Retail Worker Cleans Up With Litter-Picking Business

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Welcome to a brand new week. What's up? My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're here. Excited to bring you a whole new set of stories of real people out there making something pretty cool. These are real people with real jobs and real struggles, real challenges, but also real dreams, real goals, real desire to make something for themselves, to be more in charge of their lives, to have more freedom and opportunity and empowerment in general, all good things there.

Now, this one's really fun today because sometimes the simplest ideas are the most profitable. As much as I love technology, I always love telling you about someone who's invented the latest app or face recognition device or driverless car, you know, whatever it is. It's also interesting to look at something that at a fundamental level is pretty basic. So that's what we're going to talk about today. But listen, if I said, like, hey, here's a story of someone who picks up litter from parking lots, you might not be interested.

I mean, you might, but you know, to be fair, you might not. Another principle of the show is that we try to show our listeners how they can create assets for themselves in the new economy. Not just work harder for small amounts of money, not just, you know, get a second job or whatever. But, and here's the twist. What if I said that this picking up litter from parking lots side hustle now brings in a six figure income for its founder.

He's been doing it for a long, long time. You'll hear the story. And he now has multiple employees who do most of the actual picking up of litter. Gotta say this is the most interesting cleanup story I've ever worked on before. It is a highly profitable parking lot cleaning business.

In fact, he calls it America's simplest business. So as always, I appreciate our sponsors. They allow the show to be completely free to you. So we always give them a little shout out at the top of the show and then right before the story. Here's today's message.

And then on with the show. [Music]

The year was 1981 and Brian Winch was stuck in a dead end job. He would wake up, shower and drag himself off for yet another shift in his local sporting goods store. Brian knew he didn't want this to be his life forever. So he began looking for an escape route.

Back then, however, he had little in the way of money, education or specialized skills. There was nothing that screamed a successful business person on his resume. So he narrowed his search down to opportunities where he could get his hands dirty and work up a sweat. He would come out from work each day and brainstorm lots of different ideas and eventually settled on one that was inspired by his late father. You see, Brian's dad was one of America's original side hustlers.

A few days a week, he would get up early before work and head out to sweep local parking lots. Occasionally, Brian would tag along to help out and he remembered it as being as easy as going for a brisk walk. So he figured he'd give it a try. Now this started way back in the land before time, also known as before the internet. So there was no way to Google shopping malls near me or parking lots near me or whatever you're looking for to find a list of potential clients.

Instead, he did what everybody in the 1980s had to do to find local businesses. He reached for the yellow pages. If you don't know what the yellow pages are, just ask an old person like myself, basically like a directory of all kinds of businesses and people. I think they actually still print it, which is a huge waste because nobody uses it, but apparently some businesses are still paying to advertise in it. So anyway, back to 1981.

Brian began by looking up property management companies to get a list of prospective clients. He did this in a way that didn't involve pitching his services, but rather focused on gathering information. He armed himself with a list of questions like, do you manage commercial properties? Do you find it difficult to keep them clean? And if so, would you like to learn how to have a cleaner parking lot for less money?

He repeated this process a number of times and within a couple of days landed his first three contracts. Brian says it doesn't hurt to have a little elevator pitch planned out if you want to try it yourself, but focusing on information and the business's needs is more important. With his contracts ready to go, he took $200 in cash that he'd saved from his day job and invested it into some tools. He filled his car with a tank of gas, bought a broom and a litter collection tool. Other than that, all he needed was a jacket in case it got cold.

When it came to setting prices, Brian took his dad's lead. Parking lots can be tricky because there are a wide range of factors that need to be considered. For example, professional properties like doctor's offices generate a lot less trash than shopping malls with fast food restaurants. So depending on the needs of the property, Brian began charging a variable rate of between $30 and $50 an hour. Due to the level of service each building needs, he found it was possible to have only a small number of clients and yet still make a good income.

Many properties need servicing anywhere from three to five to even seven days a week. So before long, he was able to fill his schedule without needing to prospect for lots of new clients. He expected this to become a part-time, one-man band kind of side hustle, but it quickly took on a life of its own. Brian started to receive requests and client referrals for him to expand until he had so much work that he couldn't handle it on his own even after quitting his day job. He then brought his brothers on board and gave the company an official name, CleanLots.

And whenever the workload got too much, Brian would just hire another person. Sometimes it would be for only cleaning one parking lot a week. Sometimes it would be a full weekend of sweeping. But this is how the business grew, one parking lot, one employee at a time. Now, Brian has been successfully running this business since 1981 and now earns a full-time income of over six figures a year with annual contracts of around $650,000.

Many of the people who work for his company earn up to $4,000 a month for part-time work. Despite doing the job for so long, Brian says he's never lost his love for it. He enjoys being outside, seeing the direct impact of his work and contributing to a litter-free society, or at least a litter-free parking lot, three, five, or seven days a week. His advice is that it's better to become the best at one thing than a jack-of-all-trades doing odd jobs to make people happy. In his case, he once lost a lot of time and money, trying to expand into grass cutting and snow removal, two things that seem kind of logical, but he really should have focused on getting more parking lot clients.

Recently, he's been teaching people how to start their own CleanLot-style business, and he's even written a book on it. He wants to continue to pass on the model of what he calls America's simplest business. It's also a business you could really clean up with. [Music]

Well, I did a little research, and it turns out that the biggest clients of these services are shopping malls or other large retail centers. So doctor's offices and so on are also clients, but the biggest clients are those places that have a lot of real estate, and they tend to be massive if you consider the entire parking lot of your typical suburban shopping mall, and almost all those places contract out the cleaning service.

I think what was key here is when Brian was getting started pitching those companies, the managers, the real estate brokers or whoever's in charge of that stuff, he really focused on the benefit of cleaner parking lots. And for them, that's valuable, especially if it's a turnkey service and he can just say, "Okay, X number of days a week, "your parking lot's gonna be clean, "and I'll send you a bill at the end of the month," or whatever. I also really like what he said about how you should be the best at something. I'm not always so good at this myself. I like to do a lot of different things.

I think that's okay for some of us, but I also really respect the power of focus, people who are like, "Nope, this is my thing." And you would think in this story perhaps that going from parking lot cleanup to snow removal or grass cutting is logical. I mean, it seems like a logical thing, right? But Brian discovered that it was a mistake. So maybe the lesson there is to focus on that core competency, whatever that is for you. Let this be a lesson to you as well.

If you think you don't have a lot of skills or education or experience, you know, this guy started with cleaning parking lots, and he does it for years and builds a business, hires employees, et cetera, now making this very good living from it. And he even wrote a book about it. How about that? A whole book on how to start your own parking lot cleaning business. There is something out there for everyone.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/870. 870, we're gonna link up his project, everything about clean lots, anything else that I mentioned in the episode, and much more is on the way. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.