Nydira.com

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 in the world would I want to do a thing like this? Was I forced into it? Was I just so desperate that I’d take any kind of job? No and no to the last two questions. I was intrigued by it, tried it and found I really liked it in a short time span. It’s just has so many things to like about it.

Picking up dog poop is inherently a simple process. Simple concept, simple tools, simple routes, simple collection methods; everything about it is very basic and straight forward. I like that.

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!

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.

Another thing you try to do is organize your stops into a regular route each day with the least amount of distance between them. That way you can maximize your time and do up to 3 stops per hour if they’re close enough together.

It’s kind of an industry standard to charge by the dog per week. Right now we average $16 per stop per week. If you can maximize your routes to be able to do 3 stops per hour, the math says we would be making nearly $50 per hour. Are the lights going on yet?

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.

A lot of other advantages come with this kind of job. You get to be outside, you can set your own hours, you don’t have to come up with a lot of money to start out, you’re not dealing with the public much and maybe we’re just lucky but most of our customers are good pays.

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!