starting a pooper scooper business is honestly one of the best home service companies you could start this year it's got recurring Revenue low startup costs low competition a massive Market of dog owners and really surprisingly High earning potential and the best part is if you want to be a solo scooper you can easily take home over $100,000 a year in your pocket with one of these pooper scooper businesses I personally launched three locations to six figures plus and Way Beyond that I'm going to show you exactly how we do that in this video for those who don't know my name is William I'm the president of a multi-million doll pooper scooper business in the Pacific Northwest and the founder of the poop scoop millionaire community on school today I'm super excited to walk you guys through step by step what it takes to go from zero to your first $100,000 a year in recurring Revenue as a professional pooper scooper to start with I'm going to break down the math for you guys just so we know exactly what benchmarks we need to hit to achieve that goal and let's just assume that each customer pays us around $100 a month on average so and that's not just $100 once this is going to be on a recurring subscription basis people's dogs keep pooping and we're going to keep scooping so we're either going to come out twice a week once a week once every other week once a month we're going to have that customer on a subscription basis we're going to scoop up the poop and we're going to dispose of it for them so at $100 average we're only going to need about 85 clients or so to pass that $100,000 a year in business revenue and to do that we actually only need to get about seven customers per month and we can hit that Mark within a year but if you are willing to put a little bit of money into the business you can hit that number super fast I mean you can hit it within weeks we've had months at our business in the Pacific Northwest where we've gained almost 500 customers in a single month so really the sky is the limit the other thing I really like about this business is that one professional pooper scooper whether it's you as a solo operator or as an employee they can typically handle around 150 customers so that 85 customers you need to hit your first 100 Grand that's only going to be a part-time schedule so the first step from going from from 0 to $100,000 as a professional pooper scooper business is going to be getting the right equipment so I got a list in front of me here I'm going to go through with you guys and the very first thing on that list is going to be securing Transportation so there's really two options when it comes to transportation number one you can get a little tiny fuel efficient car we run Chevy Sparks in some of our locations or you can go and you can get an actual truck and depending on how you dispose of the waist is going to determine which vehicle you buy so there's two waste disposal methods number one is you will take the waist put it in your truck drive it to a centralized location where you have a dumpster or you'll take it to the transfer station or to the dump uh if you're doing this method I definitely prefer having a dumpster it's going to save you a ton of time and labor and basically a company like waste management will just take the waist once you put in the dumpster take care of it from there other option is going to be simply double bagging the waste after you scoop it out of the customer's yard and just putting it in their actual trash can and to be honest most customers don't really care which option you go with there's going to be a few that are going to prefer that you actually take the waste with you and that does make it a little bit more of a premium service so you could probably charge a little bit more but in the grand scheme of things most customers simply do not care so if you're just starting off with a budget I would recommend going the fuel efficient car route and just begging the ways to put in the customer's trash can so once you have your transportation secure it's time to get your actual scooping equipment and the two main tools you're going to use is a Corona garden rake and a Lobby dust pan one thing that's really important to keep in mind with the lobby dust pan is you're going to want to flip the handle on that when you first get it for ergonomic purposes one of the main injuries that scoopers get is actually wrist injuries from overuse if they're not using an ergonomic setup so simply just flipping that handle backwards is going to help you out a ton and give you a lot of more years in your pooper scooper career the next thing you're going to need you're going to need some trash bags and you're going to want a clamp and we just use that clamp to attach the trash bag to the lobby dust pan just so the bags don't fly off in the wind and you're able to be more efficient with your scooping and then the final thing you're going to need is a 1G Garden pump sprayer and some kennel gray disinfectant and this is honestly going to be one of the most important things about the entire business because you want to spray down all your equipment you want to spray down all your shoes anything that might have touched waste after you cleaned up a yard with this candle grade disinfectant so you're not spreading dangerous diseases from dog to dog that could potentially un alive some of your customers dogs so not only is that a really horrible thing to do it's also going to going to kill your business so definitely do it do not ever skip out on the kennel grade disinfectant takes a little bit extra time between each yard cost a little bit of money not that much money make sure you do it and honestly all of these startup equipment you can buy for less than $200 and you have a fully operational setup and you can go out there and start making money just with that with that in mind you probably will want to be a legit business if you are going to be generating close to $100,000 a year or more so you're also going to need to get a business license you're going to to pay for your state filing fee you're going to have to get EIN number you're going to have to get business insurance all the things that it takes to start up pretty much any business you're going to have to go and take care of that and the cost to start that is going to vary state by state in our state of Washington state is around $200 to $300 depending on how many City endorsements you get so just keep that in mind from there there's going to be a couple should have items that you're going to want before you start and that's going to be things like business cards Flyers you're going to want some software like Cana or chat GPT to build graphics to build website copy you're going to want to get a professional email you're going to want to get a website all the things that most home service companies would have just so customers can find you on the internet probably the most important thing that you absolutely could have is a good CRM which we are going to talk about in depth in this next section now that your scooping equipment is purchased and you have your basic business structure set up we can start really building out the business and most of this work is going to happen within your CRM that just stands for client relationship management software and there's a ton of different crms out there especially for the pooper scooper industry some of the most popular ones are going to be sweep and go jobber and yard book and between the three honestly sweep and go is going to be by far the best pick they got the best reporting they got the best client onboarding and it's actually the only CRM that's built specifically for the Cooper scooper industry the other ones you can make them work for sure and having any CRM is better than no CRM but those are generally geared towards other Industries or maybe they're more of a general software that anybody can be on whether you're a landscaper a plumber an HVAC person or a pressure washer I prefer to have a CRM that is just focused on your industry once you get your CRM you're going to have to go through and set it up and one of the first things you're going to do is set up your pricing or your price book depending on what type of Industry you're in for pooper scoopers we set pricing based off of the number of dogs the customer hases and the service frequency they are interested in there's going to be some other factors like if they have a big yard or different terrain but in general this is going to be how you price out your customers and I'm actually going to show you guys a sample pricing Matrix something that you guys can copy down on your own if you want I actually made a full video breakdown on how to price out services including recurring Services one time cleanups and even Commercial Services so check that out I'll put a link down in the description but as far as the pricing Matrix goes for this video I'm going to pull it up here you can see on the left we have the service frequencies weekly bi-weekly monthly twice a week and then we have have the number of dogs that the customer has one dog two dog Three Dog four dog anything over four dogs you're going to want to price out a different way but most customers are going to have four or less with most of them having two so the most common price and frequency that you're going to see is two dogs on a weekly basis and as you can see here that's $110 so I'm just going to leave this up on the screen for you guys for a few more seconds you can pause it take notes or you can go and watch that pricing video link in the description so now that you have your pricing structure put together it's time to determine what your service area is going to be and there's a couple different options when it comes to choosing your service area but if you only want to get to $100,000 I generally recommend having a little bit tighter service area cuz with only 8 100 or less clients you don't want to be driving all across town hunting these people down and spending more time driving rather than actually scooping and earning revenue for us we'll generally pick a service area that we can drive from one side to the other and 45 minutes or less and that'll be our total service area then we're going to break down that service area even further into five different days so you're going to have a Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Friday route and for each one of those daily specific routes I like to be able to get around everywhere within that route within 15 minutes or less and this should drastically reduce your drive time if you set this up correctly if you just let customers pick whatever day they want it's going to totally mess up your routing and you're going to be in a really bad spot so I'll quickly show you guys on the screen kind of what our Master map looks like at our biggest location and as you can see it could get pretty hectic and chaotic and we offer twice a week service once a week once a month so it looks a little bit crazy but we can get from one side of that map to the other in about 45 minutes if you're serious about starting your own po scooper business you need to check out the poop scoop millionaire community on school not only are you going to get access to over 100 other dog waste removal business owners you're also going to get access to courses on the best practices that we use to grow our business to over a million dollars in Revenue literally picking up dog poop in less than 3 years check it out Link in the description all right so now that you've selected your service area it's time to optimize those routes and if you pick a good CRM like we have sweeping go it's going to automatically do that for you for you so here's what our Master map looks like uh as I showed you guys before you can zoom in this is our full service area for our first location we go all the way from the Airway Heights Medical Lake over here all the way to northern Idaho and as I mentioned we can drive from over here all the way over here in about 45 minutes and all these dots in here are super tight super dense so we're able to get a lot of yards done per hour uh but as far as optimizing routes go I'm going to go go over here to the route manager and I'm going to just pick a different [Music] day let's do that and as you can see this is what our routes look like each color is going to represent a different employee so we're able to actually go in here and select which yards we want which employees to do and we'll just click one button and it will literally optimize that route for the most efficient drive time possible so super simple awesome feature highly recommend getting a CRM and I highly recommend choosing sweep and go as your CRM the other thing that is cool about sweep and go I'm not an affiliate or anything I don't make any money if you guys sign up with sweep and go but if you are a member of the poop scoop millionaire Community which is my community you could get 50% off your sweep and go subscription for the first 6 months and then 15% off that subscription for life so that was a crazy good deal and if you're looking to get into the industry and you're looking to seriously grow a business potentially can make over $100,000 a year or even over a couple million dollar a year that's going to be the way to go all right so the last thing I'm going to touch on when it comes to setting up your CRM and kind of the main infrastructure of your pooper scoper business is going to be customer billing there's a couple different ways you can go about billing your customers some people like to bill every time they come out and do a cleanup they're going to be getting paid every week it's going to help them have more consistent cash flow but they're also going to be building their customers more which is going to take more admin time the other option is to build customers either monthly or quarterly or even annually but typically most companies don't go past monthly billing you can either pre-bill or you can post Bill your customers so post bill means you completed services for the entire month then you Bill your customers pre- bill means you actually Bill your customers before you come out and provide services and at my company this is the preferred method and there's a couple reasons for that number one if a customer doesn't pay you which can happen frequently you just take them off your service route and you're not going to be fulfilling any service without getting paid so you're going have to chase people down for money anything like that and the second major benefit is you're kind of getting a 30day loan from all your customers in our case we're getting a 30-day like several $100,000 loan cuz we have so many customers and as long as you're good with budgeting you can reinvest that into your business and use it to accelerate your growth even more those are the two billing options we like to pre-bill on a monthly basis all right so now that you guys know how to essentially set up a pooper scooper business you know what equipment to buy you know how to set up your basic legal structure you know how to set up your CRM and kind of your general Business Systems and your general business infrastructure it's time to go out there and actually start making money by getting paying customers for your service and there are a ton of different ways to actually go out there and get customers and cuz I know a lot of people are going to be in different places with their business as far as budget goes so I'm going to go over two free ways to get customers and then two I guess more expensive ways to get customers but it's also going to accelerate the growth growth of your business much faster so to start with we'll go over the free methods and free method number one that I like to use is something called Facebook groups so you'll literally just log into your personal Facebook page you click on this groups button over here and then you will search groups for something like buy sell trade whatever your area is and you're going to get all of these groups in your area I like to stick to ones that are over 10,000 or more people but if you're in a smaller location just work with whatever you want you're going to want to join as many of these as possible and you're just going to post like little ads about your business tell them who you are tell them what you do and uh one key thing is to not just be S sale sale all the time go in there and add value to those groups get some facts about dogs maybe something about pet health maybe you donated to a charity so you can kind of highlight that and really just bring the community feels into it so you're not just spamming people to buy your service the other thing that's going to be important about these Facebook groups is consistency so I like to see people posting at least two to three times per work per week per group so if you're in 20 different groups you're going to be making 40 to 60 posts every single week and you're pretty much almost guaranteed to get customers if you do this on a consistent basis so just stick to it keep going and you will get customers uh the next thing that you're going to want to set up to get customers without paying any money is something called your Google business profile so it's going to look something like this and to set this up you'll literally just Google Google business profile will be the first link you set up you'll punch in all your business information you'll have to verify it with Google uh but then you're going to be able to upload photos you're going to be able to get customer reviews you're going to be able to make posts you're going to be able to add different services and products like we have here and ultimately that's going to help you show up in the map section um see if I can do a search for you guys scooper my bad pooper scooper business here we go so yeah it's going to help you show up in this map section here um and Google's just going of put put companies up there that they think customers will want to interact with so having high quality reviews and then also your location is going to be the number one thing so we actually own both these companies here but we're in Spokan Valley so Dookie shows up versus swoop scoop which is in actual Spokan uh but Google's going to put your companies up here and you're going to be able to get leads people will be able click on your website people will be able to click on this and just straight up call your business on their phone and you're going to be able to generate quite a few leads from this free platform so if you're on the other end of the spectrum and you do have some money to invest into the business uh there's two other options for you number one is going to be Google ads it's late at night right now nobody's running ads so so I have to switch to a different industry this is actually my other company there infinite electric and we're running here what's called Google local service ads you can tell by this little green circle right here and the unfortunate thing is they don't actually have these ads for the pooper scooper industry yet but once they do I'm going to be the first one to jump on that because it's probably the best lead source for my other home service companies uh when I'm referring to Google ads for pooper scoopers I'm talking about these here and you're basically be paying per click so every time somebody clicks on this ad it might cost you three four five bucks if you're in a competitive industry it might cost you 50 to 100 bucks per click so you really got to make sure it is well managed or you can literally light your money on fire which you probably don't want to do all right and then probably the best lead generator for us anyways is going to be Facebook ads and we're not talking about boosting Facebook post we're actually going into the meta ads manager which looks like this if your screen looks like this when you set up your ads you're in the right place um and we've generated over 10,000 leads in the last 3 years for our pooper scoper business with these type of ads so pretty simple to get set up you'll just go to the ads manager you'll hit this create campaign and you're either going to want to do a traffic an engagement or a leads campaign depending on how you actually want to process those leads so you'll run a traffic campaign if you want to send traffic back to your website you're going to run an engagement campaign if you want to quote people on Facebook Messenger you're going to run a leads campaign fan if you want people to actually fill out like a little lead form on Facebook so those are just a couple quick ways to get customers there's quite a few others I actually have a full marketing video I will link it in the description and I have an even more in-depth guide for each one of these specific advertising methods and many others within the poop scoop millionaire Community I'll link that down in the description as well all right so now that you have a couple strategies to get new paying customers for your pooper scooper business it's time to go back to the math so you know exactly what you need to do day after day week after week to hit your goal of $100,000 in Revenue so as I mention you can do this really fast or you can also do this over the course of months or even up to a year but generally you should be able to hit this 100 customer Mark within a year even if you're not spending money on ads if you're consistently posting in those Facebook groups you got your Google business profile set up and you're generating reviews you're going to get there over time as I mentioned at the beginning of the video we're only going to need around 85 customers to hit this goal and to be conservative you're going to be overshooting that 85 customers if you just get two new recurring subscription sold every single week that's totally doable it's like not even once a day it's like once every 2 and 1 half days to get one paying customer don't be overwhelmed if you break it down like that you can really see how achievable this goal actually is and if you are somebody that has money and you want to just get there really fast you can also do that as well so as far as customer acquisition cost which means how much money you spend on marketing to get a new customer I've seen that range anywhere between $50 to $300 to acquire a new customer at scale if you're just trying to get a customer here or there sometimes that cost can be a lot lower I can just quickly do the math for you so if we're on the low end of that $50 per customer to get 85 customers you're going to be spending $4,250 in advertising that's going to be if your advertising is like spot-on super efficient and people are just eating it up setting up for the service if you're on the higher end of that spectrum and you're paying close to $300 for cost per acquisition you're looking at $25,000 in advertising to hit that goal it doesn't cost that much but if you're in a bad Market or if you're advertising like in the middle of summer which is actually the slowest time for pooper scoopers you can really see those cost per Acquisitions go way up so you need to be smart about that but even if you're looking at it the kind of the worst case scenario and you spend maybe $5 to $110,000 for your vehicle you spend $1,000 your CRM and all that stuff set up and then you spend another $25,000 on Advertising for less than the cost of a 4-year degree you can have a six figure income and you're not going to have to waste four years of your life or maybe even more going to college so it's definitely a great option for a lot of people because $100,000 a year scooping up dog poop is honestly pretty crazy and there's not a lot of other opportunities out there that are this easy to get into with that low a startup cost and you can just get right into it hopefully that helps you guys if you found value in this video it mean a lot to me if you dropped a like you commented and you subscribed on the video to let me know that you want more videos just like this if you are interested in networking with other pooper scoper business owners you should check out the poop scoop millionaire Community there's over there's around 150 oos in there right now we got tons of courses we do live calls every single week to help each other grow our pooper scooper businesses hope to see you there and happy scooping