Archive for the ‘Yard Care’ Category
Pick Up Dog Poop For Profit!
If the title of this article has you chuckling, that’s okay. I pick up dog poop for a living and I’m willing to share some insider secrets about it.
Why did I choose this field of endeavor you ask? Why would any seemingly intelligent, older individual pick up dog poop for a living? The answer may surprise you, because it’s about simplicity.
The whole principle of picking up dog poop is about as simple as you can get. You load a couple simple tools into your vehicle each morning and start out on your pre-planned route of regular stops. It’s somehow very satisfying in its simplicity.
At the first stop you unload your scoop and large dust bin, line the bin with a small plastic garbage bag, go into the back yard and start walking it in an organized way. As you walk you stop to scoop the piles into your bin as you move along. That’s it! Could it be any simpler?
Now all you have to do is load everything back into your vehicle. Grab a large garbage bag, open it and place the small bag from the bin into it. Put your scoop into a bucket containing about six inches of sanitizer so it will be cleaned by your next stop. Load up the bin and you’re gone to the next customer.
The time it takes to complete the process can vary due to the size of the yard and the number of dogs. It averages in our case to between 15 and twenty minutes per stop.
If you get yourself organized you can do up to 3 stops per hour. The key to this is trying to make the stops as close together as possible.
Like most people in the business, we charge by the dog. We now average $16 per stop per week. When we can manage those 3 stops per hour, we are making nearly $50 an hour. Are you starting to get the picture?
Our routes are still a little too spread out so we only average 1.6 stops per hour, but that’s still over $25 per hour! Not bad for unskilled labor and it’s only going to get better as we get more customers to maximize our routes.
Plus the job has so many other perks. You’re your own boss, you set your own hours, there’s almost no investment, you don’t have to deal with the public hardly at all, you get to play with dogs a lot of the time and most customers are happy to pay on time so you’ll come back.
Pride would get in the way for a lot of people considering this kind of work. But does pride pay the bills? Not at our house. Our bills get paid after we pick up dog poop!