212. How to Turn a Simple Service Into a Scalable Business

0:00Imagine this, you're a university student trying to scrape together enough cash for tuition. You and a buddy decide to start a business with zero experience based on a single problem, your parents' dirty grill. So you start knocking on doors. No fancy ads, no website, just pure hustle. And on the very first day, five strangers say yes. That's the moment a simple summer job becomes a nationwide empire. It's the moment you realize that the most successful businesses aren't always built on complex tech, but on solving a real world problem that everyone else has overlooked. That was the light bulb moment for Michael Sayon.

0:35I'm Ryan Atkinson, and this is the Uplit Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. Today, that door-to-door hustle has evolved into Grill Hero, a rapidly expanding franchisee aiming to become the 1-800-GOT-JUNK of grilled cleaning across North America. Michael is here to break down the playbook for turning a simple service idea into a scalable, high-revenue brand. I am so, so excited for this conversation. This is a whole new idea we have not had on the podcast. So, Michael, thank you so, so much for being here. Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Ryan. Happy to be here.

1:03Let's rewind back the clock, go into that very first summer grill hero. You landed five sales on your first day with zero experience. I mean, a lot of people would feel fear or imposter syndrome. What immediate validation did that do for your mindset and what core belief did install into you about entrepreneurship? Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, door-to-door is hard. I didn't have a lot of sales experience. It was kind of like we had an idea, we wanted to test it out. So it was super validating seeing those first five people really say yes to it. keep in mind at the time we were charging like pretty low prices.

1:34We kind of made it like a no brainer offer just so we could test it out. But we actually had no idea how to clean grills when we went and pitched that. So it was like we got the customers. Now it's let's go figure out the service, go back to the customers and provide something of value. And then it was just obviously from there reiterating and building the business. So well, let's talk about that very first job, because as it was described, it was a quote, an eight hour disaster. It's a moment probably like a lot of people would quit. But like, what did that failure of that eight hour disaster, like teach you about the importance of the like process?

2:04And how did that reframe that disaster is necessary learning curve? Talk to us about that. Yeah, I think that was kind of like the first point of like, wow, we actually started a business. I think a lot of people kind of get into business. It's fun at the start, you have your business plan, and then you go get your customer and you actually like work on fulfilling that. And then we just got hit with that, you know, realization that we really didn't know what we're doing. So our first job, I think we actually We cleaned my parents' grill and we just were testing out different processes. We learned on YouTube.

2:30We figured things out. And then we showed my parents who were like, this is horrible. Like we wouldn't pay for this. Like it took us super long. And so we went back to the hardware store, grabbed different supplies, reiterated. We got it down to, you know, somewhat of a science where we're like, okay, we can comfortably two of us do a grill in about four hours. So it was still eight man hours. So it wasn't a workable business model at that point. It was like, okay, we had somewhat of a process. We did a good enough job where it was like, you know, we're charging$60 at the time. So the expectations weren't super high.

2:58And so we went out, we offered that to the customers and they're like, yeah, it's good. You know, two young kids doing what they can to kind of start a business. So we had a lot of that initial support. But then from there, it was like, OK, we have to focus on building the right service. And as we did, you know, more trips to the hardware store, test out different policies, procedures, different cleaning techniques. We were able to really reiterate that process over the course of time and really nail down a really high quality service. And then that's when our, you know, pricing kind of went up from there.

3:25Talk to us about being like a young entrepreneur, being a young scrappy entrepreneur people love to work with. I think like if you are a younger entrepreneur, listen, it's like truly your age is like your superpower because it's something that you can leverage in sales conversation to be like, oh, like, you know, I'm just an 18 year old kid that's just trying to like start a business. Like, will you give me a shot? Talk to us how that became like a superpower for you. Absolutely. It's funny because now that I'm like 28 now, I should just turn 28 last week. And so now I'm kind of like losing that.

3:50But I absolutely like 100 % agree with you. Like it's such a superpower having youth on your side. People genuinely like wanted to help us. We were 18 years old and we started the business. So like, you know, we were young and naive and just full of energy and wanting to help people. And people saw that right away. So they gave us a shot and we leveraged that for a very long time, you know, with customers for sure, but also reaching out to mentors and stuff like that through LinkedIn, getting people to give us their time and feedback and support. And so that was honestly one of the biggest helps that we got was having that youth on our side.

4:20And so I always tell people like start a business as early as you possibly can leverage that. And you're going to learn a tremendous amount through that journey. Okay. Let's talk to someone that's like, okay, I want to start a service-based business. And we hear a lot of different strategies on how to get those first like five to 10 customers. I know you were doing door knocking. What you know now, what would you advise people to get like their first five to 10 customers? Honestly, I think door knocking is the best way to start. And whether it's like physically you're going to a door or you're just doing cold outreach, But our first customers came from door to door.

4:50We did that for our first entire summer where we just did door to door. We leveraged our networks. So like friends, parents, things like that. And that's how we grew like our first, I would say, couple hundred customers, just like organic. It allowed us to really build the relationships with them. Where again, like I mentioned, like we weren't charging a lot because we were still figuring out the service. But as we provided a better service, our pricing went up. And so we really leveraged kind of like those first hundred customers to have a really good relationship with them and really kind of tweak and iterate what their expectations were.

5:18And as we delivered more value, we're able to charge more money. And then from there, in our second summer, we did lean more into paid ads. We started Google ads and Facebook and stuff like that. And that's where the scale in the business really came. But I would never have wanted to skip the step of doing door-to-door first. I feel like that was tremendously valuable just to have that personal relationship with the customer and be able to kind of reiterate. Because if we started by going on digital and we wouldn't have had that same relationship, we wouldn't be able to kind of reiterate the service as we needed to to kind of build that we ended up building.

5:49Yeah, love it. And let's talk about a really big tipping point for you when it comes to building this, because you've received a$10 ,000 grant, which is insane from your university's like entrepreneurial program. One, like, tell us, like, how did you get this? And like, what'd you guys do with that$10 ,000? What was like the first three investments for you? Yeah, so it was it kind of was divine timing, almost like coming out of that first summer, we got into our this hub incubator program through a university, they gave us the funding and mentorship, they actually stopped offering that grant after that first year.

6:18So like it was kind of the first year they're offering the program. And so we got super lucky we got in there, we use the money to just invest in turning our business from like two guys knocking on doors, to actually hiring out teams and, you know, branding and building like a brand, a website, like all these different things. So we took that money and really put it into making the business from like, two guys figuring it out to like actually having employees and all the different things that go along with that. So that was super helpful. And we got mentorship and we were in kind of a cohort with a number of other businesses.

6:46So that helped us really just start thinking differently and really treating it as more of a business that started to kind of scale. Well, let's talk about like getting the employees and like scaling. I mean, how long were you doing the actual like cleaning yourself on the grills before like you hired someone to like do that? Because it's super important to like step away, obviously, and do like the manual work. I mean, I think that should be a lot of entrepreneurs goal is to step away from manual work. Talk to us about that. 100%. Yeah, that first summer was like, it was just us cleaning and then we would we would clean throughout the day and then we would knock on doors throughout the night typically we're filling up kind of our next day or a couple days in advance with that and so we were just pulling like 12 hour days doing all the cleanings ourself putting the money in our pocket and then going and selling the next day's jobs and then kind of we did that for you know four months in a row it really allowed us like i mentioned continuing to reiterate the process have the first direct experience with the customer really understanding kind of our value proposition.

7:36And then we took that learning and built the business going to that hub incubator program in our university in our second year. And then from there, that's when we hired the teams and we kind of stepped away from doing a lot of the cleanings ourself. And then we started kind of managing the crews. We would still jump in, I would say from time to time. And we would obviously be hands on the ground doing like training and things like that on job sites. But typically, like we weren't getting our hands dirty. We're focusing more on running the digital ads and really being business owners at that second year.

8:03But I 100 % agree, like you have to kind of get your hands dirty at the start to really understand your business and then train it out and then grow from there. 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. Love that. Get your hands dirty. That's going to be one of our takeaways.

8:33So listeners, stay tuned for that at the very end where I'll give you my three takeaways. Get your hands dirty is probably going to be one of them there. Let's talk about hiring now because it's my understanding that you hired your friends to do it. One, would you advise people to hire their friends to do it? And then two, like truly, what was the hardest part of letting go of the cleaning and like trusting other people to do it to maintain that quality? Yeah, I think at the time it made sense. Looking back, it was like not the best to hire friends. I think it's hard to hold your friends accountable as employees.

8:59Absolutely. But at the start, when you're starting a business, it's like almost the path of least resistance where it's like, I have some friends who want a job. So we did that. I definitely wouldn't advise it holistically. But at the time, it did make sense. And then from there, I would say we put that rule after we did it once of like, hey, no more friends. And then we actually started, you know, going through Indeed and hiring employees like typical way. So when you're hiring people from Indeed, are these just like 1099 workers? Are they actually like full time employees? What does that look like?

9:27Yeah, so we actually tested this out. So like we had contractors, we tested that out, then we tested out employees. We found with the contractor model, like it really didn't work well, we weren't able to hold them as accountable. It was very difficult to properly manage them, frankly. So we went back to the employee model. And yeah, it's more expensive in terms of kind of like the payroll taxes and all the things you have to pay on top of that, especially in Canada, it's like, you know, more significant than in the US. But it just made so much more sense for a model, we could really be a lot tighter on quality control and the things that were really important to us.

9:57so we did test out the contractor model didn't work well we went back to the employee model and then that's when we kind of found franchising as like our ultimate business model and how we were going to scale the business you know what's so funny about you saying like contractors don't work i was literally just having lunch with a friend two hours ago who's like starting like a cleaning business here in austin and he was like honestly the hardest challenge of this right now is labor we're all 1099 employees and he said literally the past two weeks two people have just completely ghosted them. No accountability, just stopped responding, stopped showing up the job sites.

10:27It's so interesting that like labor is like truly like one of the biggest challenges when it comes to like a home service based business. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's really the two things of getting customers and then having someone to do the work, right? So you really have to nail both of those. And yeah, we just found the contractor model, frankly, didn't work well. People are like, Oh, I'm just a contractor. I'm a 1099. I don't have to, they just have that kind of different entitlement. And then when you have employees, you can actually build a culture, build a team, you can dictate like when you need them to work and when you don't need them to work.

10:54And there's just more control. And you really need that to build a proper brand with the proper quality control and all the things you want in place to really build a solid service business. I absolutely love that. That's another really good takeaway for us. But let's talk about overhead because obviously when you're doing like contract work, 1099s, I mean, it can be a little up. You can pay them more. You can pay them less, all depending on like the seasonality of it. How did you guys keep overhead costs like low, especially in the early days where every like budget, like decision like really matters.

11:21So talk to us about that. So, I mean, you always work on obviously having consistent hours for the staff, but like, just because you have someone as an employee doesn't mean you have to pay them 40 hours a week, you know, all the time. Like we would have a lot of part time. So like the way we do our demand planning internally is we figure out, okay, what are a labor hours going to look like? And we forecast out based on sales trends and a number of different factors. And then we look at like month by month, how many hours we actually need. So we're not going to go out and hire like 20 full-time staff.

11:46We might have five full-time staff and like, you know, 15 part-timers. We're going to fill in the gaps. And then we just like, as a service business, we always work on matching like how much work we're going to have with how many hours we actually need. And then we just run a schedule of our employees. So some weeks, you might have someone working 10 hours, 20 hours, and you work on having kind of those flexible staff members that can kind of scale up and scale down when you need them. So I absolutely love that. And so what I love about Grill here is we connected on LinkedIn first, that was like how we first got introduced to each other.

12:15This is truly like a business model or business idea I've never heard of. And I absolutely love it, because I think it is just so unique. And like, I have a girl back at home. And like, I can imagine like how this could be used here. So let's talk about like that first mover advantage, like, how to be like the first to market if you guys were like, how do you guys have like educate people on it? And how did that give you like a strategic advantage, just being able to get to people's houses first? Yeah, I mean, the reason why we started the business was there was no one in our area offering it, which is pretty unique, because like, you know, especially going through business school and stuff, like everyone's trying to come up with, you know, the next Apple, the next Uber, like these very complex business models.

12:50And we were just like, well, people need this service and no one's offering it. So we just did that. And it worked exceptionally well for us. And as we expanded to more markets, we kind of saw the same thing. Like there was very few competitors, maybe a handful of other people doing it. But really, it was like that first mover advantage. And like for the first while was educating people, people just didn't know they had to even clean their grills or they hadn't done it before. And they thought they should, but they didn't know there was a companies out there they can do it for. Now we've seen that completely changed like in our markets like we have good market penetration where most customers either know about us or they know that growth cleaning is an actual service but as we franchise to different locations across Canada and into the U.S.

13:28we are finding markets where we're kind of seeing that again like we're almost going back in time five years where it's like you know we just went into Edmonton for example and there wasn't a single company offering this in Edmonton and it's like there's 1.5 million people in Edmonton like it's a large market and so we're seeing a lot of initial success because we have the systems of like a 10 year business and we're now going into a completely, you know, brand new market with no competition. Our franchisee there is able to, you know, really leverage that and really have like a lot of initial success in that market, which has been super cool to see.

13:58Super, super amazing. Yeah. That's what I like love about this for it. So do you guys see like a lot of competition? I know you're based in Canada, but you're expanding to like the U S as well. Like truly, like I haven't heard of a business idea like this. So is this something that like you see, like there's a ton of opportunity for, I would say there's more and more competition. I think we're doing a good job helping more people come into the market because we're, you know, the franchise system, we're promoting that quite a bit, which is fine. A lot of the competition we're seeing is kind of like mom and pops or like younger students, people starting up like local businesses, which honestly I encourage because it helps people get familiar with the service.

14:32It helps spread awareness that people actually need to clean their grills. And that's like the number one thing that we see is I think it's 70 to 80 percent of Americans own a barbecue and like very few people actually do the proper cleaning and maintenance. So having more companies come and educate the consumer is actually quite good for us. I think it helps grow the market as a whole. But then we're still kind of like in my perspective, like we're 10 years ahead, like we've been building this brand for 10 years. You know, we're working on becoming the largest national brand. And so we are seeing kind of more people come into the market.

14:58But I would say we're still kind of at that first move or advantage where we have the scale and we're building this. so I encourage a lot of people to join our franchise system but if they want to start it up on their own like all power to you it's it's a great business model and there's definitely a strong need for it to help build the market out if someone did want to start this on their own I mean what is the startup cost look like you don't have to give us the whole secret sauce here but like what does startup cost look like what are like the tools that you need to do it yeah so like as a franchisee if you were going to buy a territory from us we charge 65 000 like our kind of startup capital that includes like the territory fee, all the startup supplies and equipment, different things that you would need there.

15:35And then you'd be starting from year 10. Like that's how I kind of pitch it to people when we're on a lot of like franchise development calls. It's like, yeah, you can go start on your own, but you're going to be starting everything completely from scratch. Lots of trial and tribulation over the years of growing this. So it's like, it makes a lot of sense to go with the franchise system, especially to get access to that kind of capital. You're going to be able to scale a lot quicker with like systems that are built out over the last 10 years. If you're going to start on your own, I would say, yeah, you can definitely start it for less, but it's going to take you longer to scale.

16:03So it really just depends on kind of what you're looking for. But I would say ultimately, like a lot of the startup capital we have in our investment is going to be working capital, making sure you're properly financed, as well as your initial marketing. So you can hit the ground running and you can actually scale your territory. You can go to a hardware store, pick up$500 of supplies and start cleaning grills. But you're going to be, you know, just offering a service in your local community, not scaling a legitimate business. So it kind of just depends on, you know, what you're looking to do.

16:31I love it. You guys have legitimate prices here because you guys went from, as you were saying, like$65 to star 70, whatever it was to an average of now like 275. We didn't have a whole lot of resistance to that pricing, you know, upcharge, I would say. What does this tell you about like the value of like customer pricing and like, how did you guys land on 275? Talk to us about that because I think that's such a great ticket size for home services, I feel like. So when we actually boosted it, so now our average job size is, uh, it's about 315 in Canada and 330 in the U S. So we do focus on like the higher end grills.

17:02Like we're not going out and cleaning like your Walmart barbecue. That was 200 bucks, you know, kind of thing. We're targeting people that have spent at least a thousand dollars on their grills. In a lot of cases, it's people who have built like really nice outdoor kitchens. They have a really nice setups and they're hiring us, you know, a couple of times a year to come out and take care of their appliance for them. I mean, ultimately what we've done is we've built the strongest brand in the space. So if someone has a$10 ,000 grill, like they're going to want to go with more of an established player.

17:29They're going to want to go with the brand that they can really trust. And that's the power of the franchise system. That's the power of Grill Hero is we really built that brand that customers know we are kind of like the premium brand name for the service. And they're going to trust us over, you know, your local kind of guy offering it on Facebook Marketplace, especially when we're talking about cleaning like these larger systems that they've really invested a lot of money into. Let's talk about failure a little bit more here because you've tried expanding into like new cities yourself here, which kind of failed, I guess, but it did lead you into franchising, which is obviously huge.

18:00And that was like how you guys have really gotten so big. It does seem like failure has been a chapter in your story as it is with everyone's here. Talk to us about how failure really has propelled you guys forward. And when I talk about 10 years of experience, it's like 10 years of failure, right? So it's like you get to start and learn from all those failures so you don't go through them yourself because they just take a lot of time and they're painful. But yeah, the biggest thing is if you can learn from them. So yeah, when we first tested out, like, you know, scaling the business, we went to other markets, not as a franchise system, but as like our own corporate territory.

18:29And we just found that it was, you know, we split our focus. Like we didn't have the capital to properly invest in the other area. We didn't have the focus. We kind of just, you know, took the existing managers we had. And now it's like, hey, instead of looking after this area, now you're over all these areas. And we just really didn't see the scale that we needed to. Like we kind of just stretched our operation. and then it was just way more expensive for us to operate these bigger areas like we could do two million dollars and in a much smaller location versus two million dollars across like a huge geographical region and you're always going to want to have like that smaller tighter operation because your mileage is going to be cheaper it's way easier to manage you're you're able to kind of go deeper and so that's when we really found franchising is like you know yeah we can expand corporately but it's not the best model when you can have someone come in with their own investment, their own focus, and really focus on specific areas, they can go deeper, they can own their neighborhoods, and we can build a really strong band in every single area we operate in.

19:22And so we tested out franchising three years ago, we've kind of never looked back, because we've just partnered with really strong franchise partners who are really owning their areas and expanding. And it's allowing us to scale on a much larger playing field than we would if we were trying to do everything corporately ourself. One of the principles that I love for you when it comes to the franchising model is managers from day one, and you're not going to cleaners. Talk to us about that core philosophy and what exactly does that mean? Because I feel like a lot of people, they are worried if they're going to get into franchising, like, oh man, this sounds awesome, but I don't want to clean the grills.

19:52But in your guys' case, that's not it. Talk to us more about that. Yeah. And so, I mean, going back to my previous point, you've always got to get your hands dirty. You've got to understand the business. You'll be willing to clean grills, but you shouldn't spend all your time cleaning grills. So typically in our franchise program, like in their first year, obviously you've got to go through the training. You've got to understand first principles of how to clean a grill. You as soon as possible, we want you out of that. Like we don't want people thinking that they're going to buy a franchise and then their head's going to be in a grill for their first couple years or even their first year, because then no one's steering the ship.