190. How to build a 7-figure poop scooping business

0:00Imagine working at a digital marketing agency one day and scooping dog poop the next. Sounds like a downgrade, right? Not for today's guest. When William partnered with a plumber friend and spotted Gap in his own backyard, literally, he launched a pet waste removal business with just$1 ,000. We started with a bucket, a bag, and$1 ,000. Three months later, we had 350 recurring customers. We scaled a poop scooping business to seven figures, and I barely touched the day-to-day. I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Output Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses.

0:34In today's episode, William's breaking down exactly how he built Swoop Scoop, what he'd do differently if he started a day, and why he believes unsexy businesses are the best way to get rich quietly. William, I'm so, so excited to welcome you to today's show. Thank you so, so much for being here. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. This is such a fun topic. I know all of our listeners really are wanting to dive into this one. As we talked about before recording, it's our number one course on the Academy right now. Let's go to the beginning for you. How did you turn from working at a digital marketing agency to scoop and poop for a living?

1:02Talk to us about that. Yeah. So it was a little bit of a transition. So I went from the marketing agency and I realized that I actually make a lot more money if I own the companies rather than just doing advertising for people. So I actually have a couple other companies. I partnered with a guy that was an electrician for 30 plus years. I did all the marketing. I did all the CRM, all the background setup. He did all the ops, all the hiring, all the firing. Took that business from zero to seven figures in about five months. Did a similar thing with a garage door company. And I had a buddy from high school that wanted to start a business with me.

1:30He wasn't a plumber. He couldn't do HVAC. He couldn't back up a trailer to do a lawn care type company. And my wife had hired a pooper scooper at the time. And they were super unprofessional, no uniforms, and it show up on time. They build everybody through Venmo. You can see the addresses of their clients and stuff on the Venmo account. And I thought, man, maybe we give this a shot and see what happens. I mean, you're running a whole lot of different stuff. You mean you have a digital marketing background. You grew a company. What made you even consider pooper scooper industry after the success?

1:56Was it truly just the unprofessionalism? You saw that gap? Or what specifically drew you to this? I saw there was an opportunity and I definitely wanted to work with my friend because we had grown up together in elementary school, middle school, high school. So let's see if we can get him some money so he doesn't have to work a regular job and kind of do a business. I'm glad we did because it's my biggest business by a lot now. I love it. And we're going to talk about how big this business is. So listeners, stay tuned for that. I want to go back to identifying that gap, being like, this is unprofessional.

2:22We got Venmo. What's that next step that you took to really get this off the ground? We had no idea what we were doing. There was no like a flip academy or anything to tell us. So I remember at the beginning, Levi, my business partner, he was literally out in the backyard, like scooping rocks because he didn't have a dog to try to figure out how long it would take. So we can kind of reverse engineer our pricing. That was a big step, kind of figuring out what we're doing, figuring out the offer, figure out the pricing. We then found a CRM that was actually dedicated for the pooper scooper industry.

2:46So we're kind of able to reverse engineer. Okay, here's how we should do our routing. Here's how we should do our billing. And we kind of just started piecing it together. That's really how things got started. And from the get-go, our market positioning, I wanted to be the most premium service possible. Nobody really knew that pooper scoopers were a thing. So I figured if we just had the best white glove service, great customer service, great branding, that would kind of carry us through. Let's talk about that premium service and pricing particularly. Before we do that, though, just to save everyone a quick Google search, what is that CRM that your team uses just to save everyone that?

3:15It's called Sweep & Go. Sweep & Go. Perfect. So listeners, there's your CRM for you. We're going to drop more tidbits here. But let's talk about that pricing model and the premium offering you have. I mean, how the heck do you know how to like price this and how should listeners think about pricing their own pooper scooper business? Yeah. So at the beginning, it was just a matter of how much time are we spending? How do we put a flat rate behind that? Because I hate charging people by an hourly rate, especially in the pooper scooper industry. I mean, because we're making over$100 an hour per like man hour now.

3:39And if you were to tell customers that you're making that scooping up dog poop, it's probably not going to fly. Right. So trying to make it a flat rate, try to make it as easy as possible. And we also pre-bill all of our customers on like a monthly subscription. So if they don't pay us, we don't have to track down receipts or anything like that. we pre-bill, we get the money, they don't pay us, we don't show up. So it really streamlined the operation quite a bit. When we were first starting off, we didn't exactly have all those things figured out. But as we continue to grow, we start to get more sophisticated.

4:03We started doing other strategies. One example is we recently implemented quarterly billing, which reduces our churn by about a went from like three to 4 % per month, less than 1 % by introducing quarterly billing. Some things like that, we've just been evolving kind of over time. That's what I like love about entrepreneurship is like, as you start like doing all of this and whatnot, like stuff that you do a year and a half from now is like, you're not even thinking about like doing it right now. Like that quarterly billing, I'm sure when you guys started, no idea. But as you said, the more sophisticated you get with it, the more you're going to start realizing this and be able to operate on that.

4:34Yeah. Well, and especially if we were to do that at the beginning, we would have been able to pull so much cash forward. We would have got three months of cashflow just right up front. We would have been able to grow a lot faster. It's all about entrepreneurship and just always continuously learning. I want to talk specifically more about those startup costs and cashflow as well. How much did you guys have to start to this business? Where did that money actually go? What was essential at the beginning? I want to get really actionable for our listeners here. Yeah. So when we first started, I think we had around a thousand bucks.

4:57So we use that to get our basic tools, which we just use like a lobby dustpan and like a Corona garden rake, some bags, some disinfectant. I think you can buy all that now for 150, 200 bucks. I got the business license, got some door magnets, got some door hangers, got some business cards. I got some basic hosting to get a website up and then basically just paid for the CRM. All that was less than a thousand dollars to get started. Wow. So then how How did you go get your guys' first customer here? The first 10 to 20 customers was pretty grindy. We went out, we were posting on like Facebook groups, like buy, sell, trade groups, like Greg's List of Spokane, those types of groups.

5:29We were able to get customers through that. And then just through sheer brute force to just like handing out door hangers and talking to people, trying to hit up our friends and family, kind of at the beginning. The beginning was definitely grindy, but once we were able to get our first 10, 20 customers, we started putting some money into paid ads. That's when things really took off for us. Yeah, and so were these first 20 customers really on or occurring? Because as I said in that intro, you went from zero to 350 reoccurring customers in just three months was just like mind blowing. So was it from day one you guys were doing recurring?

5:55Why is that so important for our listeners listening? Yeah, day one it was all recurring. So it was a big reason we chose this business model just because you have the same customer month after month after month. The cash flow is consistent. You know what you're making. Then as we scale now, it's like even better because now we can manage labor. We know how many employees can handle X amount of customers, how many managers we need for X amount of employees. So we've been able to scale up. So that's a huge benefit and a massive advantage over the other companies I've worked in. The recurring revenue and then also not really having any cost of goods sold.

6:20We're just selling labor. I don't need any parts, which is another big thing. And then also hiring as we got bigger. I don't need to find like a journeyman electrician with 8 ,000 hours. We're just hiring somebody to go out and pick up dog poop. So it made it a lot easier to scale the business. Yeah, that makes it so much easier. The reoccurring part, as any business owner will soon understand or may already understand, it's so important just for your own growth. both for someone that's listening right now, I'm going to save listeners. Like if you guys don't like this answer, you guys can cut off this podcast like right now.

6:47But William, I got to ask you, like for someone listening, like how can they validate if this is the kind of business could work in their own town? I'd love to hear like, what market do you like look for? What are some of those factors? Would love to hear that. Yeah, well, I know I've talked to probably hundreds of people all over the country. You want to be in somewhat of a good size town. If you live in a town with maybe less than 10 ,000 people, it's going to be a little bit tough to get a full route built up. We do work in some cities kind of on the edge of our service area with maybe 10 ,000 people.

7:10We still have 30, 40 customers there. So you can definitely still make some income, but it's going to be really hard to scale up. So if we're looking at new locations, opening up new locations, first thing we look at is if they're regionally close to us, then we're looking at things like housing density. So we want a bunch of single family houses that typically have smaller yards that are really close to each other because drive time is probably one of the biggest factors of profitability in this business. So we look at that. We try to look at like dog ownership percentage and kind of an easy way for me to do this is I'll just go to like Facebook ads, type in people that like dogs, I'll put in whatever geo area and I'll kind of give me an idea of how many people I could target in any particular market.

7:43So that's one thing that I do before we open up in a new area. And then I also look at things like, OK, what's the median income? What's like the housing prices? If there's a big discrepancy there, we know people might have some extra money that they could spend on a service like that. That's kind of high level. But kind of the main thing is if it's close to where we're at, right? I don't want to fly all across the country and have a location in Seattle and one in Orlando. That doesn't make sense right now. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you'll soon get there where you can fly private to go scoop poop.

8:07We're getting there slowly. Slowly but surely, I like that. I want to ask about that customer demographic because we've had someone on the podcast before. And one of my big takeaways from that was their demographic isn't the ultra wealthy. It's more of like the working class because if you think about the ultra wealthy, the mom or dad is at home all day. So they don't really need this service. I'd be curious, like more of your demographic. Yeah, no, it's definitely, as far as like socioeconomic status, it is all over the board, which was pretty shocking to me. Like when we first started, some of our biggest routes were like in the worst neighborhoods for whatever reason.

8:36They went to a couple of yards and they got like no grass or anything, but they're still hiring us to come pick up the dog waste, which was pretty surprising. But in general, I think now that we've raised our prices, we're kind of a more premium brand. It's kind of that, yeah, middle class females in their 30s and 40s is our top demographic. About 70 % of our clients are females that sign up for the service. Wow, that is super, super interesting. That's a good note. So listeners, rewind that and take notes on that because that's a really good tidbit there. But Williams, I want to ask the pricing as well.

9:02So like, is this$100 a month? Is it$200 a month,$300? I mean, like, what are you actually like charging people here? Yeah, so our first location, a little cheaper market. So right now, on average, our customer pays us about$105 a month. In our Seattle market, it's closer to$125 a month. That's a little bit of a premium. And one thing that we do to increase our conversion rate is we have an online quote tool where people can just sign up for services. We'll actually present the per visit price versus the monthly price. just let them know it's billed monthly. It actually increases our conversion rate.

9:28What I like so far of what you've talked about is I feel like you take a very analytical approach in your marketing and how you're doing. I'm sure that's by design, of course, as well. Yeah, it's becoming more by design as we get bigger. At first, there's a lot of trying to figure out what's even going to work. But yeah, it's definitely getting better and better over year. 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.

10:01Click the link in the description below and get ready with your business. Let's just say someone wants to start a pooper scooper business today. What would their path look like to get to 10k a month? Like how many customers obviously just give some numbers there? What pricing? What are expenses? Let's really talk about getting to 10 their first 10k in this business. Yeah 10k a month. What's that? You're probably around 100 clients, 80 to 100 clients depending on what your pricing is. if your pricing is lower then obviously you're gonna have to get a little bit more clients typically recommend that you price at minimum$85 a month kind of on the low end if you're anything below that it's going to be really hard for you to pay for advertising and to pay for employees I think a lot of people fall into the trap of I make 20 bucks an hour at my job so I can afford to make 20 bucks an hour at my business and it just totally kills their growth so that's a big trap that I think that you should avoid but yeah I mean 80 to 100 customers most likely that's not even going to be a full route one full-time person at our company can typically handle about 150 clients.

10:52So you could be making 10k a month working, I don't know, 30 hours a week out in the field doing all the other stuff you need to do that other 10 hours a week or or if you want to push it, you definitely can as well. That's a really good breakdown right there. And like how many times a day, like a week are they coming? They come in three times a week every day? Yeah, let me hear that actual route and how you designed those. Yeah, so our most popular frequency is just once a week. So about 65 % of our customer base is on once a week. And then we have some outliers we'll do twice a week. We'll do once a month and then we'll do once every other week.

11:19So once a week's the most popular every other week's the second most popular and it's pretty even between twice a week and once a month and obviously uh your pricing changes there as well i would imagine if you're going like twice a week one time a week or multiple whatever times a month it changes and we try to tear it down so if once a week's like 100 bucks a month let's say our every other week will be 75 a month so we're coming out half the time but we still have to pick up the same amount of waste so we try to account for that so we're not just charging 50 because we're coming out half as much we're charging a little bit more so that's kind of how we tear that down and then for For the twice a week customers, we basically just take our weekly price, double it and then take 10 % off.

11:52Super, super good. Where does like this waste go then? Like you pick it up, but like where does it actually go? You just throw it in a trash can or like are you taking a specific spot? Yeah, so this is kind of interesting. So at our first location, we want to be premium. We bought all these trucks and we take the waste and we got like a dumpster with waste management and we take care of the whole thing. Customers don't have to worry about it. But when we opened our second location, we decided to give it a try and just run around with fuel efficient like little Chevy Sparks. They're super cheap to buy, super cheap to wrap.

12:18And we just double bag it, put in the customer's trash can and almost nobody seemed to care. Wow. That's another amazing tidbit right there. So now you're just literally putting in the people's trash cans that are outside or? Yeah. Yeah. Nobody cares. It's kind of, it was kind of shocking to me. I've heard, I've talked to other scoopers. I know Erica Crouppen, she used to take the waste and then she just decided not to take it. All of a sudden she lost, I don't know, maybe like 5 % of her customer base, but it wasn't like a massive drop off like you might expect. Interesting. So would you advise people starting out this business to just drop it in their trash cans to start then?

12:49Oh, it's going to be way easier. You don't have to like find a place to put a dumpster. You don't have to buy trucks. It's going to be a lot more cost effective. It's going to be a lot less logistically challenging. So listeners, I hope you have a notebook here because this is a lot of like good tidbits. What literally I love about this business model like so much it gets me like so excited to talk about is like the startup costs can be like relatively low and like, I mean, expenses, we're going to talk about expenses here, but like it feels like you could do a one man show of this and take in 10k a month by yourself.

13:13correct me if I'm wrong there, but that's what is so exciting about a business model like this. Yeah, no, I think that's the number one thing that makes it so appealing and why I like it's probably so popular in the academy is because, I mean, you technically can start for like a couple hundred bucks and you have the earning potential with no employees to make six figures like take home because the expenses are so low. Once you get your customers, you don't have to pay for marketing. CRM is super cheap. There's no equipment. It's just basically selling your labor. So it's pretty awesome, actually.

13:36It would be too great to be true other than the dog poop. Yeah. And if you get over that, I mean, a lot of listeners probably have dogs. So just imagine doing it a hundred X of like what you're currently doing to get to six figures a year. Um, if you want to there, I mean, you're in and out on the yards on like seven minutes and then you're just driving most of the day. So it's not even that crazy. Oh man. That is just so, so crazy. I want to ask about those like expenses though. I mean, you just kind of hinted to them that like they are a little bit lower than, I mean, other industries, other services that you could provide.

14:04I mean, like, what are your actual expenses? Can you give us like dollar figures see your percentages here? Yeah, it's going to depend on what size of company you are. So obviously, like our expenses and profit margin is going to be a lot lower than a solo operator. If you're solo ops, I mean, you can be running 80%, 70, 80%. I wouldn't be surprised, maybe even higher. At scale, I try to shoot for at least like a 30 % net. Our biggest expenses are labor and probably marketing, I would say. So I mean, you got fuel insurance and all that other stuff, but every business has that stuff. But like truly, if you are going to do this as like a solopreneur, I want to talk to specifically these people, sort of like ground zero.

14:37If you are me a solopreneur in this it sounds like you know like gas like transportation of course you need a rake you need like a you don't even need a dumpster but like those sounds like the big expenses just to start out with i mean if you spend a thousand dollars on gas and that car payment and stuff like you could probably get away with that like pretty reasonably and also just for like startup expenses like you just recommend like a simple rake to do this is there a specific item or yeah no it's just a lobby dustpan and then it's a corona extendable garden rake that you could buy at home depot you buy on Amazon for like 20 bucks.

15:06Like it costs almost nothing. But one tip with the lobby dust pan is if you get it, you want to flip the handle around the other way to make it more ergonomic. Otherwise, your wrist will just get destroyed, cleaning yard after yard after yard. So we picked up some tips and tricks like that, and that will save you some wear and tear on your body. It's so easy to start and really just comes down to getting like your first few customers. I want to hit on that a little bit more here. You said like it was a lot of like brute force, like referrals. If you're going to advise someone today to get their first like 10 customers out of the gay, I mean, what would you exactly do?

15:35Facebook groups are still good. They're getting a little bit more saturated now, a little bit harder to punch through. But I think if you combine that with a good offer and really dial in your messaging. So I see a lot of people, they're just trying to compete on price all the time, but there's other things that you can compete on, right? So you can have an offer around speed, for example, you call us, we'll have your yard clean within 24 hours or it's free, or you have an offer that's get a free cleanup. Or if you're just starting off and you're trying to get reviews, one thing I like to tell people is to do what's called like the free trial method.

16:01So you go out to your friends and family, anybody that has a contact number that you can get a hold of and say, hey, we're starting this new business. We're doing free trials for two weeks in exchange for some feedback and a good review if we do a good job. Would you be interested in that? And a lot of people that end up signing on for service after that. So it's no risk to the customer. You don't really know what you're doing. You get some experience. You get some reps. You can get some content out of that. That's a pretty easy way to kind of get your feet wet is by giving that free trial to friends and family, anybody that responds to your Facebook group posts, anybody that responds to you on social media anywhere, just start hitting people up.

16:30Yeah. That's what really I feel like a lot of market comes down to just having like a crazy good offer when you're I know obviously you're you're an ad guy like you get ads you know how to run them effectively I mean within your ads would you advise people to have these same offers in there when starting off like a free trial for 24 hours or like what do your ads look like definitely shifts over time so you can give a dollar amount off you give a percentage off if you're giving that kind of an offer you have a speed offer that you can talk about for us probably the one we use the most is a free initial cleanup so the first cleanups typically more expensive it causes friction with the customer because they maybe haven't picked up in six months plus so it's going to take you a while to do that cleanup, right?

17:04So most companies will charge 100 bucks, 200 bucks, 50 bucks, whatever it might be extra before they get on to the actual subscription plan. So giving that away for free, well, yes, it sucks. It's going to help you get more customers. And the way that I like to think about it is what is your labor worth? So if you had to pay somebody 20 bucks an hour to go clean that up, maybe your all-in cost is$26,$27 with insurance and benefits and all that stuff. Just add that to your customer acquisition cost. Oh man, super, super good. It's Super important to know your customer acquisition cost. So if there's a metric to know, that's one of them here.

17:33But a question like pops into mind here, as you just said, like someone doesn't clean their yard for like six months. Like that's like mind blowing to me. That's like kind of gross, honestly, to think about. But like typically like why are customers like signing on for their services? Because like they truly don't pick it up for six months. Is it because like they're so busy? Like what's the main why on why people are buying? There's definitely a mix of people, right? So probably the biggest percentage is people that just hate picking up dog poop. So that's why our top demographic is kind of that female 3040s.

17:58But you also have busy professionals. Both people are working. They might not even see the sun because they're going to work early, coming home late. They got kids sports that they're going to right after work. So I just literally don't have the time to do it. You also have the elderly, you got people with service animals. And a lot of these people, they wouldn't even be able to have an animal unless they had a service like us to help pick up after their dog. So there's definitely a mix, but the main group is people that just don't want to do it. that's super fair yeah it's a really interesting business model i absolutely love it so listeners definitely take notes about this whole episode so so good i think it's something that anyone could start here let's talk about a little bit of reflections before we dive into our last time we heard of the fan blitz what's one thing you definitely would do differently if you had to start swoop scoop from scratch i'd spend way more money way faster if i uh if i could do it again i mean the economics are just so good if you can get a customer for less than a hundred dollars and their ltv is over three thousand dollars it's like hey i'm gonna mortgage my house and just don't put money into ads kind of a thing.

18:49So I think that definitely having the longer billing cycle so you can pull more cash forward is going to be important, reduce your churn rate, increase your LTV. And understanding the seasonality of the business also was the opposite of what I expected it to be. So quarter one, like almost in every market is the busiest time of year, regardless of if you have snow or not. I think a lot of that has to do with CPMs going down because there's a lot of advertisers pushing for Christmas, rises up advertising costs, coupled with the fact that the weather is typically the worst those times of year. So the worst of weather, typically the busier you're going to be.