How Ladybug Scoops Grew From a Lawn Care Add-On to 250 Weekly Pet Waste Clients

How did Ladybug Scoops start?

Ladybug Scoops grew out of a lawn care business. When Nicole Provolt met her husband in 2017, she was leaving the casino industry and he ran an established lawn service. He was tired of stepping in and mowing over dog poop, so he required clients to pick it up, and charged them when they did not.

Then one client’s husband, a Navy ship captain who was away half the year, came home and wanted to mow his own lawn. She asked if they would keep coming just to pick up the poop. Nicole called it a moment of “wow, really?”

They grew that side of the business, stopped taking new lawn clients and phased the rest out. On January 1, 2019 they formally started Ladybug Scoops with about 45 recurring weekly clients, around a dozen of them kept from the lawn service.

The name is a nod to Nicole’s dear friend, her husband’s sister, who died of breast cancer at a young age. “We always say that ladybugs are good for your yard,” she said.

How did Ladybug Scoops grow from 45 clients to 250?

Slowly, by doing “anything and everything.” When they started, they were by far the only service in the area, and Nicole said there was zero awareness that it existed. Many early clients were people who had moved in from places where they already had a scooper.

What she did:

• Yard signs, which people still tell her they see all around town
• Door hangers
• Posts in Facebook groups and on Craigslist
• Business cards on any bulletin board she could find
• Local events, even ones she knew would not produce customers

It was a few years before she found her first poop scooping Facebook group, which she said opened her eyes to the industry. Learning to run her own Facebook ads was the game changer. Even continual awareness ads at $2 or $3 a day were critical, and Facebook is now her most reliable source of leads.

Today Ladybug Scoops has 250 recurring weekly clients. Nicole and her husband both still work in the field.

What does her lead follow-up look like?

Fast, then persistent. A Facebook lead form triggers a text to her phone. She replies with a quote saved in her notes, adjusted as needed, and a picture of herself and the team. No response means a check-in the next day, then a drip sequence, then a long-term drip.

“People are not banging down my door. My phone is not ringing off the hook,” she said. “So I’m constantly having to follow up with the leads.”

She also cross-promotes with a local mobile groomer, a lawn service and a pet nanny and dog walker. She recently started Google Ads, mostly to track leads, since the company already ranks first on Google in all of its service areas.

How does Ladybug Scoops stand out from newer competitors?

By going above and beyond, which is the company motto. The team brings trash cans up from the street, lets a client know about a package on the porch and offers to secure it, and picks up dead mice, rats and birds. Sometimes they tell the client and sometimes they do not.

The team has put out a couple of fires in clients’ garbage cans. Once Nicole’s husband stopped a stroller, with a baby in it, from rolling down a driveway into the street.

Reviews are the other edge. Nicole had about 60 Google reviews after a concerted effort, and noticed that a new scooper in the area already had 30. “I got to get myself together here,” she said. The company now has 184.

What is next for Ladybug Scoops?

An employee, then growth. Nicole is in the field five days a week. Some days that means 10 jobs, others a 30-job route, with office work in the evenings. Her goal is to have an employee onboarded by the end of the year so she gets full days out of the field.

She thinks the company could double its clientele and wants to add 100 clients by the end of the next spring rush. With more time she plans to visit groomers regularly and build relationships with realtors and property managers.

What would she tell a new home service owner?

Get your systems in place and go hard from the beginning. “I didn’t even know what going hard meant when I started this business,” she said.

She also warned against unrealistic expectations. Some untapped areas will grow fast, but for her it was a grind and still is.

“Anybody can go out and scoop dog poop. Anybody can go mow a lawn. Anybody can be a house cleaner,” she said. “But you have to be able to run a business.”