How Poop Bandit Lands $3,000-a-Month HOA Pet Waste Contracts Without Ads

How did a consultant to billionaires end up running a pet waste removal company?

Mike Wright started Poop Bandit in 2017 to give his oldest son a job. The idea came up over a taco dinner with his wife in the middle of the week, and he had the brand and the company running within 24 hours.

For most of his career Mike had done something very different. He recruited household staff for billionaires: butlers, private chefs, personal assistants, nannies and estate managers. He also ran a trade association for domestic staff for about a decade. “It was definitely a suit and tie endeavor,” he said.

Poop Bandit stayed tiny until 2020. When his son left for the Marine Corps, the company had 8 to 10 customers, and Mike spent a summer deciding whether he really wanted to be, in his words, “a poop picker upper.” He went all in, landed his first big HOA account in September 2020, and treated 2021 as his first full-time year.

How did Poop Bandit land its first $3,000-a-month HOA contract?

Through a friend of a friend. Mike asked a family friend who had recently gone into real estate to have coffee, hoping she might refer home buyers with dogs. At that meeting in the real estate office, he heard about a community where the pet stations and trash cans were always overflowing and missing bags, from a realtor who lived there and knew the HOA president.

She made the introduction the next day. Mike got on the phone, then asked to meet in person, which he called “always a bonus if you can do it.” He met the president that same week, sent an agreement the day of the meeting, and it came back signed.

That contract was over $3,000 a month for 65 trash cans and 30 pet stations, serviced multiple days a week. It is still his largest HOA, though he now has several above $3,000. “I was all in after that because I was like, oh, I can pay my mortgage now,” he said.

How does he keep winning HOA contracts without advertising?

By treating it as relationship and referral marketing. Mike said he stopped paid advertising in November 2021 and did not start again until the January before the episode. “You’re not going to throw out $3,000 worth of Facebook ads and a bunch of managers are going to reach out to you,” he said.

What he did instead:

• Dropped off donuts and listened. He got to know association managers the old-fashioned way and let them do most of the talking, so he could learn what mattered to them.
• Went where managers go. He pointed to the Community Associations Institute (CAI), the organization community managers use for professional development and certifications.
• Did the job so well he was hard to replace. A new manager or board usually wants to trim the budget, and someone will always bid lower. His answer is to go over the top on service and never let the answer be no.
• Followed managers when they moved. He has been through six managers at one $3,000 account. Managers who leave take his number to their next management company, and the manager arriving is often someone he already knows.

Most of the time the pet stations are being handled by a landscaper who does not want the work, which makes it easier to win.

What does an HOA pet waste contract actually cover?

Poop Bandit empties the pet station bins and the community trash cans, refills the bags, and cleans up anything within a 10 to 15 foot circle of each station. It does not scoop the common areas, and Mike will usually talk a manager out of asking.

His reasoning is simple. As soon as residents see someone in uniform picking up dog waste, they decide their dues cover it and stop using the stations. Then there is more waste everywhere, the next resident sees it and gives up too, and the community has wasted what it spent on stations. When he shows a manager the budget for his program next to the budget for scooping everything, he said, it is “kind of a no-brainer.”

HOA contracts or residential customers: which is better?

Mike runs both, on separate routes, and gave an honest list for each.

HOAs: his accounts average about $600 a month. Scheduling is forgiving, since a manager does not mind Tuesday instead of Monday as long as nothing overflows. Churn is low; he loses about four accounts a year and gains about 20. The costs are real, though. He buys about $4,000 a month in dispenser bags, pays $800 to $1,000 a month for an eight-yard dumpster emptied every weekday, needs a warehouse, and washes the trucks daily. It is also a slow build, and losing one $3,000 account “stings a lot worse than losing five residential customers a month.”

Residential: customers average about $100 a month, sign up online through Sweep&Go, and can be added quickly if your ads are dialed in. Many of his have never spoken to him in years of service. The trade-off is that they expect you on the exact day, so when a technician calls in sick, the owner goes out and scoops.

What would he tell a scooper thinking about HOAs?

Get out and meet people, even if it does not come naturally. Mike called pet waste removal a great industry for introverts, but said HOA contracts require relationships, and that they take time to pay off. “If you expose yourself to danger enough times, something good is going to come out of it,” he said.

He also does not worry much about new competitors or franchises that undercut local pricing. In his view they cannot erase a five to eight year relationship with a manager.