Pick Up Dog Poop And Get Paid For It!

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.

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.

Here’s a typical stop. Unload a long-handled scoop and over-sized hotel lobby dust pan from your vehicle and line the bin with a small plastic garbage sack. Walk to the gate of your customer’s yard, open and begin a deliberate back and forth walking path of the grounds about five feet in width. As you encounter a pile drop the bin behind it, sweep it into the bin with the scoop and move on. Keep up a systematic walk of the yard until you’ve covered it all. It’s as complicated as that!

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.

Time elapsed from arrival to leaving? About 15-20 minutes is all it takes at most stops on average. Some take more, some less.

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.

Some people wouldn’t do this because their pride is too great. But can you buy food with pride? I don’t think you can. We buy our food after we pick up dog poop!