614: Scaling a Local Service Business: Multi 6-Figures in Pet Waste Removal

25:00Like as long as they're still in business, sure, we'll give them a call. Right. So that stuff can have a long shelf life. What else is going on on the marketing front. I loved, I think the example from the very first episode, you know, where we initially posted this picture of the dog pooping and it got a lot of attention and had 80 inquiries over messenger. And throughout the history of this, you've been very creative and intentional on the marketing side. So what else do you see working today? Yeah, I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to get creative. And still this day, I don't like spending money on ads over the spring, like early spring, Facebook was getting me for like six, seven, eight,$1 ,200 because I was trying to pump money into ads.

25:41And it's just for me, I don't think I had them set up right. So it didn't work. So what I've been doing is just getting more intentional with the strategy and trying to get away from the fluff, right? Just like who we are, what we do, how to get in touch with us, because people, they don't want to read long posts anymore, at least from my experience, when it comes to like the dog waste removal stuff and putting those keywords in there and just consistently creating like some sort of content between stagnant posts and videos with a trending sound over it from a camera phone. No professional photos.

26:20Camera phone videos and pictures perform so much better than professional stock photos. You posting these as organic media or as ads? No, organic media. If one pops, one does pretty well, I will put some ad dollars behind it. But I spend so much money on the vehicles that I have maxed out my ad budget probably for two years. Yeah, well, people will see these driving around town. They're definitely going to notice. So it makes sense. Do you have an example of the social media post that did go medium viral in your little area or in this niche and what it said, what that resulted in. I had a video that hit 1.2 million views.

27:08And that was me taking a trash bag and putting it over top of my pooper scooper bucket. It's just so simple, so simple. And people loved it. And I got a lot of traction with that. They're like, what is this for? What's going on? So I was able to show people that wanted to scoop the dog poop themselves, how to do it a professional way. And then the people that were like, oh, well, I just want you to scoop the poop for me. I'm like, all right, perfect. Let us do it. All right. A certain percentage, probably a small percentage of those were like within your service radius and they ended up reaching out.

27:46Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Like I would never have, because it's so broad, because it's nationwide, worldwide, I wouldn't have guessed that that type of content would really do anything for a local service business, but you're proving me wrong. Well, so it just depends. Like they'll ask like where we're from. And when you post something, it will say like, if you can add a location to it. And I always try to add the location when I post something, I really, really try. So then it shows it to my local market. Got it. Got it. All right. So trying to play the viral social media game, trying to collect reviews, Facebook ads, maybe not super effective, putting some money into the truck wraps, the, you know, right in your face, local marketing, anything else that's driving leads these days?

28:29I've always wanted to just create awareness that this business is a thing and it's available. And so I just think creating that awareness, getting involved within the community, talking to people, creating that brand. Like I don't even like the color pink really, but now I'm just all pinked out. And that way it's like brand association. And then over time, all of that just kind of compounds. Like you seeing the sign and you were like, oh, that's croupin' spoopin' scoopin'. And just being intentional. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. I remember your story about walking into the vet office with a box of donuts, trying to play the game of, well, who are my target customers already doing business with?

29:09If they got a dog, they're probably visiting the vet. Hey, mind if I drop off these donuts and these business cards? Like, here, I have a little stack on your counter and people can see it there. Or put up a banner at the local dog park. Again, bright pink gets your attention. Like, where are my target customers already doing business? Anything on the word of mouth, referral marketing, like trying to lean into that, try and turn one customer into two. Like, hey, if you've got a friend that has a dog, you know, I'll give you 50 bucks off to send them my way or something. With Jobber, they have a referral link that gets sent out, I think, with every invoice.

29:43So this is a little bit automated. And if somebody refers out, then I give that person a free week. But if they sign up, like they get a one-time clean or a spring clean, and they sign up for regular monthly service, I will give either a half a month off or an entire month free to the referral person. And it varies just depending on the type of account that gets picked up. Yeah, it's kind of this game of relatively fixed, relatively low cost of customer acquisition, in this case, for hopefully a multi-year lifetime value of this customer. I get the sense that people tend to stick around for a while once they get used to the service.

30:24Do you have the data on that? Like, what's a customer worth typically lifetime value wise? So fun fact, I didn't really understand lifetime value. I didn't even know what lifetime value meant until like six months ago. I posted on YouTube that I was struggling with certain things. And this guy, William, that started watching my channel in 2020, he started a pooper scooper business and quickly has scaled it to seven figures. A seven-figure pooper scooper business, right? So he's a million dollars. Wow. In one town? They have three locations now. Okay. Dang. That's a lot of poop. It really is. It truly is.

31:03And he asked me that. He goes, do you know your churn rate? Do you know your lifetime value? Do you know your acquisition cost? I said, what are you talking about? I have no idea. And through talking to some other business owners, he's realized that a lot of people don't truly understand their numbers. So William has recently created a course for pooper scoopers. It's called the Poop Scoop Millionaire. And in there, he has documents that go over how to figure out your lifetime value, how to figure out your churn rate, how to figure out your acquisition cost, all of that. I'm super excited because I will now be a coach within this community about talking about social media and how to scale a business from zero to 250k.

31:49Okay. Okay. Yeah. And so I'm in the process of learning all of that stuff too, because my brain kind of like glitches when he starts talking about churn rate, but I know, I know I can figure this out. It just takes time and data tracking. Right. Yeah. So you can say, well, over the course of the five years of this business, we've had 200 customers on average, they stick around for 18 months. So that is whatever, 99 times 18, you know, it's$1 ,800 lifetime value. And if it cost us less than $1 ,800, well, you know, we got labor and everything else, other costs associated with that. But if we can acquire that customer for giving somebody a free month, we have$100 cost of acquisition, like that seems very profitable and potentially very scalable.

32:32More with Erica in just a moment, including why she's built the crappiest channel on YouTube and what's surprised her the most over the last five years right after this. You did mention these guys, they were operating in three different cities. I think when we last spoke, you had a satellite location on the other side of the state, like in Muskegon. Is that still a thing? Was that under a franchise or like a subcontractor? Like, how did you have that set up? We didn't, I didn't know what I was doing. She was operating. She was making money. She was a satellite location, but she was still operating under me.

33:02But my business was getting so busy and she was doing such a good job on her own. I just presented her with some information. I said, I think you could be your own business owner. You've proven that you're able to scoop these customers on your own. You're able to communicate with them. I will show you how to get your LLC. I'll show you how to get Jobber if you need any help. And I think I sold it to her for like a dollar. I don't know. It was like a dollar. And she's doing great. She's flourishing. Yeah. It's just like, I don't want to deal with this headache anymore. Like it's your baby now. Well, because it was like too divided because I was getting questions from up there.

33:37and then I'm running my business. And then at the time I was like, let's start a YouTube channel. That would be great. Not realizing how difficult content creation is. Well, talk to me about that side of the business because you have croupin', spoopin', scoopin', 3 ,000 subscribers on YouTube. It says, welcome to the crappiest channel on YouTube. Love it. You've got the scoop podcast. And so it's starting to create content about the business owner side of things. Hey, what it's like behind the scenes running this day to day. And there's a ton of content up there, But like you mentioned, it takes time away from doing the actual thing.

34:10What's I love to geek out on the content side and what that has done for you? So the content was kind of like a creative outlet for me because I've always had two or three jobs. And so leaving the hospital, I was like, OK, I'm doing this, but I need something else to relieve stress. And creating the content is fun. But at a certain point, I needed to start making some money. So I needed to start being more strategic. But it's hard when you're trying to create content and you're trying to run the business. And what I didn't anticipate with being an entrepreneur, I didn't anticipate the personal growth journey that I was going to go through.

34:51And I've heard people say that like some years you are growing personally, some years you're growing professionally, some years you're just trying to maintain. And I've went through all of that in the past five years. So I wouldn't say that I had a lot of growth last year in the business, but personally, I went completely sober. I quit drinking March 28th of last year because mentally, my mental health, I just was not doing okay. And I just felt like I wasn't being a good wife. I was the largest that I had been in quite some time. I was an emotional roller coaster. And I knew the foundation of like what was going on with me was fastly falling apart.

35:32And I was like, well, what am I going to do? So I said, OK, drinking is a crutch for me. I get stressed. I drink. I'm happy. I drink. So I'm just going to quit. I'm going to quit. I'm going to quit drinking. And so I quit for one day. Then I quit for two days. And I noticed a lot of my content was very emotional and very low at that time. But that really connected with people because people struggling, especially since COVID. I was just kind of throwing stuff at the wall and trying to figure out what to do. But now, with a clear mind, I'm like, okay, you can't spend a bunch of time thinking about and creating a bunch of content.

36:07You have to get more strategic with it. Today is going to be your recording day. You're just going to record on this day. Your other days is going to be for networking and marketing your business. You can't worry about creating content on those days because you need to grow your business. so what I did was is I've actually I was running two instagrams one for the scoop podcast and one for croupins poopin scoopin I can't do it anymore I can't do it so I'm combining them it's just you're gonna get everything on that one instagram page now the social media side the pooper scooper side the mental health personal growth side so it'll just be like a well-rounded instagram channel okay so i like this call to you try and theme your days which is a takeaway from mike vardy from productivityist on the show years ago like so you're not switching gears so many times like okay today is going to be the recording day today is business growth and outbound calling day and maybe day three is social media day trying to minimize the mental switching costs i think that's really smart but i'm still curious about like is it worthwhile to invest the time to show people the behind the scenes of the business and become a content creator versus just doing the thing.

37:22Like I'm going to keep my head down. I'm going to just keep on doing it. Obviously led to this connection with the poop scoop millionaire and like some positive things came from it. And like now this 1.2 million view viral video, like, I don't know, I'm torn. Cause like on the one hand, super cool. I want to be the transparent work in public type of thing, show people the behind the scenes and it unlocks new revenue streams like sponsorships, coaching, brand deals, the job or ambassadorship, like stuff like that. But on the other hand, it like takes away from the core thing that's paying the bills in the near term.

37:52That's kind of where I've struggled because I'm like, what do I really want? There's a lot of different parts of me. The part of me that enjoys the connection with people from the YouTube channel and the content I've put out to see other people that have seen my videos and they've been able to grow a six-figure business, like personally, that fills me. Like that makes me so happy and that I'm able to see their journey. Then the other aspect of it, of getting content creation deals to where I'm able to make money by making videos and talking. That's cool to be able to not leave my house and create videos and talk on my podcast and make money.

38:32Amazing. Yeah. Best gig in the world, right? Yeah. And poop scooping, it's tough. You're out in the sun. We've had two dog bites this year. I had to file a workman's comp claim. So it's nice to be able to create money on different avenues. And then as for the business, it's like, I don't know how big or how massive I want to grow my business. I don't know if I want to have like a multi-million dollar, what is the word, conglomerate company. I'm not too sure. You're going nationwide, yeah. And I like to hop on camera and talk. I don't know. It's like a self-fulfilling thing to see the content I'm creating and also document the journey because I get to look back at those videos from 2020 and I literally get to see my entire journey.

39:16Yeah, that's sometimes a little awkward to go back and listen to those archive episodes from 10 years ago, but I'm with you. And it was something that you said about like really knowing yourself, but like, look, I needed something else to relieve stress. It wasn't, maybe I mispositioned it as like a trade-off. I could invest my time here or I can invest my time here where it's like, I can do this and I can do this because I want to, because it's fulfilling, because for all these other check the box reasons, rather than just driving top line growth. But it kind of leads to the next thing of, or the next question of like, where do you want to take this thing?

39:49Like, will it be a seven figure multi-state, multi-location, multi-city type of operation? Or is it say like, look, we're good. This is fantastic. lifestyle business. We've got it almost on autopilot now. It runs itself. It's predictable. Where do you want to go? Oh, it's really hard for me to make that decision because I hate putting myself into a box. I feel like if I were to be like, this is what's going to happen. This is the end goal that I'm limiting myself. Wherever God wants to take me and I get to use my talents, that's really where it's at. If I'm meant to have a big business, I'm going to have the skill set and it's going to happen and I'm just going to keep working towards it.

40:28Or if I'm going to have a big social media and talk for a living, I'm cool with that too. All I know is I want to be able to enjoy what I'm doing and make enough money that when my parents no longer can like work and they're older, they don't have to like struggle. And that's something that's really important to me because I've seen elderly people where they can't provide for themselves and they struggle. And I want that for my parents. So, and I don't want my mom to live with me. I want to be able to buy her or pay for a place for her to live separately from me because I can't with that. Well, a strong motivation.

41:09And one thing that I appreciate about all of our calls together is the transparency. And this is a struggle. Like every step of the way, there's a new hurdle. There's a new obstacle. There's something else that goes wrong. And you just kind of have to fight your way through it. You got to figure it out. That's your job as the business owner. And you don't necessarily know how to get through to the other side, but you got to figure it out. And I just appreciate you sharing all that instead of coming in and being like, I'm God's gift to Pooper Scooper. And I have all the answers that I knew it from the get go.

41:42It's like, no, this was some hard fought wins here. But since we last connected, I think late 2020, what's surprised you the most since then? The growth of the community has surprised me just how many pooper scoopers there are now. A lot of things to me and me blabbing all over the internet about it. So I've essentially created my own competition, but I don't look at it that way. I look at it as the more people that are doing this, the more people that are following good practices in business, it's uplifting the community. And the more brand awareness and community awareness that there is, the more acceptable this industry is going to be.

42:23I wouldn't say that I'm shocked. I wanted this to happen, but it shocks me at how fast it's grown over the past four years. And I can't wait to see what it's like in another five to 10 years. When you started, I remember you say, well, how did I come up with pricing? Well, I looked up what the other people in the area were charging for this. So there was some entrenched competition, but nowhere near what it is today. You kind of just attribute that to like the pie just getting bigger, like more and more people are hiring out this service. And so there's greater demand. Whereas before, like, this is a thing you could hire help for, like, maybe it wasn't on people's radars as much as it is today.

43:01Is that what you think is going on? Yeah. People knowing that's the main thing is like, what do they say? If you build it, they will come. It's also make people aware that the service is available and they can make the decision. They've seen a post and on Facebook about Pooper Scooper, they might've like snubbed their nose at it. But during that spring clean when they're cleaning and their back hurts. And they're like, this is stupid. Throw down the pooper scooper. And they're like, I know I see somebody that cleans up dog poop on Facebook. And then they hire it out. And then they tell their friends, they tell their people, the neighbors see you park in the driveway.

43:34And they're like, what's that about? And they snap a picture. So over time, it just kind of spreads and you get more exposure. Yeah, there's like this nichification of home services where number one, more and more people want to just not deal with it. Like as a homeowner, like I don't want to bother with the gutter cleaning or the window cleaning or whatever. Stuff gets dirty over and over again. Great. If you can be in the business of cleaning it up, maybe you can do it every quarter or every six months, set it up on a recurring basis and more and more people getting into it now, but like relatively low competition from the startup space or the competing service provider space where you come in with a little bit of marketing savvy like Erica has, you get some room to carve out a little bit of market share there.

44:20And you may not even need to conquest the business from another service provider just because, like you mentioned, it sounds like the biggest competition you're displacing is people doing it themselves and getting sick of this chore. Like, I don't want to deal with this anymore. There's got to be a smarter way. I'll go hire somebody who's a professional. Well, yeah, and positioning yourself well, too. Because, I mean, in the home service industry, you get a lot of contractors or business owners that just don't do good business. They don't communicate. They don't show up. They're messy. And so if there is a lot of competition in your area, this is what I did.

44:49I went through and I read all of the reviews of all my competition or people that were in the area, collected the information on what the issues were. It was lack of communication, didn't show up, doesn't answer the phone. And so I made sure when I was starting my business and continuing my business, A++ communication, right? We're going to show up, but we're going to send you a text message to let you know that we're there. So that was like the main focus is just try to be better. Try to be better than the people in your area. And that's how I'm able to charge more, too. That's why I have a higher price point.

45:24Yeah, you can add on some layer of professionalism in terms of branding and marketing. and what historically has been a really fragmented industry. You can bring that together under your brand and kind of command a premium for that, take a little margin on the top. And you can do it offline, you can do it online. The online example that comes to mind is Belay Solutions that started like an executive assistant service, which executive assistants have been around since the dawn of the internet or virtual assistants have been around for 30 plus years at this point. What they did is hire from that same talent pool, like this work from home professional and say, well, okay, now you're going to go through our vetting, hiring, branding process and charge a premium rate as a result.

46:08So that makes a lot of sense. Appreciate you sharing that. So you mentioned you're doing coaching for Pet Waste Millionaire. You've got the Croupin, Poopin, Scoopin YouTube channel, plus the Scoop podcast. What else is on the horizon for this year? Oh gosh, it's a lot. Really just building out this office, this new place that I'm in, get the new podcast studio set up. I want to start highlighting female business owners because there is a content gap for female business owners that work outside of the home. So I definitely want to dive into that a little bit. And I also wanted to get involved in the community with other business owners and bring them in studio because being a business owner and going through the growth that I have the past four years, my friend group, I don't have one personally here anymore because we're just on a different page.

46:55and so being an entrepreneur it's lonely and so my goal is to meet some new like-minded people that I can hang out with and talk business with and it's not where it's like oh she's talking about business again what is she doing so that's kind of what the goal is and then really lean into the coaching because I've been wanting to coach for quite some time and so I think that's going to be a huge part of what 2024 is going to be about. That makes sense and appreciate you sharing that it is lonely. You gotta have to have some people you could talk shop with. Otherwise, just go crazy, rattling around in your own mind with that stuff.

47:31Well, very good. We'll link up all of Erica's resources. Again, poopinscooping.com is the main website. You can check out what she's up to over there. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation 2024 edition. Then we'll take a trip down memory lane and see what you said before. If there is something that you can't figure out, if there's something you're stuck on, try to find somebody that knows how to do it to speed up your process because I spent a lot of time just researching stuff that I shouldn't have if I would have just paid somebody 50 bucks 100 bucks they could have gave me the answer so quick and I would have saved myself a lot of stress so that would be my number one tip is just reach out to people and get some help if you need it Yeah, this is the unlock or this is the shortcut in a lot of ways.

48:21There's something to be said early on and 100 % this was me. I could figure this out, right? Like I know the answer is out there. It's on YouTube. It's on, you know, a million other websites. Like I could brute force my way through this, but as the business has matured, it's like, yeah, I probably could figure this out, but somebody else already knows how to do this and I could probably just hire them to do it. And it'd be done in a week versus me just procrastinating on it and wasting a bunch of time. So if there's something that you're stuck on, find somebody who knows how to do it. This is the number one tip for 2024.

48:51In late 2019, early 2020, for that first episode, it was keep your business debt free, like minding the dollars and cents and the income and the outcome. That makes a lot of sense. A mentor of mine early on said, hey, if you mind the nickels and dimes, the dollars take care of themselves. Something that stuck with me over the years. Later on in 2020, we did a little where are they now catch up with Erica. And the advice was really powerful at that time, the number one tip was sometimes you have to slow down to speed back up. And that's something that I've definitely stuck with me. It's true. You're kind of sometimes too busy chopping down the trees to sharpen the saw to use that metaphor.

49:28So sometimes you got to slow down to speed back up. A couple of notes, takeaways before we wrap up here. We talked about the reputation. We talked about the branding. Now, if you can be a consistent and professional presence in how you show up online and offline, good things start to happen. Word of mouth starts to spread. You kind of build the community awareness there. Just at the end, we talked about like, look, this is lonely. There's a personal growth journey that you're on as well as a business growth journey. So try to find your people. And then finally on the content creation side or the business side, but like leaning into what you like to do.

50:02It's like if you wake up every day and kind of dread doing the work, like that's gonna show up. You're not gonna show up as the best version of yourself. So it's like, even if there's not an immediate ROI on creating the content or doing the social media stuff, like if that's what you like to do, you got to do it. You got to make it fun. So those were some of the notes takeaways that I wrote down during this call. The previous episodes with Erica number 368, that was the original. We talked about how you can make 50 bucks an hour starting this business in your local town. We did the catch up call in 407 to see how that had grown in just nine months.

50:36And then we got today's episode for the four year later version of what's going on. We did another episode with a pooper scooper entrepreneur, Cody Smith in the Denver area, where he really gave this deep dive in local SEO. That's episode 555. If you missed that one, and you have any type of local service business, all of the tips and tricks to get reviews and get stuff ranking with different images and the wording of the posts and how to rank in different areas really in depth on that super specific topic. So 555, of course, we'll link up all of those in the show notes. And again, your listener only bonus for this week is my local business marketing checklist.

51:17We talked about a bunch of different ideas in this episode, and just some simple checklist, simple ideas that you can use to get that local business off the ground, hopefully reduce that cost of acquisition and compare that again with your customer lifetime value. That's the local marketing checklist. You can download that for free at the show notes. Just follow the show notes link in the episode description. It'll get you right over there. Big thanks to Erica for sharing her insight once again. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up signhustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.

51:52Thanks for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. 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.