Think You Need a Sexy Startup Idea To Be Successful? Think Again.

Episode Transcript

Carly Ries: What do dog poop and million dollar businesses have in common? Well, a lot more than you'd think. This week on The Aspiring Solopreneur, we're joined by William Milliken, founder of Swoop Scoop, the dog waste removal business that started as a joke and exploded into a wildly successful and surprisingly inspiring venture. He's proof that you don't need to invent the next big tech thing, you just need to solve a real problem, show up, and out professional the competition. We talked disruption marketing, scaling a hyper niche biz, peak poop season, yes, it's a thing, and how William turned a low search volume into big time brand recognition.

This one's a masterclass in thinking differently, marketing smart, and well, scooping up success. You'll never look at your backyard the same way again. You're listening to the Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for those just taking the bold step or even just thinking about taking that step into the world of solo entrepreneurship. My name is Carly Ries, and my cohost, Joe Rando, and I are your guides to navigating this crazy but awesome journey as a company of one. We take pride in being part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all aspects of solo solopreneurship that has empowered and educated countless solopreneurs looking to build a business that resonates with their life's ambitions.

We help people work to live, not live to work. And if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the show for you. So if you're eager to gain valuable insights from industry experts on running a business the right way the first time around or want to learn from the missteps of solopreneurs who paved the way before you, then stick around. We've got your back because flying solo in business doesn't mean you're alone. Well, William, we are so excited to have you on the show.

We told you offline. We're dog people, so you're kind of a shoo in from the get go. But what I really wanted to focus on today is so many solopreneurs think they have to do something virtually. And I know that you have a a digital marketing background as well. But I just love your idea because it's outside the box.

And just to kick things off, I just wanna know, what made you want to start your business and how did it all fall into place?

William Milliken: Mhmm. Yeah. So as you mentioned, my background's in digital marketing. I own kind of a portfolio of other home service companies. And while I was working on growing those, my wife was pregnant at the time and she ended up hiring a pooper scooper company.

And they were pretty bad at pretty much everything. They didn't show up on time. They didn't have a CRM. They didn't do their billing. They didn't have any advertising.

And I thought that there's an opportunity just to do that better. It wasn't really something I had heard of before. Honestly, it kind of started off a little bit as a joke, but fast forward a couple years turned out to be a pretty pretty good business for us.

Carly Ries: Jokes on everybody else but you.

William Milliken: Yeah. Exactly.

Carly Ries: Well, I love that. Well, so speaking of the beginning, can you walk us through the early days of Swoop Scoop, some of your initial challenges and aside from battling the giggles that people were having about this idea?

William Milliken: Yes. That was definitely something upfront. I'd say probably the biggest challenge was that I had no idea what I was doing in the industry at first. I think we were practicing. We're throwing, like, rocks in the backyard and timing ourselves on how long it would take to scoop them so we can set our pricing and things like that.

And the other big challenge was kind of like myself, most people haven't heard of the service and even now a lot of people haven't heard of the service. So if we're looking at like Google search volumes, there's maybe 10 searches a month compared to like my electrical company that had over a thousand searches a month. So we had to find a way to get in front of our customers. That wasn't exactly what I was used to. So we had to kinda take a different spin on the the marketing for local companies that I've previously had.

Carly Ries: Well, now you're gonna have to give us

Joe Rando: Exactly.

Carly Ries: What that's gonna be. And, also, let's backtrack really quick because I'm gonna dangle the carrot. I feel like I spoke about this in the intro, but I don't quite do it justice. Can you explain, Swoop Scoop, for people who are just like, what is this thing? And then we'll get into that magical marketing tactic.

William Milliken: Yeah. For sure. So it's pretty simple. We're literally just a, dog waste removal company. So people will pay us a subscription. we have, different subscriptions based on how many dogs people have, how big their yard is, and we'll come out either twice a week, once a week, once every other week, or once a month. Basically, pick up the dog waste and leave. And that's really all there is to it. So it's probably one of the most simple home service businesses that you could possibly have, and there are more dog owners than ever. So a good time to be in the industry.

Joe Rando: Yeah. But it's really hard in the fall when the leaves fall down. Being a dog owner, that must slow your productivity way down.

William Milliken: Yep. That'll slow you down. And then, right now, we're in what I like to call peak poop pain season. So in our location, all the snow just melted. So a lot of people haven't gone outside for three, four, or five months.

That's when we get most of our clients for the year.

Joe Rando: Wow.

Carly Ries: I would assume so. Well, the thing I like about that, you said it was a pretty simple business, though, and I think that's just the point. Like, people need to get inspiration from the easiest thing. I mean, it's like picking up dog poop. Everybody has to do that if they have a dog.

And if they're not, that's disgusting. But it just seems so simple. But like you just said, you even had a hard time marketing that even though it's a need that so many people had. So let's dive back into that part. What did you have to do differently to get discovered?

William Milliken: Yes. We had to find ways to get in front of people, primarily through probably disruption marketing. So Facebook ads ended up being our number one channel. That's where we get the majority of our customers. Over the years, we've been able to advertise there heavily enough that we've actually been able to increase search volumes.

Now there's hundreds of searches for our branded terms. People associate us with the service rather than searching for, like, dog poop pickup or the search swoop scoop, which has been awesome. But the top three channels are gonna be Facebook ads, Google ads now, and then truck wraps. So if we're getting our vehicles wrapped with the full branding as you're driving around, those really stand out to people.

Joe Rando: I gotta ask a question because I see these things, but, you know, you go to the grocery store and those shopping carts Yeah. And people put ads on them. And you know, my sister tried that for her photography business and said it did nothing. But I was wondering, would that work? Do you think that would work for a company like yours where, you know, people see it and go, oh, yeah.

William Milliken: Yeah. it could I think it definitely could work. I think the issue with that is that you don't get enough volume and frequency if you're just on, like, the on the carts. So, if you're running billboards or running Facebook ads or anything, you need to have enough frequency out in front of people.

Joe Rando: Have you done billboards? Yeah. We've done billboards.

William Milliken: Yeah.

We've done billboards. I ran TV ads even. I had a deal with Pizza Hut. This was probably a bad idea. We're able to put, like, our poop scoop coupons on Pizza Hut boxes.

We got, zero customers from that. So don't recommend doing that. But it's definitely been a fun business to grow.

Carly Ries: though thinking outside the box, so I appreciate the attempt with that one.

William Milliken: Even if We will spend a lot of money on stuff that doesn't work, but I think we got it figured out now.

Joe Rando: Long as you know which which money isn't working, then you're in good shape. It's when you you know half is not working, but you don't know which half that you're in trouble.

William Milliken: Yep. Exactly. Exactly.

Carly Ries: You've clearly learned from these mistakes because in addition to search volume, your business has just skyrocketed in general. So what would you contribute this impressive growth to or attribute it to?

William Milliken: Mhmm. I'd really say it comes down to knowing your main KPIs. And for me, pretty much any business that I'm involved with, the number one thing I look at is your CAC to LTV ratio. So how much it costs to acquire a customer versus how much money that customer's worth over the lifetime of your business. So my first year in this, we can get customers for 30 to $50, and each customer's worth about $2,000 lifetime.

So it was kinda just printing money if you were willing to put in the work

Joe Rando: and pick up dog poop. So here's just the we like to kind of break through the some of the jargon. So you said KPI, which is key performance indicator. So something you're measuring that tells you how you're doing, and CAC or CAC, customer acquisition cost, what it costs you to get a customer. So your ad spend and anything else that goes into getting them versus how much they're worth over the lifetime of an average customer.

William Milliken: Mhmm.

Joe Rando: Yep. Cool. I just like to make sure that people that are new to this know what's going on.

William Milliken: Yep. That's exactly it.

Carly Ries: Well, so you you were successful with Facebook, and you've been successful with other online tactics, and you do have a digital marketing background. So how did that change your approach to how you marketed? And for people that don't have a digital marketing background, where should they start?

Joe Rando: Mhmm.

William Milliken: Yeah. How did that change my approach? Well, it definitely gave me a big advantage because a lot of businesses when they're first starting off, acquisition tends to be the bottleneck over like capital or other issues like that. So thankfully the business wasn't bottlenecked by customer acquisition. But if you're learning to get started, I think that the most important thing is just to find somebody that is reputable in the industry that you wanna be in and try to get advice from somebody that's actually been there, done that.

I know there's a lot of gurus and people out there that haven't actually accomplished anything. So you gotta be definitely careful about who you listen to online.

Carly Ries: So so true. Well, so I have something that we're big on is building community. That's kind of what got our business and and our followers off the ground was just having a community of like of solopreneurs. So what made you wanna start help out the name Poop Scoop Millionaire Community? And why is it so successful?

And what do you do as part of that community?

William Milliken: Yeah. So I started that. I had never talked to another pooper scooper until about a year or two ago, and I just ended up hopping on a random podcast, and we were able to grow our company very significantly in a short amount of time. And I probably had, I don't know, a couple dozen people reach out to me that wanted to do one on one coaching with me, and it wasn't something I was really interested in. So I just threw out a crazy number, failed to talk to you for whatever, $1,500 for two hours a month.

And I ended up making, like, 20 plus thousand dollars in the first couple weeks. And I was like, well, this is cool, but I don't wanna do one on one coaching for people. So it kinda pivoted into this online community on school. I'm a big follower of Alex Ramosy, and it was something that he recently invested into. So I figured I'd give it a shot and see what it was all about.

Carly Ries: Yeah. you are the, what, third person in a month to talk about Alex. And, like, we ourselves also just we have our, little internal book club. When I say that, it's just Joe and I. But we also just read that book.

And, yeah, this guy knows what he's talking about. So Yes. If you haven't checked that book out, which we'll put in the show notes, definitely do. It's amazing. But I wanted the thing I like about the community is that you have such a niche service that people might think it'd be hard to expand different offers.

I mean, it's like, well, you scoop poop. So what else can you do to keep brainstorming ways to make money and whatnot? But the community is obviously a way, you're one on one coaching. What other ways like, how can people brainstorm different income streams with a very niched topic?

William Milliken: Honestly, if all you're gonna do is scooping poop as a solopreneur, I wouldn't recommend adding any other income streams to it. One single person can typically handle a 25 to a 50 customers, and that can generate, I think for us, our average customer pays us at our first location, a hundred and $5 a month, a hundred and $20 a month at the second location. And so the business with really low expenses. So if you just focus in on that, get really good, get your routes tight. Mean, you could be making 6 figures plus literally picking up dog poop on a part time schedule.

Carly Ries: Can I just ask you, what are some of the things you consult? Like is it efficiency with picking up the poop? Like, is it a customer service to keep the clients happy? What kind of things separate you from the, not to compare you to the teenager next door, but a teenager next door could be like, can I scoop this up? But obviously, you found something that's so much better than that.

So, I mean, I know you don't wanna give everything away because

William Milliken: I'll tell you whatever you wanna know.

Carly Ries: But yeah. But what kind of things what separate you from other pooper scoopers?

William Milliken: Mhmm. I think number one is gonna be professionalism. So as I mentioned, we have all our trucks wrapped. So not only is that a good place to get customers from, but it also allows you to charge higher prices because you look like a more legitimate company and you've invested into your business. You're not just gonna not show up one day kind of a thing and never be heard from again.

Response time is probably the second thing. I mean, you guys probably call people on Google. If you don't have somebody pick up the phone, you just move on to the next listing and continue on, continue on, continue on. And then even with Facebook ads, the faster we're able to get the leads, the better off we're gonna be. And then the third thing would probably be automation.

So on our website, can go to our website, you can actually sign up for services, get an instant quote, enter your credit card. You don't even have to talk to anybody. You can get onboarded onto our system, which really just streamlines a ton of work, so you can just focus on growing the business instead of chasing people down.

Joe Rando: You get pricing on the website. So you got some kind of pricing system on the website.

William Milliken: Yep. So you go on, you just enter your zip code, make sure you're in our service area, and then we basically just need to know what service frequency you want, how many dogs you have. We'll collect people's phone number before they actually get the quote, and then we'll give them the instant price and they can sign up if they like it. If they don't like it, we set them up on a text message remarketing process to try to get them on boarded over the next couple days.

Joe Rando: And the yard size of that, does that matter?

William Milliken: Yeah, yard size matters. So for us, average size yards about eighth of an acre, so we will increase the price for every quarter acre. But we keep that off the quote form. We'll measure it in between just to get people signed up because the more steps you have on the form fill, the lower your conversion rate will be.

Joe Rando: Hey. I have a question, and this is in some levels of probably two in the weeds, but it I'm just really curious. So you know, you've got this business. Now you're not a solopreneur anymore. You've got people working for you because you said trucks.

So your biggest expense is probably payroll followed by vehicle expenses?

William Milliken: Yeah. Probably biggest expense would be, yeah, labor definitely is number one expense. And then second expense is probably marketing, I would say. Okay. Aggressive growth mode, and then it'll be trucks after that.

Joe Rando: Yeah. So my question is, do you do anything in terms of route optimization for the I mean, you think about how kinda shorten the the route to keep the expenses down and that kind of thing. So you're you're really thinking this through. Cool.

William Milliken: Yep. Yep. So we I mean, at this this point, I know solopreneur about, yeah, we got close to 2,500 people every week for that. Pick up dog poop for, so it turned into quite the business.

Carly Ries: Yeah. It's so smart. It's funny when you're talking about professionalism. Do you guys have college hunks hauling junk in your areas?

William Milliken: Yeah. We do.

Carly Ries: Well, we originally went with them just to get some stuff out of our house. But again, it's something that anybody could do, but they followed up. They were, like, automatic, they showed up in their polos. They were and it was just like, I will use them now for every moving thing because of what you just said. I know that they're gonna show up when they say they're going to.

And it just people sometimes overthink that. And I hate to say it, but the bar can be pretty low for, competitors. So if you just show up when you say you will and do the job, you're already one step ahead of the game.

William Milliken: Yeah. I mean, especially in home services. I mean, there's a lot of services that you can do with low skill, like picking up dog poop, and you can make it really good income without having any employees just working by yourself. So if you just show up

Joe Rando: Tricky to get that that right on the shovel the right way, though. Yeah.

William Milliken: That's true. Yeah. I got a training for that if you need it.

Carly Ries: Yeah. I'm sure you do. What haven't you thought of? Well, speaking of what you hadn't thought of, aside from partnering with Pizza Hut to put the coupons on the boxes, what would you have done differently when you were starting out? Because you were a solopreneur when this first got going.

Correct? Yeah. So what would you have done differently, if anything?

William Milliken: Probably the biggest surprise to me was the seasonality of the business. So I expected summer to be the busiest time. In kinda wintertime, people would drop off or not even provide service. It is actually the exact opposite of that. First quarter of the year, we get about 80% of our clients.

Our cost per acquisition is about 20% of what it is during the summer months. So if I would have known that, I could have planned ahead a little bit better and probably grown the company even faster.

Carly Ries: Gotcha. So did you have a kind of a full year to really put a good grasp on that?

William Milliken: Yeah. Well, I mean, first, was like, man, this thing is just printing money. I should go, like, mortgage my house, put a bunch of money into ads and just keep this thing going. But then as soon as summer hit, it just, like, stopped all of a sudden. And then it wasn't until fall, wintertime, things started picking back up again, and then we had that next rush the following spring.

Carly Ries: So can I ask you, as a wife that has been pregnant before, when you ran this idea by her with your child and her stomach, what was her response? And at what point was she like, that's a great idea?

William Milliken: It was actually her idea.

Carly Ries: Oh, wow. Sweet.

Joe Rando: Yeah. Well, I was guessing she was the one that was scooping the poops.

William Milliken: Yeah. Well, I don't think yeah. Neither of us were really doing that good of a job, so she was pretty happy to find the service.

Carly Ries: This is the lesson. Got it. Awesome. Well, what advice would you give solopreneurs starting out who are just starting in their one person business venture and are feeling a little overwhelmed and feel like there's too

Joe Rando: much to bite off?

William Milliken: Definitely. Well, I would just mainly focus on the things that actually matter. And when you're first starting off a business, really the only thing that matters is getting money in the door. I see a lot of people, they try to get their logo perfect and their website perfect, and they're have their business cards formatted exactly the right way. None of the stuff really matters.

All that matters is that you go out and get customer and get cash flow coming in the business because without that, you don't have a business. So whatever you gotta do.

Carly Ries: Yeah. That is so smart. I am just fascinated by this. Again, we wanted to have you on just because it's hard. People just get so mainstream with their thinking.

And this is just such a good business by just thinking like, oh, what do I do every day? Oh, how do I make this profitable? And I just am fascinated by it.

Joe Rando: And, also, you know, I just this idea of looking at businesses that are out there but aren't doing really a great job and making it great, that's really powerful, and it's a lot less risky than inventing something new. Right? I mean, some of the guys I hear on podcasts and things and, like Sam Parr and and what's my first million, Sam Parr, and I can't think of the other guy's name now. But, they talk about boring businesses, boring businesses.

And it's like, yeah. It's kinda boring, but, you know, they really can be very, very, very profitable and and not take a long time to get up and out the gate.

William Milliken: Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we started this with less than a thousand bucks, and it's a multimillion dollar company picking up dog food.

Anything is possible.

Joe Rando: I'm gonna Google it and see if anybody's good in this area.

Carly Ries: Well, you seem very deserving of this success. And so I want to end with a question we ask all of our guests. And what is your favorite quote about success?

William Milliken: It's probably a Hormozi quote, and it's just when that's it.

Carly Ries: I like it. Have you guys seen have you guys seen the show the shrinking on Apple?

Joe Rando: I have. I have.

Carly Ries: You know, that best friend, he's like, all I ever do is win. So that's what we're reading of.

Joe Rando: We can't watch that show because my wife's a health care mental health professional, and she watches that, and she just cringes constantly. She's like, I can't take it.

Carly Ries: Yeah. Well, William, this has been fascinating. Where can people find out more about you, but also more about the company?

William Milliken: Mhmm. Yes. If you wanna learn more about kind of the poop scoop industry, we have a bunch of free resources. We have a YouTube channel at Scoop Start. We have Scoopstart.com the blog.

We also have scoop start Instagram, Facebook. And if you wanna really dive into it, you can, join the poop scoop millionaire community where we basically walk you through a to z on how to start and, scale this business.

Carly Ries: That's awesome. I think you're so cool. Thank you so so much for coming on the show today.

Joe Rando: Yeah. Appreciate it. This was great. Yeah. This was I love it.

Carly Ries: Excellent thank you so much for tuning in. As always, share this episode with a friend, subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, and leave that five star review. And we will see you next time on the Aspiring Solopreneur. You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go.

So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.