231. How to Built a $600k/Year Empire With a Bucket and a $5 Ad

0:00Mark Regan:A lot of people listening want to start a business, but feel like they need a lot of money, experience, or the perfect idea. But today's guest built a business that now generates around$50 ,000 a month, starting with just about$50. No investors, no fancy equipment, just a rake, a bucket, and a$5 Craigslist ad offering to scoop poop. Fast forward today and Mark Regan is now serving hundreds of customers and even building a franchise model. I'm Ryan Atkinson and you're listening to Self-Fit Podcast where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. And today I am so excited to welcome Mark to the podcast.

0:36Mark Regan:We are having so many listeners asking us to do more Poop Scoop episodes. So Mark, so excited to have you on here. Thank you for the opportunity. Ryan, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. It's an incredible little business. Like you said, you can start with almost no money. You know, the margin, especially for a single owner-operated business through the roof. there's very few businesses that you can you know start run out of your garage and pay for your house you know get started with a couple of posts on facebook or you know asking your friends and neighbors to let you pick up after their dogs it is an incredible business and i'm going to ask you two questions just get the podcast started but you alluded to it people are going to know but in the simplest terms like what exactly do you do yes so basically it's we go to people's houses and we pick up their dog's poop.

1:22It's as easy as it sounds. We do now commercial, you know, big commercial projects too. But that's how we started. What are you doing in revenue generally about a month on average? So now we're in the spring rush, which is great. So we've grown, but even on a slow month,$50 ,000 to$55 ,000 a month.

1:41Mark Regan:That's insane. I know people are going to, their ears are going to perk up. Because again, you start with just about$50 and a$5 Craigslist ad. So let's go to that time. Where did the idea of like dog poop scooping business like come from? And why did you think it like might actually work here? Tell us about the origin stories. It started like just like so many other entrepreneurs. I have a business partner and we were just pitching ideas to each other. We would just do this all day long. We both worked a sales job. And, you know, if you're in sales, there's a lot of downtime sometimes. And it was actually Dean's idea.

2:16He just got a new dog. like, I have two big dogs. And he said, I bet people pay us to pick up their dog poop. And I originally thought he was out of his mind. I didn't know this industry existed. And he said, let's run an ad. Let's do a Craigslist ad. And to me, I'm thinking Craigslist ad. I didn't even know you could pay to put an ad on Craigslist. And he put the ad up. Maybe five or 10 minutes after it went live, we got our first call, our first customer. It was crazy. And it was a, the guy was a corporate chef. His wife was professional too. I've just had twins, but they were just overwhelmed.

2:55And I mean, he was begging, you gotta help. You know, the dog poop is ankle deep. When can he come out? We can't bring the kids outside. We don't want to walk outside. And I turned to Dean and I was like, you might, this might work. And we still have that guy today.

3:12Mark Regan:Wow, that's crazy. It's also the$5 Craigslist had, which is just awesome. But what did that ad say? And like, you know, talk to me about the moment of getting that phone call a little bit deeper. Are you like, holy smokes, like this actually might be a business? You know, it's funny. I don't know if I ever even saw the ad, which is funny. I never thought about that. No one's ever asked me that before. I think Dean just did it on his phone. But hearing that customer talk about, you know, how he was having trouble keeping up with the dog poop, it encouraged me that there are a lot of people, middle income people who work a ton.

3:44It's hard to be a professional, have dogs, raise kids. Mom and dad are both working. You need to get out there and pick up after your dog. It's a problem. Even in my own house, I hate doing it. You don't want to get out there, even if it only takes 10 minutes. And that's kind of, for me, that was the light bulb. When he came up with the idea of first pension, I thought anyone could do this. Anyone could pick up dog poop. The reality is just because anyone can do something doesn't mean everyone will do it.

4:13Mark Regan:That's good right there. Okay, so$5 Tracksless ad, you get your first customer. What are your startup costs? What were some of the first supplies you had to actually buy? Just very little. We bought actually a couple of those pooper scooper rakes, you know, and the little rake and the little scoop that goes with it. Got some Home Depot buckets and trash bags. And that was it. And at the time, I mean, I think we get, you know, you get a Koopa Scooper and a rake is probably now they're like 40 bucks. But back then they were probably 10 bucks. We probably already had the buckets and trash bags. And I think we charged the first customer, I think we charged him 20 bucks.

4:54Mark Regan:Oh, my gosh. Insane. So I'm curious. You now have like the rakes and everything you need. You're walking in this backyard. Was it simple? Was it literally just that simple of like picking up poop and like putting it in and like leaving? Was it like generally like just like was it that simple to get started? It really is that simple to get started. You just go out there and pick it up. There's no secret technique. You don't need any special tools. You don't need any special training. The magic isn't in doing the job. It's in paying attention. It's so simple that customers expect you to get all of it.

5:27That's the thing. But it really is. It really is that easy. You just have to go out. We walk like, call it the lawnmower, but it's not like you mulling the lawn. just make sure we walk over every inch of the yard.

5:39Mark Regan:But that's really all there is to it. Wow. It's really that easy. You can get started for such like low startup costs, which listeners should like absolutely be loving. Pricing the job. What's like the science, the anatomy, the formula to like actually like pricing these jobs of like what you know now and how you do it now? Like how do how should people price their first jobs? That's my favorite question, because people will look at their competition instead of looking at their own business expenses. The important thing, you can charge$10 a visit and you can have, you know, 30 customers on your route.

6:10But if you're really going to price and really going to be successful, you need to think about, you know, not only what, you know, what's costing

6:16Mark Regan:you in terms of time and effort and supplies, but where you want to go. So if you want to build this business, you need to, you know, you're going to have to eventually advertise on Facebook or Google. There's costs associated with that. So your price can't be just break even. We charge about$30 a yard, which is more expensive than average. But that, you know, at our size, that allows us to pay our employees a good wage and cover things like, you know, advertising, marketing. It covers you for things you don't think about, like what happens if a customer doesn't pay you or what if they need a refund because you did a bad job.

6:53Because we charge more, we're able to, if a customer has a complaint, we just give them their money back, you know, no questions asked. And it builds a lot of customer loyalty. So I would say to anyone who's starting this out, we picked$20 a yard in the first year. We pulled that right out of the air. But take a minute and write down not just what your costs are, but what do you want to make? Do you want to make$100 ,000 a year? You know, figure out how much is costing you to do each job, how many jobs you're going to have to do with your profit margin to get to that$100 ,000 a year or a million dollars a year, whatever you want to actually

7:25Mark Regan:pay yourself. I'm curious here because people are going to listen to this and they're like, like low startup costs, like you can make good money with it. But like, I don't actually want to scoop the poop. Is that something that you're currently still doing is scooping the poop? Or have you like contracted out? You mentioned something about employees. So it talks about the team makeup and how you can do this right. Yeah, we have employees now, but for probably the first five, maybe four or five years, me and my partner were both on the road. It was hard. I think we were too slow to get employees.

7:54When we started to grow, I was nervous to ask other people. I was afraid they wouldn't do as good of a job, which was a huge mistake. As soon as we hired people,

8:01Mark Regan:people want to do a good job. When you're hiring, you'll find people who want to do a good job. So if you don't want to do it, you can definitely find employees. But I would say, you know, if you're just signing your own, get out there, even if you have the funding to hire employees out there, get out there and just learn what, you know, what it looks like to be in some of the yard. You know, talk to the customers. Then you get a feel for what customers actually are hiring you for. It's not just the convenience. And then you get to know what your employees are dealing with. Yeah, how do you find the employees?

8:28Mark Regan:I want to ask that question. Because that's like obviously an important part of this whole puzzle. So how do you find the employees actually do this? That is a huge challenge recently. We used to just, you know, put a job posting on Indeed and we would get dozens or hundreds of applications a week. Lately, it's been a lot harder. I'm not really sure why that is. But we also will email, we'll send a blast to our customers. We actually know anyone looking for a job. You know, we'll post on our Facebook page, we'll post on town pages. It is tricky to find employees, I will say. I don't know if that's a service industry thing.

9:02I don't know if that's something about our job listings or the time of year, maybe because it's winter and it's been really bad in Massachusetts the last two months.

9:12Mark Regan:Getting your first customers of like what you know now, obviously you guys did with like a Craigslist ad, but how would you advise someone now to like get their first 100 customers in this business? You can do so much just on Facebook, just posting in Facebook talent pages. A lot of the talent pages are more than happy to let you post. They might have a rule like you can only post an ad once a week, but it's totally free. I would make sure it's short and concise and gets to the point, you know, offering a residential cooker-squooker service. Put your price up front. If you're charging$35 a yard or whatever,$25 a yard, put it right in the post.

9:49and I would just as many of these pages as you can find and get in just I wouldn't say spam them but post as much as you can because that's where a lot of people will find their you know find local services right through these pages and people like to when you post they know it's you you're the guy so they can they can message you you're not some anonymous you know company out there posting and it's free.

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10:53Mark Regan:Because yeah, I love the strategy. But what yeah, anything else that you're particularly doing as well? So we do still do that. Our biggest source of customers are Google ads. I think part of it just because that's where we put the most money. It's the easiest way, you know, we can we can track our customer acquisition costs. But there are lots of other little things we do too. We have company cars, they're all wrapped. that's like a driving billboard you know mobile billboards so that gets a lot that gets customers get referrals we do lawn signs you know you can buy those things in bulk if you can save a couple thousand bucks you can buy five or ten thousand of them dangerous flood an area and the cost is so cheap you know one or two customers acquired that way you've you know completely paid for the cost of the investment usually and you're saying that because these are repeat customers obviously 20 isn't going to pay for it all back.

11:45Mark Regan:But talk to us about that, like the lifetime value of a customer and like how you're setting these up for like reoccurring costs as well. Talk to us about that makeup and the business model. Yeah, that's really smart point. That's the whole crux of the business. You know, you pay to get one of these customers and then, you know, they stay for a long time. And tracking the lifetime value is huge. For us, it's about, make about$3 ,000 on a customer before they, you know, fall off the roles. But it means, you know, that's servicing them for years. but what's the our lawyer once called it an annuity business you know so all the costs all the spend is up front so at first you're kind of in the hole but over time you really are you know you're really building almost like a uh you know it's like a bank of business that continues to pay long after you made that investment for us it costs us about 150 dollars to get a customer and if we're making you know three thousand dollar lifetime value the profit on that is huge that's not counting obviously the other things like uh sending employees out but you're right it's the long-term value of every customer really important that's what you're thinking about yeah so how do you set that up successfully then do you say hey we'll come back in like a week or yeah how do you play that for uh yeah how do you play that then prefer weekly customers so most of our customers just sign up online and that's what they pick and that's what our sign up form defaults to but we'll take whatever if they want weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, twice a week.

13:09But for most customers, weekly is best. And on our end, weekly or every other week is just much easier to schedule. So we try and, you know, we try and kind of follow people towards that weekly service plan.

13:22Mark Regan:How do you actually schedule those amount of houses? Is there someone manually doing it? Like, how do you do it? We use a software called Sweep & Go, probably the industry standard software. I think most of the big companies using it. We basically break our service area up into regions and we do each region on a day of the week. So, you know, I know, you know, on Monday, I'm on the South Shore. On Thursday, I'm on the North Shore. You know, Thursdays, we're in the Worcester. We do Worcester County. So that makes it a little bit easier. Oh, we do have some customers, but like I said, they do twice a week.

13:54So that means on the off day, I have to have a tech drive way out of their region to get them. So that's why we try not to do that.

14:01Mark Regan:but yeah so it keeps customer happy it's business you know perfect but root density is is huge what does root density mean that's a that's honestly a new return for me so yeah what does that mean the more customers you can do the closer they live together to each other the more customers you can do in an hour and the more profitable you'll be in that hour and in regions like the south and the northwest and the west where they have a lot of like hoas you know that's like printing money you sometimes can get the whole hoa to sign up and you can just go house to house to house to house and get three or four in an hour you know and that's one of the things about this business is you get a customer and you put the sign in the yard you know well now the neighbor wants it too and you know they tell their sister about it and you know that's that's where the profit really is is you know that root density building that a dollar earned per hour yeah the The dollar earned per hour is a good part there.

14:58Mark Regan:Do you guys have a system? Because we've talked a little bit about Legion. We may hit on that a little bit more. We're like, you know, doing the Facebook town pages, you know, it's like Google ads, like yard signs as well. But do you guys have some sort of like referral system set up or like a word of mouth system set up? Because I feel like, yeah, that could be such an easy win for your team. You guys have something set up? Yeah, we do. Part of it is just after every visit, we will text. And the customer gets an automated text. It says, thank you. A, it asks, did you like your service? Do you want to tip your tech?

15:30But it also asks customers, do you know anyone might be interested in this service? And that's free. Those are free customers. A lot of times people just ignore it. But if someone, you know, someone does, oh, like my grandkids just got a pocket. This would be good for them. You know, it's an easy link to just forward to someone. So we do that every few months. We send out emails to everyone. you know, have you thought about anyone in your family, your friend group that, you know, you think might be interested in the service? And sometimes we do kickbacks, you know, like everyone you refer will give you a free service.

16:02But just from experimenting, we found that it really doesn't matter. People don't refer someone because they're getting money or a prize. They refer someone because it's a good service and they want someone else, you know, to have access to it. You know,

16:17Mark Regan:we don't do that as much as we used to. That's interesting. That's really interesting tidbit that people refer because it's a good service listeners rewind that but i think that's there's a lot to be said there if you can provide like a great service to these people the opportunity to get referrals i feel like goes up so much more it's like at the end of the day they don't really care for a kickback they care about like hey i had a great good experience i'm going to refer another dog owner i feel like dog owners are also like a really tight-knit community yeah it is you're right i also want to hit on the yard signs piece as well we're not going to talk about the google ads for customer acquisition because you do need more money to get started there but yard signs of what can someone realistically like get started with and what's your strategy on like placing yard signs like strategically yard signs the more you can buy the cheaper they are of course i but you can probably get a few hundred signs for a few hundred dollars and if that's the case instead of placing them in a customized yards i would find just high traffic areas to stick them in but we still do this like we'll find a busy intersection you know and we'll just stick them on the four corners so everyone who's stuck at that red light all they can see is our you know bright green poop away signs you know anywhere that's just busy has a lot of road traffic and anywhere where people are forced to stop you know a stop sign a slow red light a rotary we like to put them in you know fill the whole rotary so as people going around you know they're reading our sign up all the way around and just to keep them short too that's the other thing put your name you know poop away poop scooper quick phone number you know our quick website.

17:45Mark Regan:I like it. Yeah, there's a whole strategy behind like yard signs and placing them strategically that we won't get into today. But what I do want to get into is obviously all these customer acquisition channel like did lead to like your first 50k month, which is awesome. But initially, it's part of your story at around 100 customers like growth did slow down like a little bit here. So what changed like operationally to get to 50k a month? I think a big part of it for us was professionalizing the service. You get to a point where, A, me and Dean just couldn't do it all. Everything couldn't come through my cell phone or Dean's cell phone anymore.

18:18Signups couldn't all be through a contact form. We had to start automating some of this stuff. And we had to start systematizing. And it's hard at first. When you start a business, I wanted to have contact with every customer who came through. It felt weird to have someone just sign up and they're on the schedule and I've never spoken to them. And it's weird because we used to kind of be in the habit of talking to someone and they might say, oh, that's a little expensive. And then we'd knock a couple dollars off for, you know, they'd say, oh, can you come in the morning? And we'd say, oh, sure.

18:48And that was just totally like, you know, screwed up the schedule for all time because we've got to be at this person's house before 10 a. It was hard to let go of that stuff. You know, the stuff that made the business feel personal. But when you systematize and kind of get rid of all the extra wasteful stuff, that's kind of when you get over that first hurdle. The business starts to grow and you realize the business is growing because you're not touching it as much. You know, you don't have to touch with your customer.

19:16Mark Regan:You're actually an impediment to that. For someone listening, like what's the first thing that they should consider to like automate or systemize on like the back end, like operation standpoint of it? Build a way that customers can sign up for the service completely online, but there's no touchpoint. They don't have to call you. It's not a contact form where you, you know, return their email or anything. They just see it. They sign up. They're on the schedule and it's done, especially because it really is. It's a luxury service. Every roadblock that you put up is one more off ramp for that customer.

19:52You know, for they think, do I really want to pay$30? has something about my dog now i'll have my kids do it you know i'll think about it for another week and then it never happens that's right you want them to just see it sign up and once they're signed up and they have that credit card on file they're never going to think about it again you know now all of a sudden it almost becomes one of those subscriptions that they forget they have

20:13Mark Regan:yeah and it's right at that price point honestly too where it's not you know 150 a month 200 a month where every time it comes across your credit card bill you're like oh man like that's a lot of money it's$20 or$30 a month yeah well we do that a week but that's that's why we charge weekly some places charge monthly you know but if it's only$25 a week it doesn't sound so bad but$100 a month like you said you see that and you're like what the hell is this wait so I want to clarify something so you guys are charging$30 a week so whatever$120 a month yeah wow okay that makes a lot more sense because I was kind of confused I was kind of like doing the math in my I have like 50K a month is like a lot of customers if you're charging like$3.

20:54Mark Regan:But when you're charging$120, that's actually even more amazing of a business model. Wow. Okay. A lot of our competitors will pre-charge for the month. And it makes total sense. I get why they do it because it's easier. But because we charge such a high price for us, you know, like you said, if you look at your bill and you're like, oh my God,$200 a month, you're going to think about that. It's different. But if you're looking at saying, you know,$30,$35, you know, it just disappears in your Netflix and Hulu charges and it's just another subscription. So a listener is going to hear that. And I already know, I know our audience.