How to Validate a Home Service Business Idea in 2025

And Ohio is also interesting because it has three, four, five cities that are like mid size. By mid size I consider to be 2 to 400,000 people. So Columbus is the biggest. And then you've got Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton. Okay, so we are going to be looking at six cities, three within Ohio and three outside of Ohio, but in neighboring ish states and cities of comparable sizes. And, and so we're going to look at Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. All of those have between two and 400,000 people. And then we're going to look at Madison, Wisconsin, Grand Rapids, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Okay. And I'm going to show you all this data and why I thought to pull up this data. So I'm not going to look at the YouTube questions that often because it gets pretty distracting. So I'm just going to roll with it. I'm going to talk a ton and then I'm going to pause, look at questions, answer them as best I can, and then keep going. Okay, so we are trying to validate if, starting from scratch, a dumpster rental business in one of these three Ohio cities is viable. Okay, maybe you live in Cleveland and you want to measure Cincinnati and Toledo. Maybe you're saying, hey, I'm going to move to any of those three cities because I'm going all in on this business and I want to pick the one that's best. This research will fit both of those scenarios and they will fit any state and any home service industry. So just copy and paste. Okay. All right, I'm going to look at some questions real quick and then I will share my screen. All right, here's what we're doing. So here's the poll. That's what I was talking about. Okay, cool. Just for proof, I'm not trying to lead everyone towards dumpster rental. I have no affiliation with any dumpster rental business. I just like every time I tweet about it, people love it and it's hot right now for whatever reason, which probably means it's going to be pretty saturated in a year or two. So I'm going to close that window. I'm going to go to this Google sheet that I have. So this is the Google sheet that I started putting together. And let's go ahead and bold the cities in Ohio. And then the unbold cities are outside of Ohio, but in nearby states. So these are the cities, these are the populations, this is the percentage real estate growth. Now I use ChatGPT for most of this, so I don't know if this is over the last decade. Or what. But I wanted to look at real estate growth because I, in my opinion, that's going to correlate with how well home services businesses do in the area. I also want to look at the economic growth. Now, I could have put all these cities in here and scrape them at once, but I wanted you to see, like, this tedious process. So this is Indiana. We haven't done Indiana yet. Just making sure this is right. All right, so I've got one market. Let's see how many I've done these four, plus the one that I started with. So let's go here. That was the first one. The second one, Toledo. Okay. I think this will be all of them. All right, so now I'm going to sort these by city name just to make sure that I have everything that I want. Okay. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids, Madison, Toledo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids, Madison, Toledo. All right, we've got all six cities here. And then we have a bunch of scrapes that did not have a city. There was just not enough data on Google. And then we have a bunch of, like, outlying suburbs that Google Maps picked up that we can't really account for. Okay. And so we can get as granular as you want, but I don't want this to take six hours. So I'm going to keep this simple. The populations I pulled were only from the actual cities, not from the greater Cincinnati area. So I'm going to keep all the data true. And so I'm going to assume this is an assumption that there is a similar percentage of blank entries on all of these cities. I could be wrong, right? If I were starting a business, I would get much more granular with this. But I'm not. This is for instructional purposes only. And so I'm going to delete all the ones that don't have a city, and I'm going to delete all of the ones outside of the ones that I want. And then I'm going to delete. Well, I'm not going to delete the ones with a phone number, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but I am going to remove this other stuff. So I'm doing plus one space, replace all with nothing, and then I'm going to do the dash, replace all with nothing. Okay, so now the phone numbers are standardized. I want to remove duplicates, but I don't want to remove these. So look at all these duplicates. Okay, but you know what? I don't actually want to remove these for this purpose because this is a multi location business it seems and we want to account for that. Yes. So that's a big player in in Cincinnati. So I want to account for all their businesses. So a lot of times I remove duplicates based on what I'm doing. For this I'm not. So we're going to go here and I don't know what is up with Google sheets lately, but it's has not been letting me paste as values only. All right, so here's our data directly in Google sheets. Okay. So we can do a pivot table. We could get fancy with this. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to simply count by city. So Cincinnati has 17. Okay. And I'm just going to do a quick like a look over. Okay. Like garbage collection. Yeah. They're going to mix in some other random ones, but junk removal. A lot of garbage collection services offer dumpster rentals. So I'm not going to delete any of these. I'm just simply going to put the counts in. So Cincinnati, we've got 17. Cleveland we've got 11. Let's make this easy. 17, 11. Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids. Fort Wayne seven. Grand Rapids. 7774774. 11. All right. Okay, so let's go ahead and get a percentage. Okay. Now this isn't the best percentage, but you can clearly see, okay, these are the cities that are most really saturated. So Cincinnati, if you go to Cincinnati, it is controlled. And I will tell you, I've never done this before. Like I've done this process but I've never done it with dumpster rental in Ohio. And so I'm going to be learning just like you guys. This is actually really fascinating. What is this company again? Rumpke. So Rumpke has a pretty, pretty strong foothold on this market. So Cincinnati has the most and it's also the most saturated. Toledo second most saturated then Madison, Wisconsin. Four companies or. Yeah, geez, four dumpster rental companies. Now keep in mind these are colder cities. You will have to deal with seasonality to some extent. There obviously aren't going to be as many people building or needing dumpsters, but if it's covered with snow outside. But this is fascinating to me already. Right. We're only a few minutes into this, but we. Madison, Wisconsin has a great economy. It's a college town. University of Wisconsin, 12% real estate growth which is the second most of the six cities. 5% economic growth, which is the second most average. Home value highest by far. Crime rate lowest by Far average household income, highest homeownership rate, middle of the pack. And it only has four. So this could be misleading. Okay, so now we're going to go. We're going to pull up Madison, Wisconsin. We could stop this right now. And this is the 80, 20. We'll call it 60, 40. Let's look at Madison. I'm trying to see. So all of these other five examples are going to have their own suburbs. There's nothing over 100,000 people here. So immediately what this is telling me is it's not like a Minneapolis, St. Paul situation where you've got two big cities right next to each other, Dallas, Fort Worth, et cetera. In fact, the biggest suburb is only 36,000, which is a tenth of the population of Madison. Well, an eighth. So this is already really promising. This is looking good for starting a dumpster rental business in Madison, Wisconsin. But we're not done. We got to do more, right? We could unlock something here in 20, 30 minutes that makes us want to steer clear. So we're going. I'm going to show you Google lsa. So if you're unfamiliar with Google lsa, it is their answer to Thumbtack and Angie's List. They want to sell home service leads or any business lead to business owners. And they're doing a good job of it. And the leads are actually really good. We use them for our tree business. So I'm going to do this. I'm going to go. I did a little research this morning on lsa and Dubster rental is not a category. So I'm going to show you this. So you go to Allen, Texas, tree service, show more. And then you go more tree service providers. You got to know where to click. These are LSA listings. That's us. And then here, way down here are organic tree service listings. And so if I go look for dumpster rental, it's not there. Roofing is there. And so I can't really do this LSA research in a very clean way. So we're going to find a workaround. So we are going to say Madison, Wisconsin, dumpster rental. We're going to look at more businesses now. Okay, this is Google lsa. Google guaranteed. But the problem with this view that you're looking at right here, Google will only show a maximum of two LSA listings. But we are learning something here because there's only one company in all of Madison bidding on lsa, because if there were at least two, then it would list right here. This is organic. This is paid, because this is Google Guaranteed. So we're gonna, we're gonna go with this. Okay. And we're gonna add this to our data and we're gonna go LSA Madison one. Okay. Now we're going to say. So now this is sponsored. So Google's confusing because you can do Google Ads. You can do Google lsa, you can do performance ads, you can do search ads. There's six different ways you can promote your home service business on Google. So this is what I'm looking at is most likely just like a Google Ads listing and not LSA because it doesn't say Google guaranteed. Let's try this in a bigger market to see how it looks. All right, so this is exactly what I was talking about. It will only show you a max of two sponsored listings. And so we're going to. We're going to go back here. We're still going to use this. And we're just going to call that one. Then we're going to go. We're going to call that zero because there's none. So let's go back here. It's a little tedious. One. And then Cleveland is zero. So now we still got to do Fort Wayne, Grand Rapids in Cincinnati. Zero. Zero. Zero. Okay. Okay. So LSA in all of these markets, LSA is not. It's just not very strong. And I'm not surprised because LSA is fairly new. They don't have a ton of market share yet, believe it or not, which means it's an arbitrage opportunity for you. I know people that have home service businesses that wholly rely on Google LSA, they'll get a tree bid a tree lead for $50. They close half of them and their average job is $800. So it's basically $100 customer acquisition cost, 50, you know, 50% margins. You're still making about 300 bucks per job. There are people that just bid up all the areas and only rely on Google lsa. So there is an opportunity there, but it doesn't give us a lot for these markets. And we're combining LSA and just normal Google paid ads here. So let's go to thumbtack. So I'm going to open thumbtack. And you want to do this right? Because we're doing research, but we don't want these businesses that we're researching to have to spend money because of our research. So you have to do this the right way. If I were to type in dumpster rental, Cleveland, Ohio, and then go through like the process, it would charge these businesses just for Giving me a quote. A good amount of money, too. Depends on if it's roofing, could be hundreds. If it's a LOCKSMITH, could be 20 bucks. But I have no intent of actually buying from these people, so I don't want them to have to pay money. And so we've got to do this a very specific way. We're going to say, let me do this. Go back to Thumbtack. So this is basically Thumbtack's landing page for their services. Where is dumpster rental? Okay, this is what I was going to do. Okay, let's go. Let's just do all this alphabetically. So let's go to Cincinnati. I'm going to get their zip code. And. So no one's been charged yet. I haven't requested a quote, and I'm only seeing one result. So that's Cleveland. Let's do it here. Two. Oh, no. One in that zip code. Let's just. I'm going to take a look at the zip code, make sure it is populated. Yeah, okay, but. So a lot of this depends on if these guys are bidding in that exact. They could be in the neighboring zip code, but I would think if this is downtown Fort Wayne, then people would be bidding on it, but they're not. So we're going to put a zero here. Grand Rapids, Madison and Toledo. Two. Zero. Two zero one. Okay. All right, now we're going to go to Angie's List, and we're going to copy that zip code again. I'm going to close Thumbtack. And okay, here's what we want to. Okay, we got to do Angie's List differently. So we're already on Cleveland's page. I pulled this up. And we want to see how many are on Angie's List. Now, Angie's List, I'm pretty sure they scrape data from Manta, Google Maps, et cetera. So they will list everyone. And if. And they'll. The people that pay Angie's List for leads, they will put them at the top. But people that they just scrape, they will put them in the back. That way, if someone for some reason goes to the second or third page, clicks on someone, then Angie's List will reach out to that person and say, hey, we've got a job for you. It incentivizes them to sign up for Angie's List. So we're just going to do this. We're going to go to the bottom of this. We want to go to the landing page for dumpster rental in Cleveland. And you can Google it to get here. And we always want to know how many. 65. And I went to the last page and looked and like, they do a lot of reaching, right? Like on the last page, there's. They're pretty far out, like somewhere an hour away. But we're just going to keep everything constant. So go back here. So let's do this. Cincinnati, Fort Wayne. Pull that up. So we're just looking at the city landing page for Angie's List. Grand Rapids, Madison, Toledo. All right, so we've got all of them pulled up. Cincinnati. Now we got to scroll down here and we got to find dumpster rental 52. And we're done with that. Fort Wayne. 13, man, Fort Wayne. Like, I've never. I'm not gonna lie, I've never looked at Fort Wayne very favorably. But whatever, here we are. No offense to anyone in Fort Wayne. It's not Gary, 28 in Grand Rapids. Wouldn't it be hilarious if There were like 87 dumpster rental companies in Madison, Wisconsin by the end of this month? I would love that so much. All right, Internet's a little slow today. Let's see, 17 in Toledo, 17 in Toledo and 14 in Madison. Okay, there's our Angie's List data. And let's go ahead and clean this up. And you know what, I'm just going to delete the LSA column because to me, there's not enough data there to really draw a conclusion on it. So it just looks messy right now. And honestly, thumbtack, I don't know. I just wanted to leave thumbtack too. But I'll leave it. I'll leave it. So let's do this. Let's do this. We're going to make. We're going to divide this by the number of businesses in the area because that's going to be a cleaner percentage. We're going to do the same here, so. Well, yeah, man, that's. Yeah, it's going to be a. A triple digit percentage because there's more on Cincinnati Angie's List than there is on Google Maps, which is because they're pulling from a wide area. But whatever, we'll keep it the same. So we could also do the reverse. What percentage of Angie's List businesses are on Google Maps? But whatever. Okay, I'm just going to start observing this in real time. So let's look at this. So Cleveland, in this sense, the higher percentage, I guess it doesn't really make a difference. Okay, so if we look at this percentage, which is basically the saturation per city, Madison, I guess I should have reversed this, right? Because we want green to be good. Madison and Fort Wayne are attractive, but honestly, Fort Wayne is not as attractive because if you look at the not bad crime rate, if you look at the real estate growth, economic growth. Well, you know what, I take it back. Fort Wayne is not, is not that bad. I've been hating on Fort Wayne. I don't like the average home value of Cleveland. I really like to see that higher. But let's do this. This is what we want to do. We want to call this the Google percentage and the Angie percent. So if you look at the Angie percentage, Fort Wayne is at the top again. Toledo and Madison, top three. Toledo is at the bottom as far as Google is concerned. Okay, so thumbtack is there. We're not going to do that math. I'm just going to delete that. People aren't using thumbtack, which you can see. Okay, so so far we're seeing that Madison and Fort Wayne look pretty dang good. Now let's say I'm in Ohio and for whatever sick reason I want to open a business in Ohio. I'm going to look at these top three, really bad household income. But hey, there are, there is a need for dumpster rentals there. Homeownership rate, all in the 40s, crime rate, all high real estate growth. Okay, so Toledo is the highest household income, second lowest home value, middle of the pack. That best real estate growth, Not that much on Angie's list. You know what? I want to do this. I don't like this. I want to do this as a percentage of population. So once again, Fort Wayne, Toledo and Madison are. They're the least saturated, all green there. Toledo's a little more saturated. Should we give these guys a call? Okay. Garrett asks, is the real estate growth, economic growth, crime rate, etc, all scrape from outscraper? No, actually I asked chat, GPT, all of these and then I kind of cherry picked a couple to confirm. And it was accurate because sometimes it's not. So let's give these guys a call because I want to know, are these guys swamped with business, are they not? I want to know what my competitors look like. Am I going to voicemail or an answering service? Let's do this. So I'm going to get my actual phone and I'm going to call them. And I guess it's a good thing I'm not using my phone as a camera because I need to use it here. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I'm going to start calling some people. And you can hate this all you want, but I'm not going to talk to them. Okay? So, yeah, I'm going to waste their time today for about three seconds. I want to know if they answer because that is the litmus test that I'm performing right now. Do they answer their phone? And I'm going to keep the variables constant because I'm calling them all at the same time. But we're not accounting for. Maybe he's on the phone, right? Then maybe some one off variables are happening. So you can get a lot more granular with this. You could call them. You could call everyone once in the morning, afternoon and evening on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you could get as granular as you want. But I just want to see right off the bat how many people are picking up. So we're only going to look at these ones. We're not going to look at the ones in the outlying areas. So I'm going to see. I'm just going to go down the line. Okay. So if you see my phone, I just pasted it from my MacBook to my phone and I'm going to call him on speaker and see if he answers. This reminds me of a scene in the office. I can't remember which one.

Hello and thank you for calling. For a dumpster, porta Potty or rental. If you're a homeowner, press one. If you're a business or contractor, press two.

All right, so that's an answering service. So I'm going to mark that as answering service. That was fast enough. We'll go to the next one. Call ended 4:19,451. Yeah, it's right there. It's not going through. Well, it's a good sign so far. Let's go to the next one. All right, Larry answered. Sorry, Larry. I'm gonna get so many people calling me. Okay, Another answer on the first ring. Both of them. So I'm going. Let me count how many of these there are. So we've got 57. I could probably call all these.

Hey, this is Donnie with Cincinnati Dumpsters. Sorry.

It's got to be the least exciting thing you watch today.

Your call has been forwarded to voicemail.

That's a no. I don't know if I'm going to call all these. So let me call more. I want to get a good, like a baseline and then I want to go straight to Madison. I want to see how companies are faring in Madison, Wisconsin. Stopped ringing. I'm gonna call that a no. Oh, I'm gonna show you something here in a minute you're gonna like. All right, stick with me here. It's gonna get a lot better. Queen City Dumpster. All right, I'm going to finish Cincinnati, and then I'm going to text some of these guys.

Thank you for calling Dumpster Rental Solutions, the number one dumpster rental provider in the Cincinnati area.

I hope someone out there is already doing this research in their own area, because you're that excited. That's what I'd be doing.

Hello, and thank you for calling for.

Now. Okay. An answering service that's not. Doesn't mean they suck, but it's not as good as answering right away.

Thank you for choosing one.

That'S a yes. All right, now, all of these are the same company, so let's see what they do. It's got to be an answering service, right? If it was my company and I had all those locations, I would not have an answering service. There are ways to get. It's an 800 number. Yeah. It's not even ringing, so that's not a good sign. All right, now this last one does not have a phone number at all. Dumpster Tub. Let's. I just want to do a little research. They've got products, like, they went through the effort of putting this here, but they don't have their freaking phone number. What are you guys doing, huh? So we're going to call that a no. We're going to count any that don't have a phone number as a no. Then let's call all of them in Madison. I'm actually going to talk to these ones. Oh, this is a recycling center. I just realized you can't see my screen. Okay. So that is recycling center. I'm going to share my screen again so you can see that. So this is actually very interesting because if we do get more granular, then we learned that one of the four dumpster rental companies in Madison is not a dumpster rental company at all. Not a garbage service that also rent dumpsters. It's just a recycling center. So we're going to go back to the research. We're going to go here to Madison. We're going to change that to three, and look at those numbers pop. And so literally, Cincinnati, Ohio, is five times more saturated. Exactly. Than Madison, Wisconsin. So it's. I guess it's good that I called all of the ones in Cincinnati because we're on both ends of the spectrum here. So we only have three in Cincinnati. Let's give them a call. Kearns Dumpsters. So since there's only three, let's do a little more research. Yep. I don't even need to click that. Stumps rental. Tread lightly. Dumpsters. Countrywide dumpster rental. This looks like it could be a lead generation site. They just had the Madison Google page. I mean, look at this. Lakeland, Florida. San Bernardino. Contact us. Okay, this gets very interesting. I bet you anything this is just a lead generation company that's grown using programmatic SEO, which is, here's a secret. This is what we do as well. We use programmatic SEO for the same type of stuff. If you ever want to do programmatic SEO, email me. By the way, Chrisofounders.com I can help you out with that. This is very interesting. These guys are just selling leads, junk removal, and dumpster rental. Very smart. Yep. Completely different landing page. Geez Louise. Okay, so Madison, like, the more research we do, the better it gets. Now, of course, we could go to the other cities and do more research, and we're going to find similar things that would bring the numbers down. But now we've got two. So we've got Kearns. Tread lightly. That's it. Let's look at Kearns and then let's look at. Tread lightly. All right. I want to see how many locations these guys have. They service the whole county. It is a local business. Like this website. It's ugly, but it's clean. It's clear. Look at that picture, man. That picture is like a boomer's dream. Okay, so these guys look like they're using, like a template. I've seen this template before, so they're probably a little more sophisticated. They're not even like in medicine. Let's see if we can do this. We're going to try to book. I wonder if this is like, actually tied to their inventory. You know what, we're just going to call these two. I don't think this is going to be tied to their inventory. All right, I'm going to YouTube real quick. I'm going to take a breather. What am I learning from the company calls? Validating if the business is real. Great question. I want to know how good they are at customer service. We, like, we have a small business. Our tree trimming business is a small business. And James, my operating partner, he always answers the phone. He just answers it. If he's talking to a customer. Quoting a job. Can you just give me a second? He just answers his phone because the chance of getting a job, like, he knows just. Just from a call that comes in Cold is. Call it 30%. And if he gets there in person to quote it face to face, it's 70%. Right. And so let's say the average job is a thousand dollars. We have a 30% chance of closing it. That means that if he misses that call, he loses $300. Right. And if our margins are 50%, he loses $150. We lose $150 in net profit. And so answering the phone is the most simple yet most important thing you can do. So that's what I want to know. An answering service. That's Friction. That's. Oh, it's a big company. Oh, they don't care about me. They're probably busy. Friction. And then, surprisingly, quite a few of those just were bad numbers altogether. Using this example. Curious if you recommend trying to buy an existing business instead of starting one based on everything I'm learning. I would not. I would start a business in Madison, Wisconsin. So, all right, I want to call these two businesses because we're down to two now, and I want to ask them if they have availability to rent three dumpsters this weekend. Okay. Why three? Because that will give me a better idea of how busy they are. If yes and it's okay. This is like prime construction season in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm sure three dumpsters is quite a bit. This weekend is four days away. So if they say no, then it's. That tells me that they're somewhat busy. And they'll also probably tell me I can rent one, not two. So that gives me an idea of exactly how busy they are. Like, I'm expecting them to say no because it's short notice, so that doesn't tell me a lot. I would prefer if they say yes. They do have availability to rent three dumpsters this weekend because that's going to tell me that they're not very busy. And that's going to be a red flag that. That conflicts with almost everything I'm learning about the dumpster rental business in Madison, Wisconsin. So I'm going to call both of them, and I'm going to keep sharing my screen, and I will put the audio up to the mic.

Thank you for calling Tread Lightly Services.

Anyone surprised? Is anyone surprised? It went to voicemail. Guy's busy. That's my assumption. Let's call the next one, and then I'm gonna do a little more research before we text any of these guys. So that was Tread Lightly. Now we're gonna go to Kearns. This is so exciting. I'm like a kid in a Candy store right now. All right, I am calling Kearns. And I like pulling up their website as I talk to them, just so I sound like less of an idiot.

Hello, this is Kearns Dumpsters. How may I help you?

Hey, I was wondering if you have availability for 315 yard rentals this weekend.

When were you thinking of getting those dropped off?

It's flexible. Maybe Saturday morning or Friday afternoon?

Yeah, Friday. We could do Friday. We could drop them off Friday. We have 12 yards, 20 yards and 30 yards. I don't. I don't see it being a problem on Friday. Is that okay?

That might be okay. I'm just doing research right now. Are you pretty busy this weekend?

We don't deliver on weekends.

Oh, okay. Are you pretty busy this week?

No, Friday is open. That's Friday, Thursday and tomorrow, sort of.

Okay. Okay. Well, I'm just trying to call around right now, but I will give you a call back if I decide to go that direction.

All right, Have a great day, sir.

Thank you. All right, so that was interesting. Not as busy as I would have thought. Now look at their website. Compared to Tread Lightly, you can book online. That's like the obvious. You don't have to build out a custom website. There's probably a theme or a package you can buy for a couple hundred bucks. Here, you. You can't. You got to call them. It's friction. Now we're going to. Okay, we're going to do a little. We're going to do a little research here. So we're going to go. We're going to look them up on Google Earth. All right? Okay. So it looks like it. I wonder if this terra engineering business is owned by the same person. A lot of times these dumpster rental companies start out as construction businesses. And then they buy some dumpsters and then they start loaning them out to other people in the industry, and next thing they know, they're in business. So I'm not learning a lot here other than it looks like he might just be piggybacking on another business. Yeah, I would love to see a bunch of dumpsters lined up, but that's just like a trash pile. And then look at Countrywide, this lead gen factory. We could learn something from these guys. I bet you anything. Okay, what is this address? They're not fitting many dumpsters in there. I wonder how they got the hookup to validate their address on Google Maps. There's all kind of tricks of the trade. So that's interesting. 32 reviews. Just reading these reviews here. Do you See any typos? Do you see any. Look at these names. Michaela Wynn, Hershey, Abbon, Ashley Williams. I accessed the website. This is all AI written literally. Not any human on this planet has ever said, I went and accessed your website. I bet you anything they have a standard review and then they tell ChatGPT write this 15 different ways and they just swap out synonyms. It ends up making no sense. So these are all fake reviews and the automation automatically responds to them with AI. Very interesting. Very. We're doing, I will admit we're doing something similar. Not with Dumpster, not anything near Dumpster Rental, but a lead gen service with programmatic SEO and we're seeing some really good results from it. So no shade, but it's just interesting seeing this for what it is. Okay, so we've learned a lot, especially about Madison, Wisconsin. But now I want to text all these guys and so I'm going to take all these phone numbers and I am going to remove the ones with blank phone numbers. I'm going to take this and let's close that and I'm going to open a new sheet and I'm going to remove duplicates. Okay, so I just want their cell, their phone numbers here. And I'm going to scrub these if they're sell or landline. So I'm going to save this as a CSV, doesn't matter what I save it as. And then I'm going to go to this website over here, Slybroadcast, and they are happy to validate these lists and tell me if it is a. What's it called? If they're seller, Landline. So I'm going to upload this list. All I have in it are the phone numbers. Save spits it out 82 contacts. I'm going to download it, open it. Okay, let's go ahead and add a header. I don't care about the landlines right now. I don't care about the unknowns. I only want the cell phone numbers. So I do want to remove the one I just talked to because I just talked to him and I know what's going on there. So. That was Kearns, I believe, right? 2565, yes. All right, so I'm going to remove that. Well, I guess he wasn't in there because that wasn't a cell phone. So save that list. Now I'm going to go to Message Media and I use quite a few different texting platforms, but this is the one that I like for this type of outbound texting the most. So this is our co founder's account and we have a few different phone numbers. And I'm going to go to contacts list and create a list. And then I'm going to upload that list into that specific list. I only need their phone numbers. So once again, this doesn't give us data from people that are using, what's it called, landlines or unknown phone numbers. It just gives us data from people that have cell phone numbers. But it's really quick and easy. So I'm going to use this list, only 27 numbers and I'm going to say. That's it. That's all I'm going to say. I don't need a personalization in here. It's a very binary question. I'll do this. And I'm going to click send. And it's not a big sample size, but it's something. And now we wait and let's see if we have any responses. We got one. I wish we had because we would get like a 10 to 30% response rate right away. Okay. All right. Well that's something. How would you go to market if you decide to launch a dumpster rental? Well, that is, that's a whole other live stream in and of itself. We're not getting more responses. I'm surprised. I want to text more. Let's see, what could I do to text more? Okay. All right, call me. I don't like that. If I'm texting you, I want you to respond via text. What material? Fully booked. Okay, that's something. 8826. I want to see where he's at. Grand Rapids. Okay. Okay. These guys are pretty busy. 80, 91. Fort Wayne. Yeah, Fort Wayne is a good market. We're not surprised that they're busy. We already knew that. Can you book online? Book online. Imagine that. All right, going back to the questions, I went with these, Louis, because I've just, I've been doing this for 15 years and trial and error. These are just what I've settled with. They work well. They might not look pretty, but they're better than the other options. Okay, my ADD is in full force right now. Where was I? Alright, there we are. Let's see how many responses we got. 27 texts. And we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 5, 6, 7. Okay, so 20 something percent response rate right off the bat. Not bad. It's too bad we didn't text more people. Let's. I want to look more into this guy. 80, 91. Okay, look at it now. This is legit. Blue line bins. All five star reviews. 82. We've got a big parking lot. I assume that most of these spots normally have dumpsters, but it's mostly empty now. Here's a little life hack. The. Obviously the. The Google street view that you see will be different than the Google Earth view that you see. So you can get two different points in time. And then if you really want to get granular with it. Oh, this is good. Okay, so it looks like they just do all kinds of stuff. You're gonna like this. What I'm about to show you should be good. So it looks like it hasn't even been there for that long. This is May 2023. That was an auto credit place. Here's we're gonna do. We're going to take that address. We're not going to learn a lot from this because it hasn't been in business for that long, but you get the idea. So I need to be able to zoom in more. That's a bummer. I can't zoom in any more than that. So forget I said anything that doesn't work. But I had the right idea. Let's go back to this. We don't have 20 yards and our 11 yards are currently being used. Okay. So I don't like this guy. Dude, come on. Imagine how much you can learn just from this. Just seeing how busy everyone is. Demolition contractor. Just take it. LLC.net. You're gonna like this, what I'm about to show you. Oh. Saying the phrase llc.net gives me an aneurysm. That is painful. So I don't think you can book online. But yeah, whatever. It's a website. Okay, so what have we? Good. So it looks like it hasn't even been there for that long. This is May 2023. That was an auto credit place. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take that address. Now we're not going to learn a lot from this because it hasn't been in business for that long. But you get the idea. So I need to be able to zoom in more. That's a bummer. I can't zoom in any more than that. So forget I said anything that doesn't work. But I had the right idea. Learned. Let's go back to the research tab. It looks like there needs to be this business in Madison and. Or Toledo and. Or Fort Wayne. We could do a lot more research in these cities because for all we know, Grand Rapids is a great place to open because maybe it looks Saturated on the surface. But if you call everyone and really dig in and do your research and you find out that they're all busy and there's room for more, or if you find out in the northeast corner of the, of the city, there's no one, right? But be careful with research because let's say you live in Grand Rapids, it's a great place and you don't want to move and you really want to start a, a dumpster rental business, then you're going to have confirmation bias. Everywhere you look, you're like, well, let's go back to this. We don't have 20 yards and our 11 yards are currently being used. They're not too busy, but there's no one around the corner. Well, don't try to talk yourself into doing this. Follow the data, right? Be unbiased. Follow the data or else you'll get yourself in trouble. So what I like to do when doing this research, okay, so I don't like this guy. Dude, come on. Imagine how much you can learn just from this. Just seeing how busy everyone is. Demolition contractor, just take it llc.net oh, saying the phrase LLC net gives me an aneurysm. That is pain. Let's say you're not location agnostic and you want to go to a specific area, be willing to do five different businesses and do all this research. So we've only, it's only taken an hour to do this. Do all this research for all five businesses and it will scale, right? It won't take five hours to do it, it'll take two and a half hours because you, you're studying the same cities. You're just swapping out the, the home service businesses. So don't get too attached to an industry or a city in full. So I don't think you can book online, but yeah, whatever. It's a website. Okay, so what have we learned? Let's go back to the research tab. It looks like there needs to be this business in Madison and Oregon. Be flexible on both. But this is the 80, 20 or 9010 of finding out if specifically a home service business could be via the Bible in any given area. You can get a lot more granular with it. You could text a lot more people, you could, you could make pivot tables, you can make charts and graphs and yada yada, yada, but you're not going to learn anything new than what we've already learned right here. So I will link to all this stuff in the YouTube video. I hope you enjoyed something. Hope Toledo and Or Fort Wayne. We could do a lot more research in these cities because for all we know, Grand Rapids is a great place to open because maybe it looks saturated on the surface. But if you call everyone and really dig in and do your research and you find out that they're all busy and there's room for more, or if you find out in the northeast corner of the of this, you learned something. Yeah. Let me see if there are any questions before we end this. What question would you ask to gauge demand if this was researching roofing instead of dumpsters? That's a good question. Roofing, in my opinion, is just like a home service business in and of itself because it is city. There's no one. Right. But be careful with research because let's say you live in Grand Rapids, it's a great place and you don't, you know, instead of being a $200 pressure washing job or a $2,000 tree job, it's a $20,000 want to move and you really want to start a dumpster rental business, then you're going to have confirmation bias. Everywhere you look, you're like, well, they're not too busy, but there's no one around the corner. Well, don't try to talk yourself into doing this follow job, which puts it in a whole other category. And that also means that, you know, roofing has attracted a lot of sophisticated operators because they feel, rightly so, to a degree that they could do the same amount of work to get a $20,000 job as they could get it to get a $2,000 job. And because the margins are also good in roofing, you have a lot of people spending a lot of money in marketing. You have a lot of agencies built up around roofing to compete the data, right? Be unbiased, follow the data or else you'll get yourself in trouble. So what I like to do when doing this research, let's say you're not location agnostic and you want to go to a specific area, be willing to do five different businesses there. And so it is hard to keep compete in roofing because there's a lot of people there for all of those reasons, if you do all this research. So we've only, it's only taken an hour to do this, do all this research for all five businesses and it will scale, right? It won't take five hours to do it, it'll take two and a half hours because you're studying the same cities, you're just swapping out the, the home service businesses. So don't get too attached to an industry or, or a city. If you haven't already, I would love for you to subscribe my newsletter. I talk about this stuff. There's no ads in the newsletter. There's no cost. I do it once a week. ChrisJ kerner.com K O E R N E R thank you Terrell. Appreciate that. I honestly just want people to quit their job. If you love your job then you're not watching this. So if you love your job, they don't quit your job. Jobs are great, but if you're watching, be flexible on both. But this is the 80, 20 or 9010 of finding out if specifically a home service business could be via viable in any given area. You can get a lot more granular with it. You could text a lot more people. You could, you could make pivot tables, you can make charts and graphs and yada yada yada, but you're not going to learn anything new than what we've already seen. This. You probably want to quit your job or you probably already have a business and I want you to grow your business or quit your job. That's my goal. Would love to see a sort of inverted version of this. What do you mean by that, Louis? Where you have an area you want to be in and want to identify service businesses. That's a great idea. I love it. I love it. I'm back to the texting right now. I know I'm not sharing my screen. You learned right here. So I will link to all this stuff in the YouTube video. I hope you enjoyed something. Hoping. But one person said. May I ask who this is? The other person said yes. So that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 1010 responses from 27. Sheesh. All right. That's like almost 40% response rate. Not bad at all. Okay, well I think I'm going to wrap it up. Thank you guys for joining and I hope you learned something. And if you ever have any questions. You learned something. Yeah, let me see if there are any questions before we end this. What question would you ask to gauge demand if this was researching roofing instead of dumpsters? That's a good question. Roofing in my opinion is just like a home service business in and of itself. Because it is, you know, instead of being a $200 pressure washing job or a $2,000 tree job, it's a $20,000. Just email me chrisofounders.com and I'll do my best to help you with the time that I have. Have a Great day job, which puts it in a whole other category. And that also means that, you know, roofing has attracted a lot of sophisticated operators because they feel, rightly so, to a degree, that they could do the same amount of work to get a $20,000 job as they could get it to get a $2,000 job. And because the margins are also good in roofing, you have a lot of people spending a lot of money in marketing. You have a lot of agencies built up around roofing to compete there. And so it is hard to keep compete in roofing because there's a lot of people there for all of those reasons. If you haven't already, I would love for you to subscribe my newsletter. I talk about this stuff. There's no ads in the newsletter. There's no cost. I do it once a week. Chrisjkerner.com K O E R N E R thank you, Terrell. Appreciate that. I honestly just want people to quit their job. If you love your job, then you're not watching this. So if you love your job, then don't quit your job. Jobs are great, but if you're watching this, you probably want to quit your job or you probably already have a business and I want you to grow your business or quit your job. That's my goal. Would love to see a sort of inverted version of this. What do you mean by that, Louis? Where you have an area you want to be in and want to identify service businesses. That's a great idea. I love it. I love it. I'm back to the texting right now. I know I'm not sharing my screen, but one person said, may I ask who this is? The other person said, yes. So that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 responses from 27. Sheesh. All right, that's like almost 40% response rate. Not bad at all. Okay, well, I think I'm gonna wrap it up. Thank you guys for joining, and I hope you learned something. And if you ever have any questions, just email me chris co founders.com and I'll do my best to help you with the time that I have. Have a great day.