189. How to Start a Business in a Small Town (and Dominate Your Market)

0:00Imagine launching a business with a negative net worth, zero experience, and a$9 ,000 high high interest personal loan, all while working nights as a corrections officer. That's exactly what today's guests did. Meet the founder of Lake Champlain Sanitation, who turned a one day a week garbage route and an old dump truck into a$600 ,000 a year operation, with just one full time employee and a fill in driver. I started my business with a$9 ,000 loan, zero experience, and a truck I bought from a guy at my night job. I'm running a$600 ,000 company with just one full-time employee and no wasted emotion.

0:38The goal isn't to hustle forever. It's to build a legacy and still enjoy your life while you're doing it. This is Ryan Atkinson and you're listening to Self-Fit Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. Heath Andres, proof that you don't need investors, a big city or fancy pitch deck to build something sustainable. You just need grit, efficiency, and a deep hatred for wasting time. Today's episode, we're going to break down how he overcame startup hurdles, built serious discipline, and blended business with fitness to create a legacy on his own terms.

1:05Heath, super, super excited to have you on today. Thank you so, so much for being here. Awesome, Ryan. I'm super excited to be here, man. Let's lay the foundation for all the listeners today. Let's start at the beginning, the beginning of Heath's story. What were you doing the night that you had that conversation that sparked the idea for Lake Champlain Sanitation? So it was a pretty funny story. It was a rainy night. We were indoors because the people couldn't be out in the yard that we were watching over. And this guy happened to be a farmer that had a garbage route. I was entrepreneurial as a kid flipping dirt bikes and stuff.

1:36And he said, I got this trash route I want to sell. So I said, all right, tell me more. Week later, I'm riding with the guy. Two weeks later, we're making a deal to buy his little trash route and an old beat up farm truck from him. Oh my gosh. Wait. So what were these conversations like? And like, how did you know it had merit to like actually doing it? So I was a little bit bored while I was working that nine to five of job. And the guy's name was Brad. And Brad said, Hey, if you want to work with me on the side, I have this garbage route. That's how we started talking about it. So I was looking to do things outside of work on my few days off a week.

2:10So after, you know, talking to him that night and going to see it in person with him, I was kind of hooked on the fact that the trash was recurring income. So at the time, I believe the rate was 25, 30 bucks a month. So X amount of customers could bring in X amount of revenue. And I started jotting down on a notepad, okay, this many customers, I could potentially leave this job that I'm super bored at and scale this thing. Interesting. And the listener station, because we're talking about taking that leap and scaling this and everything that goes along with that. But he tells us more about exactly like what you're offering here.

2:45I want to lay that foundation for the listeners as well. Like what exactly are these services? Definitely. So I started out seven years back with just household trash removal. So you put your garbage can out by the bin. Everyone in America, at least, pretty much needs a service like that. So we started out just with that, but now we've rolled up into demolition, junk removal services, roll-off dumpsters, and we're actually shifting the business model more towards commercial. But in the beginning of the story, it was strictly those plastic garbage cans that everyone knows about that you roll out to the side of the street.

3:15We'd send a truck around. We were using a dump truck, hand unloading the garbage cans at the time and just throwing the bags into the truck and charging you a monthly fee once a month. Interesting. And I know you did those calculations as well. I'm like, okay, this is potentially how much I could be making. I mean, what were some of those early costs or revenue that you had early on in the business? So for the first full year in business, I didn't have a month over$1 ,200 in revenue. Yeah. So the gentleman that I bought the, And I say buy, I really bought a list of names and a truck. I didn't buy his business name.

3:50I had to come up with my own. So back then, we'll call it 25 bucks a month. I think there was like 40 stops and I knew nothing about business. And I'm still working, right? So I'm doing it one day a week. Not profitable at all. If I had netted$100 a month after literally working four days, it would have been a good month. And I don't know how we made it where we are, but the story gets better. Yeah, no. And we're going to talk about that story a little bit more here, but I'm curious, like buying your first truck, I think you have a pretty good story here. I mean, how did you finance that first truck?

4:22So before I bought that truck, I didn't know anything about financing whatsoever. My parents had co-signed on loans kind of up to that point. And then my first vehicle I purchased was a lease. So I had a lease on a personal vehicle and I went to the bank thinking, hey, they'll just give me another loan. And they said, absolutely not. The only way we're giving you a loan on a truck that old, because at the time it was probably 20 years old is a personal loan. So I said, Oh, cool. That sounds cool. It's a personal loan. They're like, Oh, it's this loan with like a$10 ,000 maximum. And it's like a 9%, 10 % interest rate.

4:54And me not knowing anything was like, cool, I only need 9 ,000. So sign me up. And luckily I got approved for the loan. And that's how I had the money to start the business and buy that truck. Oh my gosh. Let's talk about those early days. Then what do they look like for you? Are you literally like doing everything yourself here? I mean, you're only netting if you're happy, if you have a hundred dollars, I mean, were you doing everything yourself here? Talk to us about those very early days. I was, I was, and it was just a lack of efficiency as to why it was that unprofitable. I was driving at the time for say five hours in the morning and spending as much in gas as I was almost making in revenue.

5:32It just didn't make sense. So yeah, I was doing everything. I was doing the billing, doing the phone calls. There wasn't much sales because I didn't know how to market yet. So I was just taking the client base that I had quote unquote purchased and servicing them every week and just hoping that they paid me. I was literally grabbing the bags of cash underneath the trash can lids because I didn't even have a software to bill anyone at the time. Oh my gosh. Let's get actual advice here for the listeners. They're like, okay, this sounds like it could be promising, but obviously I want to be profitable.

6:05I actually want to make money from this. They might be asking Heath how, like, if you could start over from day one, I mean, what advice would you give to someone listening for a service like this? So back then there wasn't a lot on YouTube and now there is. So I would definitely tell people, if you want to get into this waste hauling business from scratch, there's ways to market yourself. You know, if it's yard signs, if you get, you know, definitely get a Google business profile, like any service business and do your due diligence online, YouTube university, I like to call it. There's a lot of videos out there about it.

6:36Don't go get a high interest loan on a truck and a couple of customers that are spread miles apart because we're in rural upstate New York up here. That's another thing to touch on. Service density is key. And just remember that in the beginning, don't spread yourself too thin. Really, really good there. How did you price your services early on? I want to say on this actionable advice for listeners, I want to do something here. How did you price your services early on? So in the beginning, I just took the pricing that the guy took over for and just charge the customers that. What I would do if I was starting from scratch today is I would look around in the local market and just gauge what the competitors are charging.

7:13The competitors pricing, the only thing to remember is sometimes at their scale, they're going to be able to do things a little bit cheaper than you are in the beginning because you're going to have a lot of startup costs that they may have already incurred and worked through. So check out your competition, but you also got to put your costs together, be it fuel, labor and disposal fees and price your services from there. I'm so good. And now I know you're making a pivot as you alluded earlier in the episode. What does that pivot like kind of look like? What's that shift that you're doing? And would you advise people to pivot this as well?

7:40Yeah, for sure. So the recurring income that we've built the trash route out to now is a nice sustainable, I like to call it like a cover the bills, cover the overhead income every month. But we're actually trying to make it so efficient that we can get our employees to be working more than half the week on commercial only jobs, myself included. I still to this day do drive our roll-off truck, but the commercial work, we've invested a lot of money in equipment and it just makes everything so much easier. It's a lot easier on your body and the commercial clientele seems to feed you those bigger jobs with higher profits.

8:13So you're making the shift from like a residential focus to more of that commercial. What does commercial mean? Is this commercial offices, commercial real estate? We'd love that clarification and who you're actually targeting? So commercial in our industry, and in my opinion, where we're trying to go is full dumpster rental service. So roll-off dumpsters, we have 15 and 20 yard roll-offs. We'll rent you a dumpster. We charge you trucking, daily rental fee, and a disposal fee on that. We can do dumpster contracts up to a full year where we're working with multiple contractors on a job, or we do junk removal services.

8:46We clean out for closed houses. we can demo a pool demo, you know, a whole house. We've done a couple of whole house demos. So we actually have a really big five bedroom house to gut out coming out in a couple of weeks. That job is$37 ,000 for one job for a couple of weeks. So it's a far cry from where I started making a hundred dollars a month in profit a couple of years ago. Oh man, that is a super, super interesting. I want to talk about this pivot as well. So how Are you guys like getting your first customers like in this pivot to commercial? Like what are some of those marketing tactics that you've used?

9:20For sure. So we actually saw it on our own customer base. We started letting them know what we were doing. And just because we're picking up their trash, we figured, hey, we've got at this point, 600 people that are free to market to. So we started there because it was the cheapest and easiest way to go. And we started getting some business that our name got out there. We were able to take pictures and videos, put that on our social media that we were doing this now. and it's been like a two-year pivot that we've been working through. And now our name's getting out there on Google. We do work with an SEO company to get our SEO bumped up and really try to just focus on the needs of potentially, say you're a garbage customer of ours, a garbage pickup customer, and your aunt owns a commercial properties company.

10:03We put that referral together. It works out really well. Most people spend months, sometimes years, just thinking about starting a business. But what if you could do it in just 10 days? That's exactly what the 10-day business launch plan is designed for. It's a step-by-step roadmap that takes you from idea to real operational business in just 10 days. Click the link in the description below and get ready with your business. If someone doesn't have like a customer base that they can go off of, they're really like truly starting from scratch. What advice would you give to them to land like that first client?

10:35I would say depending on your area, local networking groups are great. I mean, they have something called a professional connections group where you can meet once a week. You have breakfast with 20 to 30 other business owners. It's very inexpensive. And the in-person marketing, if you will, that you can do with this business, with this industry, that's not really like selling a car or selling a house. Like typically we're needed when things are bad. We need to remove junk or we need to remove trash. So just face-to-face getting someone to trust you helped me out a lot. Also, just from a marketing standpoint, we did a lot of giveaways in the beginning, like a dumpster rental giveaway through Facebook, especially in like April and May in our area, all the snow melts and everyone's doing spring cleaning.

11:20So we'd give a few of those away at for free. And our cost was minimal. Our cost might be$150. And a couple of them got shared a thousand times on Facebook, which was amazing. One had a reach of almost 200 ,000 people back when we used to do that. Oh my gosh. What exactly was this giveaway? I love the concept of giveaways here. And it's something that we've used at my own company as well as like, give something away like, hey, talk to us, close with us, and we'll give you something that way. I think early on, especially as you're building your company, it's a great way to get like your first few clients is some sort of giveaway.

11:51What specifically worked for you in this instance? We did a free dumpster giveaway. So what that would be is we drop this dumpster off on a Friday, pick it up on a Monday, customer would fill it with whatever they want. And we'd bring it to the landfill, free of charge completely. That offer worked excellent for us. I mean, from there then, did you go back to me like, well, now you can always use us? Like, what did that follow up look like exactly? Yep. So a couple of people did use us. I think we might have done five or six giveaways over the course of it. We weren't like spamming people with it.

12:22But the big reach was the like and share back when Facebook allowed you to like, hey, you got to like and share and tag three people. It literally added like over a thousand followers to our Facebook within a month. So that was huge. So then when we share something, the other thing that this is a little nugget, I guess, is we would post things during the week before the giveaway and people would just be like sharing our regular offers, our full price offers, because they were excited about the giveaway. So that helped us out a lot. And doing it in your busy season, I would highly recommend doing it regardless of what service you're in.

12:58Like if you're in, say, pressure washing, do it just before the super busy season. Bring all that hype that'll ride you through your season. Nice. Really, really good. What is your like current workday like look like? You've obviously made the pivot to more commercial. You've been in it for a few years. What is your like workday look like now compared to like when you started? Yeah, so my days are never the same. And that's what I like so much about my business is I'll have days in the office, which were my office is currently at my house. My guys work out of a yard space that I purchased last year.

13:27And we're building a building right now. So right now I'm general contractor today. But the average day to day is some days I'll drive a truck for a couple hours. Some days I'm out doing networking for the whole day and just trying to sell the junk removal, doing estimates. But it's nothing for me to work 20 hours in the truck if it's really busy, because since we did the initial contact, I do have two full-time employees now driving. So we have even grown a little more. We actually had our best month last month, just a tick shy of 70 ,000 in revenue with just two employees. So we do a lot of work in a short amount of time for how small we are.

14:00Oh my gosh. So$70 ,000 with two like full-time employees. I mean, how many hours, like a week are you working on this? I'm asking that because I'm going to teed up for a delegation question. So delegation is obviously one of the most important things when it comes to entrepreneurship. So listeners take notes on proper delegation, but how many hours a week are you working and talk to us about delegation as well? The average week is 15 in the truck. Like I'm working like only 40, 50 though. That's the biggest thing about my business that I feel we stand out is I don't work past 4 PM. I never work Saturday and Sunday.

14:30I just shut the business phone off. Like I've tried to build the business to an efficient state where my guys aren't working more than 45 hours a week. The last couple of weeks, all month, last month, they didn't have a week over 42 hours and we were doing those numbers with just two of them. So it's all about pricing yourself correctly and being super efficient when you deliver your service. Nice. That is so, so good. So I want to speak about delegation. How did you know how to delegate? I know you just hired another employee. So talk to us about delegation and how you know what to delegate and the importance of it.

15:02Yeah. So the biggest thing that I found was once I got to a point where the calls were coming in and I wasn't able to get back to them fast enough. For me, I like to get back to someone within an hour if we're open. And I was not getting back to people. And that was really bothering me back a couple of years ago. So that was when I said, I absolutely need a driver. And we hired our first full-time driver and he's still with me to this day. We've gone through some part-times in between, but the second driver was needed when the dumpsters, you know, I knew this summer was going to be busy. We have 20 roll-off containers now.

15:32So I try to hire before I need it now. Like I'm already kind of looking into the third hire, but I don't know. It's a feeling. It's a gut feeling. I mean, we're super disciplined. Tyler, who works for me is super disciplined at getting stuff done the right way. And I think finding good people, you know, one great person can be better than two average people. And we all know that. So just putting time into your employees and Tyler trained up Noah. I didn't train Noah whatsoever, which was really cool. like I met him and I had full trust in Tyler and now Tyler and Noah, I'm going to have full trust for the next person.

16:05And I guess it's kind of like building blocks, but Tyler and I had hit about just under 600 K with just two of us. And that's when I was like, all right, we're building the shop out of pocket too. I know I'm going to like spray a lot of people, but we're building like a $300 ,000 building out of pocket. So I'm like trying to now reinvest in the company where I want to get asset heavy. And now I'm ready to like hire a receptionist, hire a mechanic, like spend the money on that, but we need to get our assets up first. Oh man, that's so crazy. I want to hit on that little less than$600 ,000 with two people.

16:35I think that is just absolutely amazing. A big part of this is your mindset and fitness here. Obviously, it's the habits that you have as an entrepreneur, but it's also what you do outside of those working hours that can really set you apart. And you've mentioned your passion about discipline and fitness. How do those values carry over into your business life then? I've been working out since I was 18 every day. I used to power lift competitively. I used to be able to deadlift 600 pounds at 180 pounds. So I was real disciplined on training, not getting hurt. I've raced motocross. I still ride.

17:04I'm just big into fitness, big into exhausting the mind, right? Or exhausting the body to tame the mind, they say. And every morning, 4.30, alarm goes off. I get to the gym, then I get to the shop, and then I get back to this home office. And it's every day, man. I don't know. Fitness has been a huge part of my life. Staying healthy, you know, spending time with my family, that's just been a pillar. So I think if you can get your body right, your mind kind of works better. A lot of times we've been speaking about on this podcast about like how much like working out or just like taking a cold plunge, like those typical things that people say, it's like, yeah, you can say to do it, but like there's so much merit to it where, you know, working out already builds that consistency, that discipline that you need to spill over to entrepreneurship to allow you to do 600 ,000 with two people essentially.

17:48Yeah. I think like a cold shower for a few minutes in the morning, which I just got into the clarity it gives you is crazy. I don't have a cold plunge, but my buddy got me on the cold shower thing. And it's pretty wild how clear you come out of that after a few minutes in there. Yeah, it's great for the hair. And it's great for the face too. So there's more reason to do it. But what advice would you give to someone who's stuck in like that safe job, but has an entrepreneurial itch that everyone listening to this podcast has? I think just planning goes a long way. In today's day and age, it's super easy to get excited.

18:19And you don't really want to make that jump before you got a little bit of cash put aside. That was one mistake I had. I mean, my back was against the wall. Luckily, I was able to start this business while still working. So if you want to experiment with things, I would highly recommend doing that while still having a secure income. There's nothing wrong with running your business on the side for a few months or even a few years if it means that when you actually hit the runway and you're going to fly, you're safe. So that's one thing I've listened to a lot of people. They get in debt over their head or they get out over their skis and just be cautious.

18:51You know, entrepreneurship is awesome, but it's not for everybody. Who is entrepreneurship not for? I would say if you don't have a stomach for risk of any kind, whether it's financial or your risk of your time, you got to be willing to put in the time in the beginning. You got to be willing to sacrifice, you know, the family time and just, I think sacrifice mentally more than anything. Like there's been a lot of family events I've been at where I'm not really there. Like I'm there physically, but I'm thinking about something. And I think we all have that problem. And if you don't have that problem, you might not be cut out to be an entrepreneur because it's all the time.

19:28You cannot shut it off. So if you just want to clock in and leave it at the door and not be detail-oriented, you probably have a tough road ahead of you. It's so much different than many jobs where once you leave the shop or leave your work, you don't have to think about it. But entrepreneurship, you go to the grocery store, you're thinking about entrepreneurship. You're like your company. You go to Target, you're thinking about it. You go on a walk, you're thinking about it. It is a double-edged sword where it is awesome. Entrepreneurship is great. There's a lot of great benefits to it. But it is scary.

19:55There is risk to it. You will stress yourself out. But it does speak to like entrepreneurship is for people and for not people, essentially. One thing I want to add before we jump off that topic is if you're looking to scale, solopreneurship is great. Did it for a few years. It's awesome. Depending on the industry, that might be as far as you want to go. But what I'm realizing now is carrying that burden on my shoulders. And so my guys can just go home to their families and have a great calm night and carry it on my shoulders gives me a sense of pride that I've never felt before. and that is really awesome.

20:26Ah, so, so good. Before we dive into our FanBlitz questions, what's something that you wish more people understood about starting a business in a small town? How much word of mouth matters in 2025 even still? There are a lot of people in our town who have been in business 50 years that for the last 30 have not advertised a lick and they do more business than anybody new coming in. Yeah, I grew up in a small town, 7 ,000 people and like word of mouth is everything. Yeah, your reputation in a small town is truly everything. So Heath, I want to say thank you so much so far. Let's dive to our Fan Blitz questions.

20:59These are questions submitted from our community and listeners, if you want to join in on World Class Entrepreneurs, go to www.youtube.com slash outflip and submit your questions there. But Heath, ready for our last five questions here? Let's do it. Number one, what's one habit you swear by for staying disciplined? Exercise every day. Really good. Two, what's the biggest mistake new entrepreneurs make? Jumping in and expecting too much too fast. If you had to start over tomorrow with$1 ,000, what would you do first? That's a really good one. $1 ,000 does not go very far in the trash industry. I will tell you that this business is extremely capital intensive, but I would probably go get some yard signs and get in as many networking groups as possible before I bought a truck.

21:40Really good. What's your lease or part of running a business? Never turns off. Then last one for you. What's one thing you do better than almost anyone you know? Give back to my clients in a timely manner. That is very, very important. That is very, very good. Heath, I want to say thank you so much for joining the podcast today. If someone's like, oh my gosh, I need to learn more about Heath, where can they learn more and connect with you? They can connect with us on Facebook, Lake Champlain Sanitation. We have a Facebook and we also have a YouTube channel, Lake Champlain Sanitation. I currently run that channel.