In this motivational episode, William Milliken, President of Swoop Scoop, shares how to scale service businesses and overcome mindset barriers to hiring. If you struggle with doing everything alone and fearing your first hires, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to start taking action without waiting for perfection

- Why mindset blocks prevent scaling beyond solo operations

- What simple systems turn a simple service into millions

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 3 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

William Milliken is the Founder of Swoop Scoop, a multi-million-dollar dog waste removal company that has transformed a simple chore into a booming business serving thousands across multiple states. With a sharp digital marketing background, he’s built several 7-figure home service companies and has become a go-to expert in creating profitable, recession-proof businesses. As the founder of the Poop Scoop Millionaire community, he’s empowered hundreds of entrepreneurs to launch successful dog waste removal businesses. William shares powerful strategies for scaling businesses, digital marketing, and unlocking financial freedom in unexpected industries.

Want to learn more about William Milliken's work at Swoop Scoop? Check out his website at https://swoopscoop.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as

founder, I'm your host, as always, Scott Ritzheimer, and

today we're talking to founders and those even thinking about

getting into the founder game, who know that there's this

uncomfortable milestone that we all have to face. It's that

point where you've got customers, that's a good thing.

You've got revenue, that's a good thing, but you physically

can't do it all yourself anymore, and you're staring at

it for the first time, thinking, we need real hires. We need

people who can help. Why in the world would anyone want to work

for me? Because you realize you're competing against the big

guys, right? The AmEx, the Amazons of the world. FedEx is a

world of the world, the landscaper down the street of

the world, especially those who are in the service business. And

it's a real challenge. And what I have found is that while there

are some realities to that challenge, a very significant

portion of it is between your two ears. So we're gonna figure

out how to fix that. We're not gonna do it by ourselves,

because today, we have the one and only William Milliken, who

is the founder of Swoop Scoop, a multi million dollar dog waste

removal company that's transformed a very simple chore

into a booming business serving 1000s across multiple states,

with a sharp digital marketing background, he has built several

seven figure home service companies and has become a go to

expert in creating profitable, recession proof businesses. As

the founder of poop scoop millionaire community, he's

empowered hundreds of entrepreneurs to launch

successful dog waste removal businesses. William shares

powerful strategies for scaling businesses digital marketing and

unlocking financial freedom in unexpected industries. To say

the least, William, welcome to the show. So glad you're here.

This is easily the most interesting business idea that's

come across our desk as we're looking at different guests to

have on. And what I love about it is you have literally made

millions of dollars getting people to pick up who like,

literally in an industry that other folks wouldn't touch. And

from the looks of it, you guys are doing a fantastic job with

that. And again, it really goes to the heart of this issue in

the small business world, of why in the world would folks come

and work from us? So how have you done it? How have you gotten

great folks to come and work for you all these years?

Yeah, definitely, it's been an

evolution from when we first started. For sure, I'd say some

of the big things that we like to do is, as you were

mentioning, comparing yourself to the big guys. So first and

foremost, we like to be able to pay a little bit above market.

So we'll go and see what the local landscapers are and Amazon

and FedEx and all those types of places. We generally try to pay

people just a couple dollars an hour, more than that, and then

beyond that. It's about having a good culture, having good work

life balance for people. So we provide benefits. We also allow

people to come in and work. Basically, they can pick their

own schedule, as long as they get their routes done, which is

a benefit of this business. So we're able to offer a lot of

flexibility there as well, which I think goes a long way. And

this industry too, as you mentioned, not a lot of people

have heard about it before, so it's kind of novel. Has the

opportunity to go viral, not only for getting customers, but

for people that want to work here too, because they just want

to go outside, they want to spend time with dogs. So I think

a lot of those things kind of play into how we've been able to

ramp that up as we've grown

Yeah, so starting off with kind of the

elephant the room in that statement is we find out what

the average is, and then we pay a couple dollars more an hour.

How do you make that possible? Someone who, who's sitting there

again, someone in similar shoes to where you were years ago?

Now? How? Let me actually start with this seemingly basic

question. But how do you know? How do you know what other folks

are are offering nearby?

Yeah, I mean, you can just go on some of the

job boards. You can go on Indeed, a lot of places will be

posting those, those prices, and if they're not, you're done,

typically going to be more competitive. You're going to get

more applications if you actually tell people what you're

paying versus some of the competitors. So that's probably

the first place that I would go. Place that I would go to start.

And then just as you're interviewing too, you can get

intel, and you can get information from people, kind of

as you go.

Yeah. And then how did you guys figure out a

way of paying more? What was the what's the backstory there?

Yeah. So for me, personally, my kind of

philosophy in businesses, I don't I want as little problems

as possible. So I want to be able to get the best people on

my team as possible. So it's kind of the whole philosophy,

and then it's just kind of reverse engineering the union

economics of your business, right? So you have to have high

enough margins to be able to do that. You have to have good

enough systems to be able to do that. And that's kind of how we

reverse engineered the business, just to make sure that we could

actually afford that. So I didn't have all those issues,

because I don't want people coming in and out of the

business all the time. It creates quite a bit of issues

and costs more money than I'd like to pay.

Yeah, it's interesting, because those

issues are a lot harder to quantify than the dollar an hour

that you see on the job ad or the number and. Yeah, the pay

stub. How did you guys get a sense of how much that was worth

to you?

Well, I think at the beginning, as I

mentioned, I don't, I don't want any issues personally, so I try

to be as hands off as possible with the business. So I'm

willing to take a little bit less personally, I guess, I

guess, to make that happen, but really it's just putting putting

it out there, putting a different price, putting a

different offer out to the marketplace, and then seeing

what kind of candidates you're able to get from that. So with

the kind of current flow that we have right now, every time we

post a job ad, we have over 100 people applying professional

Cooper scooper, which is great, and we'll literally filter

through 125 different resumes before we actually make one or

two hires, just being very selective about what we're able

to bring on now too, has been very beneficial.

Yeah, it's fascinating. It's interesting

because it sounds obvious when you say it, but for so many

people, the thought process is the opposite. The thought

process is like, I got into this to make money. Why would I give

it to everybody else? And, and I think again, that's really at

the heart of the problem, in that there's some obvious

limitations to that and and the trade offs aren't as clear in

that direction as they are in the opposite and so the Yeah,

I'm trying to figure out how I want to wear this next question.

But when let me just switch gears a little bit, I've been

wanting to get this. I'm putting off those to see if I can go any

longer, if I can. So you talked about paying above the average

wage, and then the other thing that you talked about is

culture, and that's interesting to me, especially in an

environment where folks at their own hours don't work their own

routes, they're going to spend the majority of their time out,

most of it even alone. How do you guys achieve culture in an

environment like that?

Yeah, so there's a couple of things we

do. One big thing that we've done that's helped not only with

culture but hiring is we have a use a platform called School,

which is basically an online community platform. So we have

all our employees there, and not only can they interact with each

other, they're able to talk to each other, they're able to

upload pictures of like cute dogs and stuff they saw that

day. We also have full training for every single position within

the company, so whether you're Cooper scooper, marketing

manager, office manager, everything's right there in that

same hub. That's been a pretty big unlock for us, especially

when we're onboarding as many new employees as we are, they're

able to just go through the training, it's pretty seamless,

and then they're able to kind of integrate into the community in

online way. Then we also will do events, we'll do competitions,

different things like that, and then also having, like, a clear

ascension route for people to come in as super scoopers if

they want to become a supervisor, we call it as a next

step or area manager. So we have, we have a lot of

opportunity also,

I love that. What What role do you think your

selectiveness and hiring has attributed to that culture?

Yeah, I think it's been, it's been totally

key, especially in the service based industry, right? You have

to make sure you have good customer service. You got to

make sure that you're getting good reviews and reducing

turnover, making sure you're hiring high quality people,

people that can pass a background check, people that

you're not afraid to send out into your customers backyard. I

mean, that's that's going to be totally key if you want to

scale, scale any business beyond yourself, I would say.

Yeah, so I want to shift our focus back to

the founder themselves. We talked about the mindset that

you shared on valuing, not having problems and paying well

to do that. Now the flip side of that, especially for folks who

are in service businesses that might be a little closer to

their heart, right, something like an accounting professional,

or I remember talking once with a guitar luthier, and so almost

a bit of a craft an artist and piece to it. And part of the

challenge that they find in bringing other people in is that

those other people just are problems. They don't think like

them, they don't act like them. So for someone who who is really

good at the job that they do, and they're trying to reproduce

that success in others, what have you learned as a trick

there?

For us, it's really we've productized our

service, right? So it's not, we're not like attorneys or

anything like that, where we have to come up with strategies

and whatnot. Everything is totally systemized from the way

that you walk your yard and how you clean your equipment in

between each yard, and it's easy to replicate, I guess is what I

think the main key is, it's makes it a lot easier to train

people not doing a bunch of custom services and the custom

products for people. If you could just set your product,

make it kind of cookie cutter, that's going to be a lot easier

for not only scaling your business in general, but also

hiring training, getting people going.

Yeah, one of the things I like about that

sets it up to when you've simplified. That by the

delivery, you can set up really effective processes around that,

right? Yeah. And again, this looks like an area that you guys

have really excelled. But it's one thing to have the systems.

It's another thing for people to actually follow them. How have

you guys succeeded in getting folks to actually follow through

on those systems processes?

Yeah. So, I mean, we really try to track a

lot of those important metrics, right? So we're tracking how

many yards people are doing per hour, tracking that people get

callbacks. We do QA is on everybody. And there's also a

clear line of command. So there's, there's a lot of

oversight to make sure people are doing their jobs the correct

way, which is another expense to the business. As you get bigger,

right? The more people that you hire as you bring on, managers,

directors, etc, definitely shrinks the margin. But without

it, kind of the wheels fall off the bus, so to speak. So it's

definitely something necessary as you continue to grow.

I think one of the challenging things to accept

is that, is that all that management stuff is worth it,

right, especially if you're being selective where you're

hiring the top 1% of the people who who choose. Why is it that

management is still necessary in that in that environment?

I mean, you can only manage so many people,

you can only scoop so many yards. Can only manage so many

people, you can only hire so many people and you only have so

many domains of, I guess, knowledge that you're really

good at. So we're at the point now where we don't even hire

scoopers anymore. We have a Operations Manager. We have

location managers at each location. We have an office

manager who's hired a marketing manager. We got somebody to run

finance. And with those are all the kind of the core functions

of the business, right? I want to have a business anyways that

can technically operate without me, even though I'm still part

of it, trying to grow it. But it's not possible unless you

have those people in those positions that are that are

talented at what they do.

What role does your vision for the company have

in that? Did you have, I mean, did you have an ambition of

going to multiple locations in many states from the very

beginning? How did you know that those investments were going to

pay off?

You know, I'll be on. When we first started

this, this business, I had no idea if it was even going to

work. I was happy to make an extra 1000 bucks a month, kind

of a thing. And as it started to grow, and as we started to get

product market fit and the demand started to increase,

really started to expand the scope of what was going to be

possible. So we're in a good position now where we have a lot

of options. We can keep opening up locations, we can franchise.

Just really looking at, for me, I look at the unit economics and

see what makes the most sense for the company. And over this

last year, kind of my job has been building that

infrastructure, bringing in those leaders for the company,

so we can just start copy pasting, opening new locations,

which we're going to be doing throughout the next few years.

Yeah, I love that. So William, there's this

question that I have for you asked all my guests. I'm

interested to see what you have to say, both as someone who

helps founders and entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs and someone

who's still very much in the game themselves. What would you

say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?

What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening

today knew?

The biggest secret I wish wasn't a secret at

all. I know there's a lot of people that are kind of afraid

to make that first step to get into business. So I would just

say, I mean, the biggest secret, really, is just to get out there

and start doing things, start taking action. It can seem

overwhelming, but it's just things that you got to figure

out one step at a time. If you want to have a better life, you

want to hit financial freedom, you really just got to get out

there and get after it. That's going to be the best way to

actually learn not do things, not make things perfect before

you get started. You don't need to have the perfect logo, you

don't need to have the perfect website, you don't need to have

the perfect marketing plan. You don't even need to have the

perfect plan in general. It's just really going out there

getting started. I say, I would say it's the biggest, biggest

secret to success that I found.

Yeah, so good, doesn't happen if you don't take

the first step. So there are some folks listening that may be

interested in becoming franchise fees or or just learning from

your success. How can they reach out to you? How can they find

more out about the work that you all do?

Yeah, so we're not franchising the business

right now, but if you do want to learn the business, or you do

want to talk to me, we have an online community on that same

platform I talked about school. It's called the poop scoop

millionaire. So we teach people how to get into the industry.

That's pretty much the only place where people can talk to

me. I check my exams every morning, so if you want to talk

to me, that's probably the best way to get a hold of me.

Otherwise, if you want to see our company or anything, check

it out at SwoopScoop.com kind of see what we've been doing over

the years.

Fantastic, fantastic. Well, William, thanks

for being on. Thanks for sharing what you learned. Fascinating

stuff in there. I really appreciate you being here today.

And for those of you watching and listening, you know that

your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as

much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot see

you next time. Take care.