Get Paid To Pick Up Dog Poop!
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.
How did I get into this area you ask? It’s not a long or complicated story. It’s actually a very short explanation. I like it for it’s simplicity.
If there’s a simpler business out there I’d like to know about it. Picking up dog poop is simple any way you look at it. The concept, the tools, the collection methodology, the routing of stops; it just doesn’t get any more basic than this. And that’s what appealed to me most.
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?
When done, take your tools and the product you picked up back to the vehicle. Gather the edges of the small bag in the bin and pull it out. Open a large garbage bag and deposit the small one into it. Put your scoop into a bucket containing about six inches of sanitizer (to clean it between stops), load it into the vehicle with the bin and you’re off to the next stop.
Time elapsed from arrival to leaving? About 15-20 minutes is all it takes at most stops on average. Some take more, some less.
Maximizing your route comes from organizing stops to be as close to one another as possible. If done right you can manage up to 3 stops per hour without too much effort.
Most companies charge by the dog. On our routes, we have averaged about $16 per week per stop so if you can do three stops per hour, you’re getting paid the equivalent of nearly $50 per hour to pick up dog poop! Are you beginning to get a sense of why we do it?
Our routes are not as dense with customers as we’d like yet. We’re still a little too thin in spots. As it is we only average about 1.6 dogs per hour, which is still over $25 per hour. We’re striving to add customers every day to fill in those routes to make it even more efficient.
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!