoors here.

16:11Maybe if I could sort of depart from the core thesis of this podcast, tell people like two or three amazing things you can do in eastern Washington if you're an outdoor, kind of an outdoor fan. Oh, yeah. There's tons of rafting. There's five or six like ski mountains, like within an hour and a half drive. So if you're big into skiing, snowboarding, there's a ton of stuff to do there. There's all sorts of stuff, zip lines and lakes. There's like over 100 lakes within like a couple hundred miles of eastern Washington. So there's a ton of stuff to do. Yeah. And it's a great place if you're going to Airbnb or go to a hotel.

16:46It's also affordable, which is really great. Back to the entrepreneur stuff. For someone who wants to start a business, let's say, or they're entrepreneurially minded, What are some things that you would recommend to them? As an example, I think in each of your cases, you have a partner instead of doing it everything yourself. Maybe talk through the logic of that. And then also maybe it's your superpowers and this other person's superpowers. They align in some way. So I'd say probably the best piece of advice for people that want to start a business is just to take action and make sure that you're not being a perfectionist.

17:26perfectionist. I see a lot of people all the time, they have to have the perfect business cards and the perfect website and perfect this and that. They don't actually go out and start doing the things that it takes to make money. They don't have any cashflow and they just end up failing like really quick. So I'd say that's on that side, that's probably the biggest thing. As far as partnerships go, you definitely want to be careful about that. You don't want to partner with somebody that has the same skill set as you. Otherwise one of you is redundant and not necessary in the business, but you can definitely supercharge the growth of your business if you partner with somebody that has a really good talent and something that you don't have.

17:56So good operator, somebody who's not good at marketing, that could be a good fit. You have somebody that's good at making a product and you have somebody else that's a good promoter, that could be a good fit. You don't want two of the same people in the business. I think you make a really interesting point about perfectionist and when you launch something. And I see this a lot in software or digital businesses, which is where I've spent most of my career, which is trying to get the product perfect before you release it. And that is impossible. It's not even going to be close to perfect out of the gate.

18:28And getting feedback right away is really important. I'm curious how you think about, quote unquote, voice of customer. You mentioned things that you tried to figure out, or you had to figure out out of the gate, like pre-billing or telling people what your arrival windows are or whatever. What are your methods for getting those signals as fast as you can and making a decision about those? Yeah, well, you definitely have to start getting customers right for the first thing. So you can't make sure everything's perfect. You're not going to know until you start getting some reps in and you actually get people coming through your funnel.

19:01And it's just slowly, slowly improving, right? So trying to collect whatever data you can. I know that's kind of difficult when you're first starting. Looking at things like if you believe you review, talking to your customers, seeing what their feedback is. You can do like net promoter score surveys, things like that. So just collecting data, talking to your customers, seeing what your reviews are. And then on the business side, like trying to solve problems, like, man, it'd be really great if we didn't have to chase down all our customers to collect payment every month. How can we fix this problem?

19:31Let's just bill them before we show up. Problem solved. So just thinking about it like that, trying to be creative. Because you own the business, you kind of do whatever you want, as long as it's legal and ethical, right? So trying to solve problems as they come up. What's your approach to prioritization? Because you talk about problems or opportunities. You probably have 50 things that you could do today to improve your business. Yeah, I think it depends on what stage of the business you're in and what the bottleneck of your business is. So for us, our prioritization now is trying to hire that better team.

20:06But maybe a couple of years ago, it was how do we get as many customers as possible? The year after that, it was how to refine all of our hiring processes and making sure our operations doesn't break because we've got all these customers coming in. And so it kind of shifts over time. It's pretty intuitive. Once you get going, like what's breaking in your business and why you can't continue to grow. So just fixing the stuff that breaks first, I would say. And if everything's going good, I think it's going back to that kind of CAC to LTV ratio. What kind of things can we do to acquire more customers for less money and make them worth more money over a longer period of time?

20:37I don't know if you or your partners have any background in branding or marketing or those types of things. I don't necessarily mean digital marketing. I guess I more mean like the look, the feel, the experience, all of that stuff. What's been your approach? I would call your business is very friendly feeling. And sort of was that a conscious choice? What's your thought on all that? Yeah, I think it definitely developed over time because I wasn't a branding guy. My business partner wasn't a branding guy. So it's something that we try to develop over time. And again, trying to collect more data, more information.

21:15So our top demo is going to be females in kind of their 30s and 40s because they seem to hate dog poop more than anybody else. So the customer problem, yeah. Yeah, it's trying to make it friendly. We tried to pick a color when we first started that was kind of unique and stood out. Not a lot of other companies have that color in our area. So that was one thing that helped us out quite a bit. Trying to be friendly in all of our ads. I typically will run ads with like our female employees standing in front of branded vehicles. and those always seem to perform the best because that kind of fits our target demo the best because people like to click on ads for people that are most like them.

21:46So things like that. And we're just continually developing it over time. Love it. William, this has been an awesome conversation. Congrats on all the growth of your business. And we'll put for people who are interested, we'll have your education link in the show notes. If you listen and if they're interested in starting their own business or just learning how you do it. Thanks very much. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.