I Found A S*** Business

We met a guy who made 20k a month in his first 3 months of having a porta body business, having never done it before.

Don't throw up. Don't throw up. Stop it. Stop it.

I'm on a hunt to find the best main street business in America and this business was one of the nastiest I've come across. But I think shep boy found something liquid gold that is pungent. When you open that door, it smells like money. Coming from super humble origins. We're gonna break down exactly how he did it so you can steal his homework even if you don't know any. In this video, we're going to cover how you can make more than an NFL player in waste management. Spoiler, he was one. We're going to get step by step lessons from Russell on how to build one of these yourself if you want to. And we are going to break down recession proof businesses for you to win in any economy. Oh, and by the way, this business is on track to now make millions. But first of all, why this business of all businesses, what do they exactly do here? They sell porta potties, they build these bad boys, they rent them out to other people, then they scaled up to water tanks and they scaled up to water fountains and they even have these things and they are slowly going from one unit to five unit to now 1500 poopers. What exactly do you do at Chef boys?

So we are simply rental providers of waste. Sanitary needs being site services, construction projects, parties, special events, disasters. We have multiple streams and multiple services that we provide within the movement of waste and rental assets that support it.

So you were in the NFL, you knew nothing about waste, you knew nothing about port a potties. What made you go, this is the industry. I think there's an opportunity here.

I was playing for the New York Giants at the time and I was out the night before trash. My family has experience in the dump truck world, so I have an understanding of tonnage and how things cost. So seeing all that trash out, it was like somebody's making a lot of money. And then I came back to Manhattan the next morning and all the trash was gone. So that immediately str something in me and called everybody I knew that dealt with waste and all that. And everybody was telling me, hey, I know you see trash, but you need to look at.

You got a weird group of friends if that's what they were telling you. But they were right, 100% right.

Dirty guys.

Let's be honest. I want to see how he did it, but I Don't think it's normal to make tens of thousands of dollars a month cleaning up in your first job or even get to millions. It's hard. It takes hard work. Special circumstances, background education and effort are all going to make a difference here. No guarantees in life, certainly not with this. This is going to take that unique blend of work and luck. But let's see what learn and what the numbers are.

We're gonna show her a little bit.

You gonna show me?

We got two corporate restrooms. There you go. I see the vibe. Right, right, right, right. So obviously they've used it. Hand sanitizer right here that we replaced. They have your hand sanitizer. You seen the restroom? I'm gonna show you how efficient the equipment is. We have about 100 gallons of waste in there. So as you can see, it's already empty. Whoa.

Nicely done. You didn't come from a ton. You went into the NFL. But there's a lot of milestones that in the NFL. It's not like you get it all in these chunks and, and you have a really short earning career in the NFL. So you're like, I gotta make X in three to five years and it's gotta last 50 years. So you kind of are looking forward and like, all right, I got this money, but I kind of got to protect it. And I need to start something that actually cash flows 100%. And that's how you got to Porta Potties. Porta Potties, Natural selection. It's actually not that normal.

No. Right now we have about 1500 rentable items out.

1250 of these bad boys, half a dozen of these, a couple of these dozen of these, and a bunch of these bad boys.

The cool thing about these things behind you right here now that 75% of our revenue, it cost me $500 to make one Porta Potter.

This is 500 bucks.

$500. It's just industrial plastic.

Then how much is this?

It's going to run you probably about a good $50 to decal the whole side.

And how long does it take?

It takes probably about a week for it to develop. And we usually on turn, we're getting our money back with two to four months of renting it out.

We got the non fancy sh and then we got the fancy.

So this is a flushable unit. So it is controlled by a simple foot pedal.

I like that.

In essence, it allows us to upcharge with a standard unit. You're going to pay 125 for once a week service. And that's going to be billed on a 28 day. We do 28 days because if you build 28 days, you get an extra month adding simple things like a foot pedal, adding things like color. And with these units by simply being Pink, we're on 150. So it's already a $25 upcharge.

Love that.

These are motorized water tanks. And so what these tanks are, these are water supplies for temporary housing units. Honestly, this is our highest margin business. And the cool thing about these is that we picked this property because we have a water well.

This is where we are right now, water well.

So we have a natural water well. So we pay no water bill. So we charge $225 a month every 28 days to be exact for this piece of equipment.

You fill it up once a month.

We fill it, but it's a two way revenue. So again, this is why we get our highest margins with these. Because we charge $225 for the actual structure and then we charge a dollar a gallon for the water. A typical company that's going through 30,000 gallons of water, that's a couple thousand dollars a month in water bill.

Love that.

So we're able to capitalize on that, increase crazy margins and be able to handle these huge water jobs.

How much are you paying your employees to do this? How expensive is labor in this?

Labor gets. Labor actually for us is not crazy because we're able to service so much with just a lot less work. If I was doing let's say a million in revenue, it's going to take me on average with the restaurant, it's going to take me probably about 35 employees with us on the wayside. For every million it's about 7 to 10.

They're not skilled trades. Right?

Non CDL drivers.

Yeah. That means that they don't have to have a special license that's more expensive to have. You don't have to have special licenses on the truck and bigger and more expensive.

Our retention rate is way higher. We're not handicapped by cdl selective, you know, permanent drivers because they have a.

Lot of optionality your guys, you take good care of them. They probably don't have a ton of skills. You pay market rates maybe slightly above and you keep the guys for a long time.

Our guys on average, everybody on the Payroll does about $1,000 a week. We give them all the instruments, all the tools and resources so they can do their job as efficient and as clean as possible.

Honestly, the more I meet a lot of guys in the trades too. They're like, you would have to pry my cold dead body back into a cubicle in an office where I had to wear a suit and a boss was over my shoulder. All they're just not into it. So when you were first starting out, year one, if my numbers are correct, you did something like 6k in revenue in the first one or two months. Then you scaled to like 12k month two or three, then month three or four, 18k in revenue and then eventually got to a point where doing millions. Is it that reasonable to think that if you have the porta potties plus you go out and you get some commercial contracts that you can start making real revenue like that inside of the first 90 to 120 days?

100%. I mean we got, we got to close a million dollars in revenue within our second full year business with no experience. We did our part to generate revenue.

Yeah, that's the part people always mess up on. How do you get your first client in this business?

Word of mouth is probably one of the more organic ways. But I would say the second thing is associations. So when we deal with the multifamily developments, the hospitals, they all have associations that they're part of. So we reach out to associations, we sponsor, we donate. The number one thing I would say is that when we did our research on industry and how people built sales revenue, people were doing it with no Internet presence. So even in our third year business, we are the number one reviewed portable restroom company in the city of Houston.

Nobody understands the power of reviews. We did this video where we basically broke down all of the ways. I think we broke down like the 10 best ways that my companies get reviews. My service companies, it gets like 100,000 views as a video and my other ones get a million. And it's like, man, if you guys only realized that if you have other people say nice things about you, your business will never suffer from clients. And if you treat your first client like it'll be your last client, then you will always have referrals. And the two Rs are the thing that's, that's referrals and that's reviews lead to revenue and revenue leads to money in your pocket. And yet nobody understands the equation. Let me give you some inside tips. Sometimes I have my best ideas here. Couple quick tips. If I was going to use social media to scale this business, here's what I'd do. One, Social media is non existent. For these businesses. Do something fun. I would play around with short form videos like this on TikTok and then do a ton of SEO with local hashtags like Houston, like downtown Houston, like Galveston. Get really specific and I would make these fun and funky. Two, I would use a Facebook page from the local community and the construction communities and individually target all the clients on Facebook. Facebook may seem like just for old people for you guys watching on YouTube, but actually the old people are probably going to be the ones that pay you. Third thing that I would do is I would use a localized SEO service. This is a little technical, but basically making sure that on the Internet, in every single community, your service comes up as the top one. Okay, shut the door, Tanner. I got some business to take care.

Of, and it just drops. Water, fresh water. You can drink that water.

One of the parts of my job is getting to talk to people like Russell, people bringing dignity back to main street and boring businesses. So both you and I can steal their 10,000 hours. And as a business owner, owner, things get wild fast and stuff can start to fall by the wayside. One of the first things you go, I think, is mental health. That's why I have a therapist, why we pay for consultants in our biz. Why not hire a pro for your mind? Now I'm all in on therapy because it makes us stronger, not weaker. I use BetterHelp, who is the sponsor of today's video therapy Made Easy. Fill out a questionnaire that'll help them find you the right match, and then you get paired with your therapist, usually within 48 hours. They have 30,000 licensed therapists, and if the first one isn't a fit, no cost to switch. Life is busy. I need my therapist to work on my schedule. They do. If you think you might benefit from therapy, you can learn more by clicking the link in the description. Plus get 10% off with your first month. So, obviously, we talk a lot about shit and porta Potties, but we need some tech for these businesses. Let's go inside and break that down, huh?

So it is nearly impossible to maintain thousands of things, you know, without running up a huge liability bill. So what we do is we invest in softwares to help us maintain our rental equipment. Helps us see what the guys see in terms of being on the road. So this routing system gives us alerts. So we put in what we want alerts for. It can be simply a guy goes a mile over the speed limit, a hard turn, a hard brake. So for example, one of our trucks, which is titled Little Nasty, so the alert trigger is hard braking. So what the software does it Gives us the address where he's at. It gives us actually the clip and it goes green when you see the heartbreaking occur. So it helps us be more efficient. At the end of the day, the number one thing that we need to be able to do is be able to put ourselves and our guys in the best position.

What's up with Mama Nasty? I saw she had an issue.

Yeah, Mama Nasty got all type of stuff going on. So Mama Nasty issue is tailgating. Exactly. So again, we see what they see. And then it allows us, when we have our weekly safety meetings, to meet with the guys, put it on the screen and talk through what we've seen.

And you say, what the F, Harold?

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. It's probably a little meaner than that. Everything is American made here. Affordable restrooms, the tissue, everything.

Really everything. That's incredible. Yeah.

Our manufacturer is down the street in Austin.

That's amazing.

Yeah, so they manufacture there and that's why we're able to have a quick turnaround.

Yeah, you should win those government contracts then.

We've had great luck.

Did you ever have, like. I remember when I first started one of my first businesses, I had. I remember exactly where I was. I remember exactly who said it to me. And there was a human that said, like, you're not gonna make it in so many words. And I remember that exactly. Did you have a moment like that for you?

For me, it was probably a year or so into the business when we actually got it started. And at this point, you're spending your hard earned money to get it going. And then us being a startup, we didn't qualify for banking help right off the bat. Within the first year, I felt overwhelmed. And then, you know, obviously you got people, you know, I'm on sites, cleaning the restroom. And just a year later, I was in MetLife Stadium. Because again, I took a big leap of faith. And not only I invested and I was a majority investor in the company, you know, within the first three years also too was the first driver playing professional sports. I got pretty good at ignoring the noise. I had little kids calling me terrible. For a while, I had the skill of having the blinders on. But in terms of being hard on myself, being a professional athlete, that's where the self doubt was coming. Within a year, fighting my own battles and like, okay, why are you doing this? What? Did you really give up your million dollar dream job to drive a truck around? That was a humbling, you know, year.

It smells good in here now. You did such like a dignity for these workers here. Otherwise, if they didn't have you, they'd be in trouble. Huh?

Everybody love this man.

Yeah. Let's tell them some of the hard truths here. Have you ever been lied to, cheated, stolen from in this business?

Big thing with our business is that, you know, it's the wild, wild west. You know, we don't have contracts, for the most part, with a lot of our revenue and with our customers just sign invoices. So we consistently get underbid. And the only reason we know is because the loyalty of our customers sending us, you know, pictures and text messages, hey, waste management came over here that they're trying to underbid you guys. So we see a lot of the bad business with our competitors. We see good business with our competitors as well. But a lot of the good thing for us is if a person is humble enough to deal with human waste, typically they're a decent person because it's a humble job. But on the opposite side, since it is a humble job, it's a very lucrative job. Business owners and operators tend to get a little cutthroat.

One of my best pieces of advice when I went into business that somebody told me was, I can't guarantee you'll ever make any money, But I can guarantee at some point you'll lose some. So I think that's a good thing to know about business. You know, I've been lied to, stolen from, cheated, sued, all of it. But the wild thing is, after you've been in business for a while, I think this scares people off. But rarely does it kill you.

Doesn't kill you. It makes you more resilient.

It does it like lifting weights in the gym. Every single one of those difficulties just means you get a little bit more muscle.

That's a big part of the reason why I've been able to make this transition. I don't have a business degree. I don't have a father who ran just a high revenue company. I have the right ingredients, and then we're not scared enough to go out here and figure things out on the move. None of my family have waste experience. Majority of the things that made shep boys what it is today, it's people learning on the move.

So should we clean up some?

I've seen probably about a thousand maggots so far.

Oh, God, dude.

So what we got is a 10,000 gallon frac tank that we hold on the yard to hold waste. We want our guys to start their day off with empty tanks. Yeah, you got, you started off with a full tank. Then he has to go dispose taken away from showing up the sites on time and getting stuck. You get all the way up there.

There are maggots up here.

There are maggots. They're maggots. There's a bunch of other stuff in there too. Oh God.

That's pretty gross. Oh, this is stressful.

So what we got here? So again the waste as this physics and how things go. Solids are going to sink to the bottom, liquids and small mass materials are going to rise to the top.

Yeah.

So again a lot of times what we pick, we can either draw from the top, this the middle or the bottom. But we choose the top because this is where most of the liquid is. So again as you can see, you got a couple hundred maggots, you got some cloth tissue, you got a few.

Female products, some see that maggot in there like this.

Beautiful. It means that we're making money.

Yes, right. You know it's part of the circle of life, right?

We haul our waste, our water at a rate of a dollar a gallon.

Yeah.

So stash in this little tank right here is about $10,000 in value of waste that we're gonna have to dispose of that we've been paid to haul or contain.

Do you, do you ever wear a nose plug?

No, I've gotten kind of used to it.

It's not that bad.

It's not that bad. It's not that bad.

Good.

Not that good. But the dirtiest, the nastiest smelling waste is grease. Grease makes look like Fiji water.

Wow, that seems like that would be tough to do.

Yeah, well you know, piss is natural. It's actually considered a non hazardous waste. There's no way they can classify human waste as a hazardous because it comes from us. It's the reason why we're able to be inside of a residential inside the city limits because we haul non hazardous waste. The way you become an official Chef boys employee is you have to get showered waste.

No, no, no.

It happens by accident. It's not on purpose. But as you can see right here, that is a disposal mount. And most of the time our guys will connect here because it makes it more efficient. But between this and that, at some point you're going to get, you're just gonna get. You ever seen a range?

No, it's not good.

You should come here about 4:30 in the morning.

Oh shit. Oh actually that reminds me. We have a list of 130 boring businesses, dirty businesses that we think are recession resistant. I made the list just for you. You guys can get it right here. So that when you see this, you actually think this. Do you get used to all this? After a while it doesn't really bother you anymore. It's like when you have kids, you get used to changing diapers. So you get used to this.

Smell like money to me. I love the smell. I've grown to it.

Yeah, it's pretty gross.

Yeah, it is, right? They don't stink? No, it smells like money.

Wanna smell my hands? It smells like cinnamon. I kind of smell a little bit like a stripper now, I think. What do you think? There's a little.

I don't think you smell that good.

Let's give away some homework today. So let's imagine somebody young is listening. They want to be chef, they want to be you. They want to start a waste management company. Let's go through like what are the seven steps that they need to do to start a company Just like this.

The first thing I would say is do your research. I mean we're in the research era. So whether it's YouTube, you know, social media, figure out what you want to do. Find something that's very simple. Something that's simple but has a correctable problem. Third thing, we chase problems in the business world, we want to solve problems. When you solve problems, that becomes a very lucrative thing for us. Fourth thing I would probably say is gain the experience. Even myself as a professional athlete who had, you know, I had resources, had capital, I still decided to be an employee at my company, be active so I can learn. The best way you learn to lead your company, your guys is gain experience, do it yourself. Fifth one is gain as much financial experience and just knowledge as you can. Banks, you know, you gotta figure out what banks are looking for. What's the criteria? Cash flow, margins. Chase could deny you, but you can find a local banking business system that'll support you. Sixth thing I would say is minority certifications. You know, we're in the space right now where we're seeing the minority just doesn't look like a black and brown individual. Minority now are women owned businesses or people with disabilities. They're widening the stage scope and just the things that come with being a minority. So figure out where minority opportunities in your market and capitalize on them. And the seventh thing I would say is what's your exit plan? You know, unlike real estate, where there's hard land or structures built on top of land, businesses don't last forever. I don't care if you're a Walton, at some point Walmart will Belly up. Some businesses last longer than others. But the whole idea is to be able to build something of value and have an exit plan. So then you can take that those resources and continue to invest in a variety of other things to widen your portfolio.

First, let's talk about what's awesome about this business. You've got reoccurring revenue. You've got commercial contracts. That means they're harder to cancel. They're bigger jobs. You've got a sustainable industry that you know that you have built in demand. Recession resistant industry because everybody's going to the bathroom always. And you've got a business that you can have a hyper localized model and experience spanned throughout all amazing. But there are many things that suck about this business. Let's talk about it. It stinks. Obviously we're dealing with human waste. So the number one thing is you cannot be queasy. The second thing that sucks about this business is look what's happening here. Do you see the paint coming off my face? Is it sweaty outside? This is a hard, manual intensive business. Third thing about this business is anytime you're dealing with unskilled labor, these guys come and go quickly. They don't often stay and there's a lot of problems. The other thing that's tough about this business is there's expensive equipment like trucks that cost a lot of money that you might need to have in the beginning or at least be able to rent them. Those are some of the biggest things I see. You tell me in the comments what else you see that's awesome about this. And it stinks. Height. Nailed it. Touchdown.

Yeah. I think you would have made the team.

I would have made the team.

I don't know if you practice squad or not, but you make the team.

Let's talk about how to scale a company like this. Here's what I do. The first thing you want to do if you've never run a company like this is exactly what Shep said. I would go and work for a company like this. I would actually want to go work in sales. Why? Because if you can get sales, everything else gets solved as a problem. The hardest thing to understand in a business like this would be how do I talk a construction site into actually letting me be the person to handle their way. If you don't know the answer to that, well, go watch people who do that for a living. So you go and work in a sales job. The second thing that I would do is when I was in that sales position, I'd be talking to the management and Saying, can I understand the unit economics? Which means if we have this thing that we sell, porta potties, how much does the porta potty cost, how much do we charge the client for it, and how much is left in the middle? The third thing that I would want to go do is I want to figure out what is the most valuable client that you have. And because I know in the very beginning I'm not going to be very good because I'm just going to be starting out this business, I want to go and figure out the most valuable, most expensive client that I can have, because that way I don't have to get as many of them and I can have still a lot of profit in it. A lot of things that people do wrong is when they start out in a business like this, they go after the easiest client to get. Often the easiest client to get is the cheapest client. They don't stay with you. You don't have enough margin to make mistakes. And then the next thing that I would do is I would actually figure out, once I understood all of this, could I buy the business as opposed to build it? Remember when he said he had a startup and so it wasn't bankable in the beginning because there was no revenue, there was no history. Well, if instead you go out and you buy a business like this, then you have the opportunity to use the historical cash flow in order to get a loan so you don't have to use your own money. Now that comes with its own set of risks. This is just what I would do to scale faster. So I think he's a little bit right.

Right.

This is liquid gold.

Double teaming Ozell. Eli Manning's out. I need you to give me the ball. Throw me the ball.

Okay. Ready? And I go. Ready. Set. High. Yeah.

Yeah, but you're going that way. Yeah, but you should face that way then.

Oh, there you go. Ready, set, hike. I panicked. I panicked.