The main issue is just, yeah, a missed pile here and there, missing a flower bed. Because normally they don't go to the bathroom in the flower bed. That's. Right. Yeah. Not all backyards are created equal. Some are more complex. The different hot zones. That's right. Okay. Welcome to Masters of Home Service, a podcast by Jobber. Each week we talk to successful home service entrepreneurs and experts in their field to learn how they built their company so we can make your business more
profitable and more efficient. We're in Las Vegas at Blue Wire Studios, and today we have Erica Kupin. Erica, you poop scoop or you scoop poop. Which one is it? You scoop. Scoop. I scoop the poop. Poop the scoop. All of it depends on the day. So you started a business about five years ago of dog waste removal. Yes. And it's going really well. And so I want to talk to you about that. But first, give us our listeners just an idea of what a normal day is in your industry.
All right. Well, in my business at 8:00 AM my customers get an automated message saying, Hey, today's your scoop day from Jobber. Beautiful. I don't have to send any of that out. And then when we have all of our supplies together, we keep our trucks very organized. Everything for the most part is very streamlined. You wouldn't expect for a pooper scooper business to be so organized, but we have to be right? This is a legitimate business.
So then when we're on the way, we text the homeowner, say, Hey, we're on the way to scoop your yard. I like to add a dog and a poop emoji. I like to keep dog poop cute. And then we arrive to the property and we scoop the waste in a streamlined way. And then we just rinse and repeat 20, 30 houses a day, and then we leave for the day and that's it. So most of our listeners know 20 to 30 stops a day. That's a lot.
So high volume businesses, window cleaning, maybe mowing, no one's doing 30 in a day, single crew at least. And so that's a lot of stops. Yeah. First of all, let's go back a little bit before we get into this because I have a lot of questions. How did you get into this business in the first place? My husband's last name is Rein. So I married into this last name.
And growing up as kids, they would joke around about Kreins, poopin, scoopin, okay, whatever life goes on. We ended up getting married, and I seen my dog going to the bathroom outside. I was sick of my pharmaceutical job. I was a pharmacy technician for 14 years, desperately knowing that I needed to do something different. I looked at my dog doing the biz, I looked at my husband, I said, can I start that group in poop and scoop and think, can I use that name? Is that okay? He's like, yeah, sure.
So literally the next day I went and filed for A DBA, did some research online and just kind of pieced everything together. And now I'm here. Good for you. So how did you get your first clients? Facebook. I created a Facebook page. I created some crappy, I like to say some crappy material. There's so many good one-liners like that. So many pennies, right? And I posted on social media and said, Hey, I started a dog waste removal business. I'm looking to get my feet wet.
Would anybody be interested in letting me scoop their dog waste? And this woman from the jewelry business, I was selling jewelry at the time, just kind of get my feet wet with sales. And she's like, yeah, sure, come on over. And I did it incredibly cheap. It was on a Wednesday in the evening as the sun was going down, and that was my first gig. It was 6:00 PM on a Wednesday.
And I remember leaving there and I had 20 bucks in my hand. I said, I cannot believe I just made $20 scooping dog poop out of my 2007 Chevy Cobalt. Good for you. That's the American dream right there. Okay. So you get one client, which obviously turns into many more as we'll Get to in a second. What's the service plan? So tell our listeners, a client, once you come scoop your poop, is it every day? Is it weekly? What's the frequency? And tell us about that.
Well, for recurring, it's usually one time a week. At one point I was doing three times a week, but then I was just spread too thin, so it was just trial and error. But the big thing is when springtime hit and I posted in buy, sell, trade groups, I didn't realize how much this was going to blow up. I posted in 47, buy sell trade groups. I left for a jewelry show. I thought maybe one or two people will message. My phone was blowing up. I'm listening to the speaker, I'm looking at my phone.
I got up and walked out of the convention. I was like, I don't need to sell jewelry anymore. I'm skipping poop from now on. Exactly. And so I just started responding back to people. And at that time, I was only charging $55 a month flat rate, which if it was four weeks, was 1375, which is no money, no money. But I quickly learned that my prices needed to go up higher. And then for those first time cleans, I said, 50 bucks. Sounds like a good idea.
When I first started, it was just, okay, that sounds like it's a good idea until you look at the numbers and you pay taxes and you're like, okay, I should raise those rates. Yeah. Okay. So first year you're charging? Not very much, which we've all been there, right? We're just trying to get a business started. Get off the ground. So you're at 1375 a visit. If it's the first time, there's way more poop. Just like if you're cutting grass, the grass is higher the first time. So I get that.
So the first time it's more expensive. And how were you charging people monthly or were you charging them each time? Well, it was money. It was loose. I was, however you want to pay me, carry your pigeon check, whatever, just give me Venmo.
And so some people would pay per week. Some people would pay per month, but they wanted to pay afterwards because a lot of the lawn care, they were comparing me to the lawn care industry, and they said, well, most landscapers do all of the work and then they pay at the end. And I just didn't feel comfortable with that. And so I said, if you want to pay for the month, it needs to be prepaid, so you'll pay on the first of every month. And that was difficult.
That was really difficult to hold my ground and to be confident in my business and say, no, we provide a good service. We're reliable, so I want to charge ahead of time. And it didn't happen right away. It was a slow progression. And so now for the most part, everybody pays at the first of every month. But some people do pay every week once their service is completed and their credit card gets. Charged. And is there a variety of service or is it just one thing,
pick up the poop? Is there anything else? Add-ons, anything else you do? I don't, but you can add sanitation because you can go and sanitize patios, decks, sidewalks, and that's a really good income producing. Opportunity. So what is that? Tell us more about that. So. You have deodorizing or sanitizing because a lot of times when the dogs use the restroom, you'll get an odor that isn't pleasant. And when you have people over,
you don't want to have that smell. So you can go in deodorize, or if a dog had parvo or had some type of fecal disease, we would come in with a sanitary solution and spray down the area to kill that bacteria. You haven't done that yet, but you're working your way towards releasing that service. Is that right? Yeah. I hadn't put together a policy and procedure and put the time into it. I didn't really have the time and I didn't make the time.
But recently I sat down and we come up with a plan, what products we're going to use, why we're going to use them, and educate ourselves because our customers, they're going to want to know why is this product going to work better than this other product? And we want to be able to tell them why. Yeah. So how many houses or homes I should say, do you go to each week and then each month roughly. As a company or per technician? Per technician.
Per technician. One. Scooper can usually do about 150 houses a week, and that's a good full solid week. And we're productive. Our route density is really tight and we're making money that way. And what's your average ticket on those? Right now it's 1850 and we're trying to get it up to $20 because the goal is to make $60 an hour with our business. And obviously the bigger the yard, the more you charge. Yes, I assume.
How do you bid that? Do you bid online? How do you bid people over the phone? I. Have a tier. I want to know how many dogs you have, and I want to know the size of the yard. Is it one eighth of an acre or less? One quarter, one half or larger. And so that's how my price tier is. It's how many dogs versus the size. And then I have the equation that comes up with the price. And so someone calls you, they have three dogs, you price it all out and all that kind of stuff.
Do you do any commercial clients? I do. I have a couple HOAs. That's your homeowner's association. If the homeowner's association is paying you, they're considered the commercial account and we'll come in either we'll scoop the common areas where the dogs go to the bathroom or dog waste stations. Those are your green stations that you see at parks along walking trails. And we would sanitize those. We would change out the little bags and then the trash reciprocal at the base.
If you could have a perfect business, would it be all residential? All commercial? What's your favorite or what's best for you? Commercial is money. If you want to make money, money. Commercial is where it's at. It's hard to get into it, but once you get into it, the property managers talk, but dealing with commercial comes with its own issues. They don't pay you right away. It's either a net 30 or net 60. They're going to want to lock you into a contract.
So you have to be able to negotiate that. You have to make sure that you have the proper insurance. As for residential, we love seeing the dogs. We love the homeowners. So if I could have a good blend, I would like to have probably 70% commercial and 30% residential. And because the residential helps float the cashflow, I mean, if you have 50% of your business is residential, you're getting paid every single time, you'll be fine. But if you were to go all commercial,
there would be a gap there in the net 30 you'd have to bridge. But yeah, I do like the 30 70 model for sure. So I have a lawn care business. My technicians don't like homes that have dogs for obvious reasons because they step in it and it's gross and all that kind of stuff. And so have you gone down the road of, I don't know, pairing up with lawn care, mowing companies, partnering with them, even just a referral program? Is there anything there?
My landscapers that are listening to this, don't get upset with me. I love you guys and I do enjoy working with the landscapers. Here is the issue. They have their route, they do their stuff the way that they do it, and I as well, so if they have a customer that's on a Thursday and they want to be scooped on a Wednesday, but I service that customer in my area on Friday, there's a discrepancy. And so the landscapers that I do work with are flexible.
They're like, I don't care if it's picked up two days before, three days before, I just need it maintenance. Those are the landscapers that I definitely can work with. So if somebody's listening to this and you want to get in a relationship, you just have to really work out those details about the scheduling and what works for you guys. Okay. You said your average ticket is by $18 visit, so you're doing one, you have one full-time technician and you also Right.
One full-time, and then I have one on Wednesdays and then me, I, I'm work Mondays and Tuesdays. You're scooping two days a week, but then you're working all I'm. Scooping Monday and Tuesday. Okay. So generally speaking, based on these numbers, I mean, a technician can do about 10 to $12,000 a month in scooping by themselves with no heavy equipment, no big trailers, not a whole lot of anything besides some, what do you need? Bags.
You need a yellow gloves, a yellow quickie, dust pan. It's like a dozer bucket. You need a child's garden rake or a rake that suits your height and then a 13 gallon trash bag because that is the perfect bag that fits into that bucket. And you need your sanitation. You have to sanitize. If you can't purchase the 2 56 top performance cleaner,
it's too expensive bleach. That works well too, but that doesn't have a super long stability shelf life, so you have to make sure that you keep making that solution because you cannot transmit bacteria from one home to another. You just can't. Where's all the poop go? Well, you can either haul it away with you, which then you're considered full service, or you can double bag it and put it in the homeowner's trash can.
And that's what I do now, because I ran into a situation where I loaded a dumpster down way too much and we had to go in there and pull the bags out. No, my husband, my husband went in there and did it, and he's still married to me. That's true love right there. Right, right. He didn't kick me to the curb, but he said never again that you can't do that anymore. Never. So it sounds better anyways. I mean, keeping it on site, anytime you start hauling things, it costs more.
And so it's better just to keep it on site. It does, and it adds money to the hauling costs than the drive time and then sending your technician that non-billable time. So it adds to payroll, it adds to everything. And clients don't care if it's double bagged, as long as it's not stinking. If that's built into the cake, then that's just how you do things around here. Then I'm sure you lose very few people because you want to leave it
on site. I'm. Guessing. I feel like if the homeowner's really upset about a stinky trash can, maybe you can upsell with a trash can deodorizer. There's. Always options there. What. Kind of training goes into it? Because with a lot of companies, pretty much every industry, there's a callback issue, right? Like 5%, 10%, whatever. You have a callback. Someone made a mistake in your industry with poop scooping. What gets you a callback.
A missed pile? Usually, or unfortunately, and I can't say this hasn't happened to us, a gate that's been left open and that is huge. I had to do a termination because of that, but I was able to put a job form into jobber. So now it triggers us to make sure to take a picture of the gate before we close our job out. So that is prevented. But the main issue is just, yeah, a missed pile here and there, missing a flower bed because normally they don't go to the bathroom in the flower bed. That's.
Right. Yeah. Not all backyards are created equal. Some are more complex and. The different hot zones. That's right. Okay. Well, let's take a quick break and talk about jobber. Erica, you use jobber and you use the automatic invoicing. Is that right? Oh, absolutely. Everything's automated because I'm a little wild. I'm a little crazy. I'm a little forgetful. And so jobbers literally my best friend. I have everything automated.
Yesterday while I was here hanging out, customers were getting billed because their cars were getting charged on the first of the month, and that has been a huge game changer because I'm not having to chase around money. I'm not having to say, Hey, where's the check? Because as you know, when the check's in the mail, it's not coming. It's not coming. I used to sit in a car on road trips and just charge every invoice hundreds and
hundreds every month. It was automatic, but it wasn't automatic yet. When automatic invoicing came out of the jobber, it revolutionized my business. That sounded painful. It was. Sorry. I'm sorry you had to relive that. Appreciate it's. Over Now. If you want to give jobber a try for automatic invoicing and all the other features that come with jobber, you should go to jobber.com/podcast deal for an exclusive discount for new customers. Do you guys use company cam? No. You know what it.
Is? I've heard of it. I don't use, so. Company CAM is a software. That's amazing. And what it does is it basically, because a lot of times you tell your technicians, take a picture of that, take a photo of that, it's on their iPhone. They text you,
then they're off work, they forget. And all the, so company cam, all the photos that you take in company cam are in company cam, they're not on your phone, and they immediately upload the cloud so the office can see them instantaneously, and then you can forward it to the client. The reason I bring that up is because you could require them to take a photo of the gate closed. That's what we do.
If the client calls you and says the gate was open and you can actually send them that photo with a timestamp, and so actually it was closed when we were there. The UBS guy must have opened it or somebody else. I love company Cam. It's totally changed my business. So how do you hire employees and then also how do you retain them? Tell us about that, the training process. How's all that look?
Well, I'll be really transparent. I'm struggling with hiring right now, so I'm in the process of that, but the rockstar that I did hire, I was looking for somebody that was reliable, somebody that had good energy with this position. You can't have somebody that's ior. They can't be slow moving because money, we got to move fast, but we have to be efficient. We have to be detail oriented. So that's what I look for.
I look for somebody that has a good personality that can talk to customers and somebody that's about getting work done. And so that's what I've really been focusing on recently. I'm curious, earlier you said that you were doing three times a week, but then you just couldn't handle that. In a perfect world, if you had the staff to do it is three times a week best? It depends on how many dogs and the size of yard. Say if you have three dogs and you have a smaller yard like that one eighth of
an acre. Yes, absolutely. Three times a week would be perfect. If you have kids and you have a pool and you like to entertain, because when you have that many dogs and the yard's that tiny, what's going on back there? Yeah, it's not pleasant for the pups. What is your messaging like? I've been your website. It's a beautiful website by the way. Thank you. It's very well branded and it's very strong. What is your ultimate message to people who are checking out your
company? What's the thing that really gets them to jump on board with you? What would you say? What's the messaging. That if you don't want to scoop the dog poop, you don't have to because we can take care of it for you. We don't like to judge. I don't care if you are hurt, if you don't feel like it. People want to consider you lazy. We get that a lot. I can't believe people are so lazy to pay, and so I have fun with it. I go back and forth with people in the comments,
and I think that attracts people too. They see my humor around it. I don't get defensive. I don't get nasty. I have fun. I'm just like, I'm surprised you had enough time to message this when you had to go hunt your own dinner and build your own house, and did you build your own car and grow your own grass? All of that. So I do stuff like that, but that's just my main messaging is if you want it, here it is. Yeah, we do it for you so you don't have to. Yeah.
Do you find that clients are doing it themselves or are they really just letting poop just pile up in their yard? Oh, it depends. It depends on the area. It depends on the people. And some people, they get overwhelmed, especially with that spring rush that happens. They go out there and they start it, and then I start hammering on social media. You don't have to scoop the poos.
We can come and a lot of times we'll get calls from people that started doing their yard and they gave up. They're like, I can't do this. And so they bring us in. I'm like, don't worry. And that's another thing is people, it's very intimate. It's a very intimate service to tell somebody that you haven't scooped dog waste in six months, eight months. It's embarrassing. It's. Embarrassing. It's a little shameful. It is for them at least. And.
So I think with me coming in and talking to them and talking them off the ledge and just letting them know, we understand. We're here to take care of it. We are the professionals. It gives them that peace of mind and then they're, they're not embarrassed anymore. And so that's what we really focus on. I make sure to tell my technicians when we're in that backyard, even if it is absolutely horrendous, you will never say anything about it being bad. You say, oh, it's okay.
We'll take care of it. You get to your truck, then you can talk all the crap you want. I'm never in that backyard because we don't want them to be embarrassed. I mean, it's like house cleaning. So many people don't pull the trigger on house cleaning, embarrassed. Their house is dirty. And so I'm curious, do you ever scoop on Saturdays? If there's a weather day, a rain day, we get pushed back.
Or if it's a spring rush or something is really intense is going on, we will work on the weekends, but we really try to operate Monday through Thursday and then keep Friday as an overflow day. Yeah, I do that too. I would encourage you if you're having a hard time hiring people, just because you don't want to work on Saturday, I've learned this too, doesn't mean someone else doesn't want to. And so you might be able to find a part-time person who just bangs it out on
Saturdays. Clients are home, they're happy, it's sunny. They're playing basketball in the cul-de-sac. You might find that Saturdays are your best days for five star reviews and tips, all that kind of stuff. You guys get a lot of tips. Yes. Okay. Crystal gets the most tips when I'm going through her tips and calculating them. I'm like, dang, crystal, they love. You. That's great. It is really good. But can I circle back to the Saturdays?
Yeah. A lot of times we don't want to scoop on the weekends or on holidays because kids are home and kids will open up doors. They want to say hi and let the dogs out, and not all dogs are friendly. And the one time that I was was actually bit on a Saturday because a toddler opened up that back patio, your door, it'll never do Saturdays again, I I'm traumatized for life. That's kind of stuff that you have to be cautious of the doors, the kids.
That's why we send the A message when we're on our way because some dogs could just nip you a little bit and then another dog could really, really do some damage. It's dangerous. Absolutely. I want to change topics a little bit in terms of our listeners. Our listeners. There might be some people out there who are thinking about starting a poop given business after hearing this interview, if they lawn care or house cleaning,
specifically interior cleaning. Have you found, what's your experience with this of making this an add-on service of another company? Do you think that would work? It could landscapers add this onto their services because it's a pain point for them. They arrive, they go to mow and it's nasty. It's all over the place and their mowers are going through it. And a lot of the landscapers, they were just picking it up and not charging well, then they heard my podcast or social media, they're like,
we can charge for this. Absolutely, you can charge for it. So you're already at the property, so you don't have to charge the bku bucks, but you could add another 10 or 15 bucks onto your mowing a client. Yeah, I like that a lot. So they were to do that. You went through earlier the supply list. Anything else that they would need? How much does it cost to get started? Could you get started for a thousand bucks? Yep. That's what I had. I had a thousand dollars. I went and got, what is it?
A-D-B-A-I would suggest getting an LLC. I have that now. So get that, and then you just get your supplies. And then because I was hauling the waste away, I had to put a hitch on the back of my 2000 Chevy Cobalt. Love that. Yes. Then I put a cargo trailer on the back of her and I was able to get everything started with business cards. Bleach, a very poorly done website in the beginning for all under a thousand dollars.
But realistically, if you just want the bucket, the rake, I would say you'd be able to get away with this for under 200 bucks. If someone's out there thinking about starting a business, what would you tell them? What should they do? First, second, and third? Pick a good business name. Try not to have your name in it, telling you with it being creep, kreins, poop, and scoop in Every time a complaint comes in or an issue,
not only is it my business, but it's my last name. It's so personal. I'm like, oh, it's so bad. So I would suggest really think about your name, think about the scalability of it, and then make sure when you go online, make sure, obviously the name's available for your LLC and then all of the social media platforms like your TikTok, your Instagram, your Facebook. You definitely want to be on Facebook where your customers are at the older generation that have the extra money,
that's where they're hanging out all the time. So that would be the first thing. Get your business going, and then just get your supplies and don't be scared to tell everybody and anybody that will listen about your business and just have fun with it. Have fun. It's a crappy business, but it's a fun business. It is a fun business, and I think that one thing that comes to my mind is it's such high volume. There's low volume and there's high volume, and then there's really high volume,
which is yours. You could dominate the reviews on Google. You could have so many reviews because you have so many clients. If someone's power washing houses, they're doing three or four a day, you are doing 20 to 30 a day. That is a lot of opportunity for five star reviews and just dominating the reputation online. So I love that approach. So Erica, you said that you probably wouldn't rename it the way you did it, the first one because it has your name in it. Would you still name it that way?
I, I'm torn. I'm thinking about it. I've actually been thinking about it or a rebrand. I was going to get my truck wrapped hot pink. I want all my vehicles to be hot pink. But when they sent me the rendering for the same wrap that a partial wrap I had on the car, I said, it's not right. Absolutely not. So it's getting me thinking that maybe I need to either do a different name or really play on the kreins and then have a really powerful tagline. Yeah.
Gotcha. I don't know, I'm still kind of torn. Up in the air a little bit on that. I. Am a little bit up in the air. What. Would you say are some mistakes that you made in the last five years that people could avoid?
Letting my emotions get to me because I am an emotional person and the self doubt creeps in. The imposter syndrome creeps in, and the emotional roller coaster that an entrepreneur goes through, it's one of the wildest rides, and you won't understand that unless you're an entrepreneur.
And so surrounding yourself with people that get it, because when people don't, they work their nine to five, they come home and they shut it down, but we're all over the place and having a good support system around you to help control those emotions so you can just stay focused and stick to the plan and make sure you have a plan. Okay, have a business plan and stick to that.
So kind of all goes together because when the emotions get a little wild and you're feeling kind of down on yourself, you just resort back to the plan. It's like, it's fine. It's cool. We're just going to work it. So what's next for creepin poop and scooping? What's the next stage of business for you?
I'm going to learn how to hire. I'm going to get this down, and I'm working on the policies and procedures and getting everything that's in my brain on paper, black and white, and I've realized I can't do it on my own. I have to reach out to people to help pull that out of me. So I'm hiring that out. I've spent the last year and a half, two years trying to do it myself, and it's not good. Yeah. Yeah. You need help. You need a team, and you need to grow this thing.
This is a great business. And more clients need more creeping, pooping, scooping at your. House. There's so much opportunity. There's the 2020, as we know. We know what happened in 2020. A lot of people bought dogs, so the pedic economy just has exploded. Oh. Interesting. Erica, this is great. I do want to, as we wrap up, I want to hammer home because I still have some questions about it.
How do you price the first visit? I imagine, like you said, it could be been eight months since it was last scooped dive into, especially for our listeners who are looking to start this kind of business, how do you price that first visit? Okay. Now it's not standardized pricing across the board. This is just how I like to do it in the industry. People like to make 60 bucks an hour. That's the goal. $60 per man hour.
And so if you go into a backyard that has, it's one eighth of an acre or less, I know that typically that property should not take me more than an hour. Even if it is full to the max, we could just rake that property up. Oh, so you're raking. I was thinking you were scooping using the thing to scoop. Oh. No. If it's. A huge sea of poop, then you can rake it. It makes perfect sense. Yeah. We use children's garden rakes because the scoopers, that's makes wild.
Yeah, that's amateur stuff. We're professionals over here. We have the rake, we have the bucket, but if it's a really bad yard, we could just use a big rake, rake it up, put it in the trash bags. It's not a problem. And so with that in mind, I want to make at least 60 bucks an hour. So I'm thinking to myself, each one of these first time visits are going to take me at least an hour, but I don't want to just charge 60 bucks. I want them to start at 90. So I add an additional $30 onto it,
like another half an hour. And so that's where my prices are starting, and then they go up from there. Then the larger yards, if you're getting into a quarter acre, a half acre, then we're going into $200, $300, $400 for these cleans. Just because the sheer size, because not only are we walking the property once for the first visit, we're not walking it twice, but a lot of times we're walking it three times to make sure that that property is thoroughly cleaned for that first visit.
So pretty much maybe every single one new client is an in-person. You go to the home and you look, you don't even try to bid a first time cleaning over the phone? No, I do. Oh, you do? I do. Yeah. If they answer it, if they say, my yard is one eighth of an acre or less cool. They have two dogs and it's been, I have tears. Is it freshly scooped, which no yard's freshly scooped, like how we scoop it.
So there's automatically a $20 onboarding fee added onto what their first visit would be, and then it has it been a month, two months, five months plus. And so that kind of gauges where our trigger is going to be and where we're going to start with our pricing. So if somebody says it's been a month, two dogs standards size yard, that's going to be $110 for us to come. I know that we should be able to get that done in under an hour. Now.
Everyone listening is thinking this. I'm a man of the people. So I'm going to ask them, what happens if they tell you it's been a month and it's been a year, what do you do then? Or what does your technician do? The technician will call me or text me and say, Hey, listen, this is way worse than we anticipated. So if we exceed that hour, I make the phone call, I say, Hey, I don't know Miss Susie, or whatever your name is. I have Crystal in the backyard. We're scooping,
and we've already exceeded the time allowed for this scoop. On your intake form, it said that it's been a month, but it's clearly been a lot longer. We've pulled out 17 buckets already. At this point, in order to move forward, we're going to have to increase the price to set price. So from my brain, so you could charge per bucket. You. Could if you. Wanted to. People do people charge per bucket. People charge. Why don't. You?
Because I don't want somebody out there staring at me watching me fill that bucket up. These buckets get very heavy, and so sometimes I'm not filling up a bucket all the way. I'm filling up halfway. Because you can get tendonitis in your wrist, you can blow out your shoulder. This is. A five gallon bucket. Yes. Okay. And it's heavy. And so yeah, I just don't want people to watch me. I just want to go back there. I want to do my thing.
But people definitely do that. They have a ratio, like first bucket is $45, and each additional bucket after that is 20 or $25. I. Love that. So in theory, you could get a two gallon bucket and fill that up. Yeah, totally. There's options. It's not. Guys. That's really useful. Okay. Interesting. That happens. People say, and they might not even do it on purpose. Oh, it's been a couple months. It's been three years. Because they don't realize it's obvious.
And there's poop everywhere. Yeah. Got it. Okay, so let's summarize this in three actionable steps. Number one, if you start out, make sure your pricing is right. It might be low in the beginning to get customers, but then quickly raise it up to an adequate, proper price and price base on number of dogs and size and all that kind of stuff. Number two is you're selling convenience. People are willing to pay for this. It does not have to be a freebie. It doesn't have to be this cheap thing.
It can be an appropriately priced service, just like anything else. Number three is upsell sanitation and upsell deodorization. Is that right? Yes. If you want to deodorize or sanitize the actual property, that's an upsell. We sanitize our equipment every single time, and that's included in the price. That's very. Important. That's a must have, but in terms of cleaning their surfaces, that could be an upsell. Yes. Got it. Erica,
thanks so much for being on the podcast. Really appreciate it. That was great. I appreciate you talking a little crap with me. Anytime. So how can our listeners learn more about you? Either Scoop podcast or cruin scooping, scoop in, just type that in and lots of stuff will pop up. And that's a weekly podcast? It's a weekly. I did Monday today. Oh my goodness. 52 episodes and 52 weeks. Wow. Good for you. That's awesome. Thank you.
I know that a lot of people are getting a lot of that out of that podcast, and I love your branding. I love your website. It's beautiful. It's well done. It really gets the message across. You made a nasty thing cute, and that's hard to do. So well done. Thank you. I'm so thankful to our listeners. We're tuning in today. I hope that you heard something that makes your business more profitable and more efficient. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
You can find me@adamsylvester.com. Remember, your team and your clients deserve your very best, so go give it to 'em. We'll see you next week.