Scooping up Millions: What Every Service Business Can Learn from a Dog Poop Empire

Jeffro (00:03.556)
What if you could turn one of the most unglamorous tasks imaginable into a multimillion dollar business using nothing but smart marketing and relentless focus? Well, that’s exactly what today’s guest did. And in this episode of Digital Dominance, we’re going to break down how he did it and what we can learn from it. William Milliken is the founder of SwoopScoop, a dog poop removal service that’s now a thriving multi-state operation. Backed by his background in digital marketing, William scaled not just one, but multiple home service brands to seven figure successes. He also runs the Poop Scoop Millionaire Community, helping others build recession-proof businesses in niche service markets. So whether you’re looking to grow your business, improve your marketing, or explore some surprising new revenue stream, this episode is one you won’t want to miss. William, welcome to the show.

William (00:49.558)
Awesome, yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Jeffro (00:52.527)
Definitely. mean, this is a great topic and I’m excited to get into this because you’ve built a multi-million dollar business around something that most people don’t even want to think about. So how did that even start?

William (01:02.802)
Yeah, well honestly it kind of started off a little bit as a joke. I wasn’t really expecting it to take off the way that it had. As you mentioned I have some other service companies, I an electrical company, got a garage door company and this one worked not the same like whatsoever, not what I expected. Kind of got into it the way that I operate is my background is digital marketing and I’ll actually partner with operators. So I partnered with electrician, partnered with the garage door tech and I had a buddy from high school that wanted to start a business, how the other businesses were doing. But didn’t necessarily have any skills, do HVAC, couldn’t back up a trailer to do lawn care or anything like that. My wife had hired a hooper scooper business at the time because I wasn’t doing it, she was pregnant and that’s kind where the idea came from and yeah, I was pretty shocked by the results over the last few years.

Jeffro (01:49.338)
Yeah, I didn’t even know that was a thing. So, very cool. What gave you the confidence though? At what point did you realize, okay, dog poop removal could be scalable and worth investing marketing dollars into?

William (01:51.406)
Yeah, exactly.

William (02:02.934)
Yeah, so at first, like I said, I didn’t really put a lot of effort into it. My business partner was kind of out grinding it out, doing door hangers, knocking on doors, networking with people. And he kind of grinded it out as first, probably 10, 15 customers doing that.

When we first got into the industry, one of the first things I liked to do was look at Google search volumes. So how many searches are there for electrician or garage door or plumbing or poop scooping? There were thousands of searches for pretty much every trade in our area. There was maybe 10 to 20 searches a month for poop scooping. So it’s like, I don’t know if this is really going to be a thing or not.

But what we were able to do was find ways to get that message in front of people. Once you got those first 10, 15 customers, I said, hey, let’s just throw some money into Facebook ads and see what happens. And probably within the first three months of running Facebook ads, we were over 350 recurring customers. It just basically took off from there.

Jeffro (02:51.078)
Yeah, very cool. Well, I think most services want to grow, obviously, but they don’t know always how to market their niche. So can you talk about some of those early lessons that you learned about which channels worked or didn’t? You mentioned Facebook ads, but I’m sure there’s others too.

William (02:58.168)
Thank

William (03:05.614)
Yeah, so right now our top three channels is Facebook ads still number one number two is going to be Google ads and SEO And it’s actually more so Brand focused now more people in our area actually search for our name than the service because as you mentioned a lot of people don’t even know that the service even exists so finding ways to get out in front of people and then our third best one is actually Truck wraps so all of our trucks are fully wrapped so we got We got over 20 plus vehicles now that are just driving through neighborhoods and kind of because of the nature of the industry that we’re in, they tend to go a little bit more viral than your plumbing truck or electrical truck or thing like that. So I think that plays a lot into it as well. And then the thing is also compounding those three things together. So for example, our best Facebook ads are pictures of employees standing in front of trucks, making it look like we’re real people in the local market.

Jeffro (03:39.534)
Yeah.

William (03:54.87)
So that helps our Facebook ads and then our Facebook ads obviously drive more demand which drives more Google searches. So those three things kind of work together hand in hand for this particular business. Yeah.

Jeffro (04:02.745)
Hey, you got a snowball effect because people might see an ad, then they notice the truck and you got a memorable name. So it just kind of keeps rolling. That’s awesome.

William (04:09.996)
Yup, just keep compounding.

Jeffro (04:13.58)
Yeah, very cool. what about, obviously now that every marketing tactic works for every niche, can you give us an example of something that maybe flopped for you and something else that really hit?

William (04:26.838)
We’ve had all sorts of stuff flopped. We’ve tried all sorts of things. Probably our biggest flop, which looking back at this, I’m looking right across the street now, there’s a Pizza Hut. We got a deal with Pizza Hut where they let us put our dog poop coupons on pizza boxes. I think we spent like five grand on that. We got zero customers. So that was definitely the biggest flop that we’ve ever had. We’ve got direct mail. That’s kind of been more of break even for us. And we’ve even tried things like TV ads, billboards. It’s a little bit harder to measure, but we definitely had our best years when we were doing that.

Jeffro (04:38.99)
Ha

William (04:54.574)
those extra branding activities. One downside to the industry that I would say, unlike the electrical or like the garage doors, there’s not a lot of those direct lead aggregators for the industry, so we don’t have any like Google local service ads, we don’t have like the home advisors, Thumbtack, we don’t have any of those. We just pay for lead kind of platforms, so we’re having to generate basically the demand ourselves. Yeah.

Jeffro (05:15.598)
there’s no category for you guys

William (05:18.134)
Even the state, don’t even have, I think we’re categorized as like a pest control company because the state doesn’t even recognize bloopers, scoopers as like an official industry yet.

Jeffro (05:27.36)
Interesting. So when you’re wrapping your trucks, mean, do you ever advertise on other vehicles too? Because I’ve seen people drive around just with ads for companies. Is that something you’ve done?

William (05:28.365)
Yeah.

William (05:38.762)
That’s not something we’ve done. I have looked into that. I know there’s a company where you can get partial wraps or full wraps and you got like the Uber, it’s kind of like Uber drivers driving around with your brand on it. My preference was just to wrap around drugs because we’re to have those for whatever, five, six, seven years. So ROI was going to be a lot higher. And also, you don’t exactly see the direct benefit of those like really quickly. might get a couple of customers every month per wrap was there for us.

Jeffro (06:08.747)
Yeah. Well, what I like that you’ve done is you’ve tried all these different things to figure out what works. think too many owners, they might try one thing and spend a few hundred bucks like Facebook ads doesn’t work. Marketing doesn’t work. I’m just going to hand out flyers or whatever. And like they go back to what they know, whatever that happens to be, rather than testing stuff to get to a point where they have the ability to scale or have that compounding effect where you’re in multiple places. So the lesson shouldn’t be that, you know,

William (06:13.902)
you

William (06:24.429)
Yeah.

William (06:31.459)
Yeah.

Jeffro (06:34.382)
putting coupons doesn’t work, it might be that people don’t want to think about poop when they’re eating pizza, right? So there’s different lessons there.

William (06:36.27)
.

the heat.

Yeah, yeah, 100 % and especially with like Facebook ads there’s so many different ways that you can run Facebook ads engagement campaigns You can run my lead form campaigns. You send traffic back to your website run custom conversion campaigns Like there’s a lot that goes into it a lot of different things that you can actually test out A lot of things work and even more things probably don’t work. So

Jeffro (07:02.145)
Yeah. Well, it sounds like you had enough early success that gave you a little bit of marketing spend, right? For you to realize, okay, this is bigger than a solo operation. Maybe I can scale this. I can bring in other people and actually, you know, make this into a thing. So can you talk about that transition a little bit?

William (07:18.734)
Yeah, it happened really fast. So one person can typically handle around 150 accounts on their own if they’re just working on a jam-packed full schedule. As I mentioned, we went from 10, 15 to like 350 in like three months. So that was a bit of an experience. We just kind of got forced into trying to buy trucks and hire people. Just, I mean, thankfully for us, the acquiring clients didn’t end up being the bottleneck of the business when we first started. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Jeffro (07:47.267)
Well, yeah, I’m just, I want the listeners to get a feel for this, right? Cause they might be in a similar situation where maybe they’ve got something that’s small right now, but it has potential. How do you go from just me doing everything to starting to spend on advertising and realizing, okay, this is more than I can handle. If they haven’t gone through that process yet of growing a business, what should they look out for?

William (07:57.933)
you

William (08:07.33)
Yeah, Yeah, definitely. Well, it’s definitely Something that you want to plan ahead for I know for us I kind of think of it similar to marketing right you advertise and get your customers you put them through the onboarding process You have a retention process for your customers. You should kind of have the same thing around your employees So you got to advertise to get good employees. You have to have a good interview process. Do you have have a good training process? It’s almost like a parallel funnel to acquiring customers as it is for acquiring talent, I guess we will say. So I think that’s something that definitely gets overlooked, especially if people are trying to scale up really quick, they’re complaining they can’t get good employees or this or that. You really need to invest in that employee acquisition funnel, I guess we’ll call it.

Jeffro (08:49.055)
Yeah, well, I think your background in digital marketing obviously shaped the way you approach the business and customer acquisition and everything because you already know how this has to work in order for it to grow and keep working month after month.

William (08:57.774)
Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. And so I will say too, if you can definitely try to treat your employees better than you think you have to. Like we pay people 20, 25 bucks an hour to go pick up dog poop, provide benefits, don’t take home the truck. We try to make it basically the best entry level like job position that somebody can find. We pay more than FedEx and Amazon and all the lawn care companies around. So I think that goes a long way to attracting the right people. Cause the worst thing you can do for your business is hire bad employees because they will hank it.

Jeffro (09:30.497)
But that’s going to build team loyalty. And so it’s going to make your life easier as you go forward because you’re not going to have a high turnover. People are going to be satisfied. They’re going to tell others about it and even bring in their friends who are looking for work or anything like that. So very cool. I am curious. So I imagine people are signing up for like a monthly service, a weekly service, and you guys just come into their yard, pick up the poop and leave. Is that it?

William (09:36.716)
Yeah.

William (09:42.156)
Nope, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

William (09:56.276)
It’s pretty simple. So we have a different subscription plans and that’s going to be based on how many dogs you have and the service frequency you want. So we’ll come out anywhere from twice a week, once a week, once every other week, or even once a month. It’s kind of our lowest frequency. Put somebody on a subscription plan and we’ll actually pre-bill them for the whole month. So if they cancel or they don’t pay or whatever happens, we’re not wasting money. We don’t have to collect money. We’re not chasing people down. We just don’t provide service if they don’t pre-pay us.

So from there we will come out to their house, we’ll basically pick up the dog waste, we’ll take a gait photo before we leave so that they know that their dog’s not gonna be let out, they know that the service was fulfilled, and we clean all of our equipment with a kennel-grade disinfectant just so we’re not spreading parvo or anything like that from yard to yard. That’s pretty much the, I guess the basic cycle of a customer, pretty simple.

Jeffro (10:43.157)
Gotcha. So I, do you think what are the cross selling opportunities here with like some of your other service companies? Like you have landscaping and stuff. If people are only coming to you once a month to pick up their dog poop, are they going to have like dead grass spots all around? mean.

William (10:51.937)
Yeah.

Yeah.

William (10:58.558)
Yeah, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of cross-sell opportunity. It just depends on how you want to grow your business. So I wanted to scale this one to be a big, eight-figure business. So I know offering a bunch of different service lines is going to make that more difficult. So you’re to have more operational complexity. You’re going to have to train people on different things. You’re going to have to buy equipment. Each business is kind of like its own individual business. So we kind of opted to stick with scoop and poop. We literally don’t do anything else. That’s all we do. And I just try to do that as much as possible.

With that being said, we’ve surveyed our clients, probably about 30-40 % of them every single year that want to get a lawn mowing quote. So that’s probably the biggest cross-sell opportunity. I know a lot of companies do things like odor control. So some of these yards smells bad, can spray something on it to make it smell a little bit better. There’s definitely a lot of opportunity to cross-sell, but for us, like I said, getting customers isn’t necessarily the bottleneck. I’d rather just go out and get another hundred.

scoop gust tires then. So 20 people lawn mowing and add all that complexity.

Jeffro (11:57.377)
Well, sounds like what you’ve, you’ve managed to avoid the shiny object syndrome that so many entrepreneurs get into, right? Cause yes, it’s easy to add all this stuff, but like you said, it adds operational complexity, it adds overhead and you’re more likely to run into just more problems. And so you can get really good at one thing. You’re going to be able to be a lot more profitable like you’ve done. So that’s awesome.

William (12:18.417)
Yeah, I mean even on the even on the marketing side right like everything we put out is just about scooping poop our brands just about scooping poop like our topical authority on our website Google knows that we’re just about scooping poop we’re not doing like a kajillion different services that waters down our authority so we’re super niche I think that helps with our SEO and other things like that quite a bit

Jeffro (12:36.629)
definitely does. So as you’ve scaled, I mean, people try to figure out how do I scale without losing quality? In your case, it’s so simple, like, okay, you show up on time, you scoop the poop, you leave, right? Take the picture. That’s all it is. So I imagine that also helps with keeping the service strong while you’re going to multiple states and having a consistent experience for your customers so that they’re likely to leave positive reviews and everything else.

William (12:47.776)
Yeah. Yeah.

William (13:00.652)
Yup.

Yep, yeah, definitely keeping it simple is gonna be key if you want to scale a big company like even just adding like you said one little thing here or there that adds like a whole nother layer of complexity something else that can be messed up. Even at the point where you mentioned show up on time we don’t even provide time arrival windows we just tell people we’re coming on a certain day just to make it even that much easier. yeah, as much stuff as we can peel back because really people just hate picking up dog poop so we’re just trying to eliminate that for them and not get fancy with anything else and just keep doing that.

Jeffro (13:21.278)
Okay.

Jeffro (13:34.352)
I like it. mean you’re solving a real pain point or annoyance that people are willing to put money behind. So I do have to ask though, what do you do with all the poop that you’ve scooped?

William (13:44.844)
Yeah, so we’ve kind of learned over time. So at our first location, we have a bunch of four-wheel drive trucks. We got snow and all that stuff. And we will take the waste and we just partner with a company like Waste Management. It’s got like a big centralized dumpster at our offices, which we have two offices now. And they just basically take the waste and burn it, I think is what they do with it. Cause you can’t really do anything. It’ll kill your grass. It’s too high in protein content. It’s actually considered like a hazardous material. So there’s not a lot that we can do with it. So they just dispose of it there.

But we realized that customers actually don’t seem to care that much if we physically take the waste or not. So in our Seattle location, which was our second location, we just double bagged the waste, put it the customer’s trash can and we’re able to drive around with like little Chevy Sparks, get three times the gas mileage out of those. We’re spending whatever, five to 10 grand instead of 30, 40 grand per vehicle. So that’s made scaling up quite a bit easier and we’ve had about the same growth rate there.

Jeffro (14:40.639)
Okay, interesting. that’s, you’ve just removed one other piece of complexity from the process when you do that. Just drop it in the trash and you’re done.

William (14:47.502)
Yeah, that’s a big bottleneck to especially as people are just of the capital expense, right? Especially in home service companies, you got to buy all these trucks, you got to buy all these equipment, you got to buy all your material, which thankfully is scoop and poop. We don’t have to have any material. We’re just scoop and poop. It’s just all labor. So that’s another big benefit of the industry, I would say as well.

Jeffro (15:05.439)
Nice. Well, that’s very cool. I like the way that you’ve structured this and been building it out. That’s a really good example. And speaking of having an example, you’ve actually built a whole community around helping others get into this same industry. So can you talk to us about that a little bit?

William (15:18.669)
Yeah.

Yeah, so it wasn’t something that I initially intended to do. I did a podcast with somebody that had another Poop Scoop company, maybe a couple thousand followers at the time.

Because most pooper scoopers aren’t doing over a million dollars a year They may be doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year kind of at best I went on this podcast and Once I got off that I probably had 20 30 companies reach out to me that wanted like one-on-one consulting didn’t really want to do that So threw out a crazy number like okay at 1500 bucks a month you can talk to me For a couple hours, and I think I made like 20 grand at first like couple weeks of that. It’s like man Maybe we got something here but I didn’t want to do the one-on-one thing. So I saw Alex Hermose had invested into school So I said, hey, let’s give this a shot kind of see what happens I wasn’t sure if we wanted a franchise or just keep an open up corporate locations or if we wanted to get into acquiring other companies and other routes kind of like waste management did but I figured this would be kind of a good groundwork to kind of lay the foundation for whatever we wanted to do next and Actually turn it into kind of a business of its own. We’ve got I think at this time like over 850 companies in there Yeah

Jeffro (16:24.318)
Nice. And so now you’re training them to do the same thing that you’ve done. What has surprised you most about teaching others to replicate your model?

William (16:28.621)
Yeah.

William (16:35.629)
I think there’s just yeah, there’s a lot of positivity in the community. It’s not very negative. I was expecting people to kind of go back and forth as you know how the internet can be right? But it’s such a simple business for people to start and if you’re willing to go out and get your hands dirty like a solo operator could be making six figures without any employees if they’re to pick up dog poop. So I think showing people the way with that has definitely been more impactful than I anticipated to be for a lot of people. And then also we’re kind of, I don’t know, the market leader of the poop scoop industry now. So we’re able to go out with all these members and we can negotiate discounts on CRMs and software and equipment. So we’re almost like some big, unofficial associations. We’re able to get cheaper prices for the whole industry, which is another thing that’s been pretty cool.

Jeffro (17:20.638)
what are some of the things that people need the most help with? you focusing more on helping them with their marketing or is it some of the operational challenges or what is it?

William (17:27.502)
Yeah, so for most most companies you got to come in you got to learn the basics obviously so we have like a one-on-one course on how to start a business how to do your basic budget business plan get your LLC all that kind of stuff but I would say most people probably struggle with acquiring customers that’s typically the first bottleneck that any business has we don’t have customers cash flow you don’t have a business right so it’s kind of what the main focus is especially on the early but as people scale up you start hiring employees and you figure out to train employees you need to start having standard operating procedures and handbooks all that kind of stuff starts to become kind of a bigger part of the business as your focus shifts whatever the bottleneck is that you’re at

Jeffro (18:06.44)
Very cool. And I imagine people have different goals too. So some people might be content doing it by themselves and just that’s it. Other people might want to build the business and have other people take over certain aspects of it.

William (18:11.286)
Yeah.

William (18:16.206)
Yep. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Different goals for different people. So people just want to have an extra, I don’t know, 20 clients make an extra two grand a month. Right. It’s definitely a big, a big, uh, variety there, but there’s something for everybody in the group depending on how big you want to get.

Jeffro (18:24.839)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (18:33.051)
That’s very cool. Now for someone who’s running a service business in a different niche, let’s say landscaping or pest control or something, what can they take from your approach and apply that to their own growth?

William (18:44.27)
One thing that I would say that we didn’t really touch on right before is especially for like an electrical company garage door company a lot of those get kind of get Constraint by how much search volume there is it’s where most of the high quality leads come from So I think a big thing that you should be doing is making sure all of your customers or prospects are opted into marketing We send out a lot of like text message remarketing or email remarketing and that is probably our highest ROI channels other than getting like referrals right so cheap to send out those text messages or sign up clients every single time we do a blast so yeah make sure you’re clicking that make sure you’re getting referrals because if you can only get so many leads from Google or Facebook or whatever it is that’s really the smartest way to grow I think it’s just stacking more repeat business stacking more referrals and doing those low-cost outreach methods

Jeffro (19:32.144)
Gotcha. Well, the nice thing about the pooper scooper business is that it is a recurring ongoing thing. Some of the other niches, know, plumbers are often called out when there’s a problem, right? It’s not like I’m going to sign up for a plumbing subscription for you to come look at my pipes every month. Yeah, right. But I mean, if you can figure out a way to do that, where you do get them on some kind of plumbing retainer, that would be awesome. Or like plumbing insurance plan or something. But that’s that’s kind of a different

William (19:36.866)
Yep.

William (19:41.869)
Yeah.

William (19:46.816)
I wish.

William (19:57.346)
Yeah. Yeah, something like that.

Jeffro (20:02.277)
mentality than people have with you know, scooping poop, where it is just I know it’s going to be there that I keep feeding the dog it’s going to keep making the poop so

William (20:10.233)
Yep, yep exactly so so the reason why I like this industry better than the other ones that I’m in Dogs keep pooping the employees are a lot easier again I don’t have to find somebody with 8,000 hours and all these crazy like trade licenses I don’t have any material costs recurring revenue. It’s low ticket. So it’s a lot easier to sell a lot of benefits and then even doing simple things like doing a price increase we raise everybody’s price like

$2 a week it made almost an extra $200,000 in bottom line forces because we have such a high number of customers So that small $2 increase over 2,500 people adds up really quick

Jeffro (20:47.292)
That’s amazing. Cool. Well, William, this has been a blast. Thank you for giving us a behind the scenes look at what it takes to scale a business in a niche that most people would never even consider. But there’s so many beautiful aspects to the way you’ve done it, how simple it is and the recurring nature and just it’s low overhead, all this stuff. So if you guys are listening, check out the links in the show notes to connect with William, learn more about swoop scoop if you need your dog’s poop scooped up. And you can explore his poop scoop millionaire community if that’s something you want to learn.

William (20:56.718)
you

Jeffro (21:16.389)
from him about building your own business the way he’s done. So let’s wrap it up with this final question. What is the biggest mindset shift that a business owner needs to make if they want to grow something that’s seemingly small into something truly scalable?

William (21:30.798)
I would say the big thing is just to take action. You don’t have to be perfect, right? If you are trying to make everything perfect and have the perfect website, have the perfect job description, you’re gonna get stuck in the weeds and you’re not gonna be able to grow your business. It’s much more important to take action and actually go out there and start doing things. that’s what I would say. Yep, exactly. You can fix it later. Get the money first.

Jeffro (21:48.367)
Yeah, ready, fire, aim, right?

Jeffro (21:53.794)
Yeah, can course correct as you go, but you learn so much from the failures and the attempts. So otherwise, you can’t figure it all out on paper until you get out there.

William (22:00.814)
And don’t put your ads on pizza boxes if you pick up dog

Jeffro (22:03.77)
Very cool. Well, thanks again, William. Thanks to all for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, a quick rating on or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps us reach more service business owners who want to dominate their market. So please do that. Take care and we’ll see you next time.

William (22:19.783)
Thank you.