How to Start Swoop Scoop: Pet Waste Business That Makes Money on Day One

How to Start Swoop Scoop Business

Can $1,200, a bucket, and a rake turn into a multimillion-dollar company? Yes — and Will Milliken is living proof.

Find out about jobs in the pet waste removal industry - from entrepreneur William Milliken, Founder of Swoop Scoop®, one of the fastest-growing pet waste removal businesses in the country! 

It’s simple, low-cost, and you can start making money from day one.

If you thinking about  a career change or wish for an amazing side hustle, this episode is for you. We uncover the secrets behind building a multi-million dollar business from scratch.  

Listen and get motivated to start on your own journey!

Learn more:
▫️ Swoop Scoop® → https://swoopscoop.com

▫️ Poop Scoop Millionaire → https://www.skool.com/poop-scoop-millionaire/about

If you like the show, please leave us a review, it really helps!

How Much Can I Make? Is nominated for 2026 Women in Podcasting Award!

Want us to cover a specific job? Shoot us an email!

Visit howmuchcanimake.info

Music credit: Kate Pierson & Monica Nation

Transcript

Intro And Will Business Reveal

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Realistically, you can get started with just like a bucket and a rake. Um, and if you have if you have uh transportation, I guess you could ride your bike or you could walk around, but I probably wouldn't recommend it. You can you can go out there and start making money within like a day.

Will’s Background And Spark Of The Idea

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Welcome back to season two of How Much Can I Make? I'm your host Miravozeri, and we are kicking off things with a job you absolutely will not believe. Just 32 years old, William Willikan built a$3 million business within just five years and he did it with an initial investment of only$1,200. You wanna know how? By picking up dog poop. Yes, he turned poop into gold. Literally. Will is the founder and president of Swoop Scoop, a booming service that picks up your dog poop. So let's find out how he did it. First of all, thank you so much for giving your time and enjoying the show. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Let's start with the name Swoop Scoop, which is very catchy. How did you come up with that?

SPEAKER_00 1:07

So we actually started off with a different name and we ended up having to change it because we couldn't get a trademarked push through. So we ended up just putting like five different trademark applications through the uh the process, and that was the only one that came back. So that's kind of uh how we ended up with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

How did you come up with the idea of scooping poop? What's your background?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

So my background uh uh was in digital marketing. I have a couple other home service companies, I got an electrical company, I got a garage door company, um, and I had a friend that wanted to start a company with me, but he didn't really have any trade skills. He wasn't a plumber, wasn't an HVAC. And my wife had ended up hiring a pooper scooper service at the time because she was pregnant, I was just too busy with work, and that's kind of where the idea came from. Had no idea what we were doing. My business partner started off like timing himself, scooping rocks in his backyard just to see how long it would take so we could set pricing and stuff. Really just kind of took off from there, but that was kind of how we got it, got it started.

First Customers And Early Growth

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Ever since I read about you and listened to your videos, I started to ask friends of mine with dogs. Because for me, it's like unfathomable that people will pay to clean their loan, right? So I started to ask them, would you pay for the service? They all said in a heartbeat. Were you surprised when people agreed to do it?

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Uh a little bit, yeah, because one of the first things I do when I start a new business is I'll look and see how much like Google search volume there is, so how many people are searching for any particular service? And there was nobody searching for this service when we first started. I was pretty surprised, but once we were able to get the word out, it was just yeah, people just wanted to sign up. I guess people don't like picking up uh dog food themselves.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

So, how did you get the first customer?

SPEAKER_00 2:33

First customer we got, we really were grinding and out, just kind of reaching out to friends and families. I think we had some door hangers, we're knocking on doors, we're going to vet clinics and just trying to build relationships that way. That's how we probably got our first, I don't know, 15, 20 customers or so. And then once we had some cash coming into the business, we started to invest into paid advertising. So uh Facebook ads in particular were very, very powerful for us once we started doing Facebook ads. I think we went from 20 to over 300 customers in about three months.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

And how long did it take from the idea to the first customer?

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Probably by the time we got all the business license and all that stuff set up, maybe I don't know, maybe like four or five weeks.

Pricing, Capacity, And Subscriptions

SPEAKER_01 3:08

How many customers does one need in order to make it a full-time job?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

So one technician or owner operator, they can they can handle up to about 150 clients by themselves, which is a pretty pretty good income. Our average client pays us around$110 a month right now. I mean, there's not that many expenses in the business if you're just running it by yourself and you don't have any employees. So, I mean, realistically, I mean you could replace your income with 60, 70 clients for most folks out there.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

You go to a to a customer twice a week, once a week.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yeah, so it works on a subscription model. So we have uh different subscriptions based on how many dogs you have and what service frequency you want. So if we come out, we'll either come out twice a week, once a week, once every other week, or once a month, kind of depending on whatever the customer's budget is and how often they use their yard. And that's really all there is to it. We show up, we scoop the poop, and we leave. It's as simple as it gets.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

How long does it take you to do a yard, roughly? Uh, I think the average yard is around seven minutes. What do you need to start a business like this?

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Realistically, you can get started with just like a bucket and a rake. Um, and if you have if you have uh transportation, I guess you could ride your bike or you could walk around, but I probably wouldn't recommend it. But really, you just need a bucket and a rake, and then uh we also highly recommend that you get some like disinfectant so you could spray down your equipment in between each yard so you're not spreading like barbo or anything like that to dogs. So technically you could start for a couple hundred bucks if you want to get your LLC and all your legal stuff, and obviously that's gonna cost a little bit more. But uh as far as like the bare bones, what you need to get started, you can get started for a couple hundred bucks.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Wow, and you turned your business into a million-dollar business, but we'll get to it in a minute because you have a a side hassle sort of with all your members, which was very impressive. One of our uh listener, Maria David from New York, sent me a few questions. She wanted to know have you ever got bitten by a dog?

Business location and idea protection

SPEAKER_00 4:49

I haven't been bitten by a dog. I actually haven't even scooped myself. So I started with a business partner that was doing all the the scooping, but he has been bitten by a dog a couple of times, unfortunately. Um it's pretty rare when it happens. Uh, I was running through the numbers. It happens about once every 20,000 yards that we clean. Most of the time when it does happen, it's if there's like a kid or something that like lets out a dog that's not supposed to be outside while we're in the yard kind of a thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Right now you're only on the West Coast, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Yeah, we're in uh yeah, North Idaho, Eastern Washington, then we're also in uh Seattle, Everett, and then we just opened up in Tacoma.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

But how can you protect your idea? Anybody could do it, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:23

I mean, at the end of the day, it's not rocket science, it's just picking up dog poop. So I feel like uh it's more of an execution thing, right? So it'd be really hard for somebody to come into our market and become bigger than us just because of how much brand recognition that we have now. We also have a full team, we have a lot more resources, we got an ops manager, we got a marketing manager, we got finance people. So it's really hard for somebody to come in that's starting their first business and kind of compete with a business like that. We got, I don't know, close to 1,500 five-star reviews across our location.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

So I know, I saw that.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Yeah, so there's definitely a brand moat, and then I think the biggest thing is just that uh the execution, right? So I know there's a guy in New York, he calls himself the uh the king of poop. He owns a company called Scoopy Doo over on Long Island. So he's got about a thousand clients himself over there. Whoa. But he's he's been in it for over, I think he just hit his 25th year, which was cool.

Seasons, Snow Strategy, And Spring Rush

SPEAKER_01 6:10

And how do you deal with seasons when it snows? I don't know if it snows where you are.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Our first location it does snow. Our second location it doesn't snow. Uh we actually clean all year round. So when it does snow, most of the waste just stays on the top of the snow, so it makes it really easy to pick up. And then when the snow melts, I call it uh peak poop pain season. So people have two, three, four, five, six months worth of snow that just melts off in their backyards, like totally disgusting. That's actually when we get probably 70, 80 percent of our clients for the whole year, is kind of during that. So we call it the spring rush.

Commercial Work And Waste Disposal

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Yeah, every business has its good season. Do you only do loans or apartment complexes also?

Biggest Challenges And Churn

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah, so we'll work with uh homeowners associations, uh, some commercial buildings, some apartment complexes. So we'll actually go and install those like uh pet waste stations uh that have like the bags and the garbage can. So we'll install those and then we'll also uh yeah, clean up like after apartment complexes and stuff like that. It's not a huge part of our business, but uh definitely we definitely get calls for that coming in.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

What is the biggest challenge of this job?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

The biggest challenge. We had a lot of challenges over the years. Uh it kind of it kind of varies depending on the season. So when we first started off, it was all trying to figure out like how to hire people uh efficiently, how to keep people working for the company. So that was a big challenge when we first started. Another challenge, especially when you get bigger, is uh managing like your customer churn. So like how many customers are canceling every month. So as you get bigger, maybe you only have a four or four percent churn, but you got a couple thousand clients, you're losing over a hundred customers every single month that you gotta replace to stay the same size. That's probably the biggest thing that we're always battling, especially with a subscription base, is just how do we reduce our uh customer churn?

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Why do people leave? They move away or they they decide they can pick up themselves?

Marketing Wins And Expensive Misses

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Yeah, a lot of it's uh people will move away, their dog passes away. Oh a lot of people will uh cancel during the summertime, which is actually the opposite of what I thought. I thought the summertime was gonna be the busiest time of the year. But a lot of people go on vacation, their kids are home from school, they try to make their kids do it. So for us, the worse the weather gets, the busier it is for us. So, like quarter four and quarter one are is like the busiest times for us. People don't want to go outside.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Nothing like benefiting from people's laziness. I must ask you though, what do you do with the poop?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Yeah. So yeah, this one comes up a lot. There's a couple options. So unfortunately, dog poop isn't really good for anything that I know of right now. So, like, if you try to use it as fertilizer or anything like that, it'll just kill your grass. So you gotta dispose of it. So at our first location, we just have a deal with waste management. We got some big dumpsters, and then they come and they take it. And I think honestly, I think they just like incinerate it. I don't know, it's not not good. And then we realized that a lot of our customers actually didn't care if we took the waste away. So uh, like over in our Seattle location, we'll just double bag it and we'll put it in the customer's trash can. That's pretty much it. So it saves us a lot of money. We don't gotta buy these big trucks, we don't have to get all these dumpsters, and it's just a lot, yeah, a lot more efficient for the business.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

And the client doesn't mind that you put the poop in their garbage?

poop scoop millionaire club

SPEAKER_00 9:01

No, I mean that's where they were gonna put it anyways, or had been putting it anyways, so I saw that you have something very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

You have 900 members. Could you explain this to me a little bit?

Industry Growth, Goals, And Future Plans

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Yes, we have an online community called the Poop Scoop Millionaire. Uh so we were looking at ways to expand swoop scoop ourselves. We looked at franchising, we looked at just opening more locations, we looked at buying up other companies. I didn't really feel like franchising offered enough value, and there wasn't really any other companies that we could acquire, so we decided to kind of put out all the information that we use to grow our own company. Swoop Scoop, just out on an online community. Um we basically just walk people through how to start the business, so what tools to buy, how to do your marketing, all the equipment, all that kind of stuff's gonna be there on that community. Um the goal is really to make the industry a more uh well-known industry, more of a mainstream industry. So get more people searching for the industry, which is just gonna help all the different companies throughout the throughout the country. We even got people all over the world. We got people in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Canada. So it's kind of it's kind of it's kind of crazy. It took off a lot more than I expected it to.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Wow. If somebody wants to start this business, what the best advice you could give them?

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Yeah, I think the best advice is to just get get out there and start. I see all the time, especially in the community, people try to get the perfect logo and they'll try to get the perfect website and they'll try to get the perfect like whatever, and they never actually go out and uh get customers, which is what it's all about, right? If you don't have customers, you don't have cash flow, and if you don't have cash flow, you don't really have a business. So I would say just go out there and get started, like whatever it takes, get your first one, two, three, five customers, and then start to kind of dial in those other things. But if you don't if you don't get started, you're just not not gonna go anywhere.

$3 millions from 2020 to now

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Right. Now you started the business in 2020, correct?

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, right at the end of 2020, right in the middle of uh the COVID.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

With little very little investment, you got to million dollar. I mean, just tell me what is the potential of this business money-wise.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Definitely big potential. I think we're one of the we're one of the bigger companies in the space, obviously. I think we'll do a little over three million dollars this year. What?

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Yo, yeah, that is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Yeah, thank you. So, and then we actually made uh we made the Inc. 5000 list, so we were the sixth fastest uh consumer service business in the country, also on the Inc. list.

growing from here

SPEAKER_01 11:09

Oh my god, this is this is shocking. It's in five years you did all of that?

SPEAKER_00 11:14

That's and so now now it's getting to the point where it's like, okay, we really got our systems dialed in, we got our next layer of management dialed in, so I'm not really doing anything day-to-day in the business, I'm not scooping, I'm not even running our marketing, I'm not even hiring people anymore. We got other people to do that. So now it's gonna be a point of how many locations can we just basically copy paste and open up in new cities.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Um you have to buy the cars for them, or you could just put somebody in business with a bicycle, like you said.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Uh yeah, I don't recommend there's a lot of people out there that will just get instead of hiring full-time employees, they'll get like$10.99 and they'll make people drive their cars so you can get started even if you don't have a car. I personally like to buy all our vehicles so that we can put those wraps on them because it's a pretty uh core element of our marketing. But if you're not taking the waste, you can literally go out and buy a$5,000 car that gets decent gas mileage. That maybe it's a little bit older, throw a wrap on it, nobody can tell that it's an old car, and you can go out there and get started.

marketing strategy

SPEAKER_01 12:06

What would you say was the smartest marketing thing you did?

SPEAKER_00 12:09

We did a lot of not smart marketing things, but like what? There's a pizza hut right across the street from our office, and we we thought it would be a great idea to put our poop scoop coupons on Pizza Hut boxes. So I think we spent like five thousand dollars putting like flyers out on Pizza Hut boxes, and we signed up zero customers.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Oh, that's another kind of funny one.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Yeah. Probably the best thing that we did was we wrapped all of our vehicles. So all of our trucks have full wraps, they're like kind of the teal blue of uh swoop scoop. They all got our logo on it, they got our phone number on it. We've yeah, we get hundreds of customers signing up every year just from our truck wraps alone. Um, but we got like 25 vehicles rolling around that are wrapped now, which is nice.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

So that you think was the smartest thing to do?

SPEAKER_00 12:50

I think that is one of the smartest things to do because not only did we get people calling in right off the wraps, more people started Googling the service. So we show up on Google, which helps, and then our Facebook ads that we actually took pictures of our real team standing in front of our real truck, those always seem to perform the best as well.

the business in 5-510 years

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Where do you see the business going in the next five to ten years?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

It's definitely growing, especially since we started coming out and doing podcasts and doing our YouTube videos and things like that. I think just over the last year, searches are up over 180%, which is nice. I think it's definitely gonna become a more mainstream service, right? People search for house cleaning and lawn care and all that stuff. So my my hope is that it'll be kind of up in that arena where people know that it's a service that's available to them. Because, like you said, you probably talked to all your friends and they're like, I had no idea this was a thing, but I would totally pay for that. So it's really just getting the uh getting the awareness out there because people want it, they just don't know that it's a a service that it exists. So I think it's gonna continue to grow pretty exponentially for our company specifically. Our goal is to get to 10 million within the next three years, which I think that we should be able to do now that we've got our infrastructure in place. But yeah, that's kind of that's kind of where we're going and I think where the industry's going.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

So is your dream eventually to have an exit for somebody to buy your business?

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Maybe. I mean, I'm pretty I'm only 32 right now, so I gotta find something to do. If I sell my business and retire, I'll probably die early. I don't know if that's a good idea. But uh I think I think the goal is always to have a valuable business just so you have those options, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:10

What's your favorite part of the business?

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Um the money. I don't yeah, I like money. I'm definitely not passionate about dog poop, so I guess I don't want people to get confused about that. I don't know. For me, it's just kind of interesting to see how big we could take picking up dog poop, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

So everybody asked, they thought it was a great idea. It is obviously a great business idea. The way you grew it in five years, it's shocking.

How to network and start your own business

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, it's low cost, there's definitely some upside, you don't have any like cost of goods sold. It's a lot easier to hire employees. Like I got an electrical company where I gotta find guys that have like 8,000 hours and all these journeyman licenses and stuff. I can just hire somebody to scoop dog poop. It's like a lot easier to scale this company and then other companies.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

If somebody starts the business through you, do they have to pay you anything?

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Nope. Yeah, it's literally uh 69 bucks a month, and we'll basically teach you everything we know to get to the point that we did. It's a pretty good offer. If you wanted to buy into like a franchise or something like that, you're paying 50 grand to a hundred grand just like in franchise fees and getting set up and doing all the stuff, and then you have to listen to what they say.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

But this way they just learn from you and then they go on their own.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Yep, exactly. And I mean that's kind of the whole point of the industry, right? It's you don't need a giant investment to get into this and actually start making money. Um it's been pretty life-changing for a lot of people that uh weren't happy at their jobs, they were able to get in there and get 100, 150, 200 clients and leave their job and have their own business.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

I know I read some of the reviews of your that side of your business, and they were raving. This they are independent now, they're making great money, they were like raving, and you have a lot of hundreds of mem members. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Yeah, but it's been cool. We even did a uh in-person event out in uh quarterly, Idaho, so we had like over a hundred companies fly out called ScoopCon, which was cool. So that was that was actually pretty crazy. It took me like an hour and a half just to walk through the lobby because everybody was like trying to stop and talk to me and stuff. So it was that was kind of cool. But and that was just our first year online, so we'll see what happens a few years down the road. But yeah, it's definitely been booming more than I expected it to.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah, it surprised you, huh?

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Yeah, it did. I was like, okay, I gotta not let this go out of my head. You're just getting started.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

Right. It's crazy. Yeah. The opportunity that in 2020 you could still find a brand new business that nobody ever did. This is fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

I really commend you for that. I take my head off.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

I appreciate that. I appreciate that. I know I always kind of say, like, if you're thinking about starting a business and you've been thinking about it for years and years, and you're not willing to start like this business because it's so simple, you're probably not even gonna start one. You know what I mean? You can you can go out there and start making money within like a day.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

So if someone wants to start a scooping business, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Yeah, so if you want to just kind of check it out before you commit too much, we have a free YouTube channel. So if you just search like Dog Poop Business, we'll pop up. We got like 400 videos on there. And if you really want to dive in, we have our online community called Poop Scoop Millionaire. That's where we have all our courses. We have the live trainings, we got like eight, nine hundred other companies in there that you can ask questions to. And then uh the other cool thing about this community was that it got so big that we were able to go out and start negotiating discounts on stuff. So if you join, you can actually get discounts on software and equipment and things like that. Unofficial association. So we're trying to get some buying power. So it's actually cheaper to be in there if you use the discounts than it even costs, which is cool.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

That is really great. I'm gonna put in the show notes all the links for people to know exactly where to go to get in touch with you and get into business and start making money.

SPEAKER_00 17:26

Yeah, that sounds good. I appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Sure, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah, have a great day.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

You too. Bye bye. That's a wrap for today. I don't know about you, but we really reminded me that the opportunity is everywhere, even in places I never thought of. If you like the show, please leave us a review, it really helps. And until next time, stay curious. See you next week.