Grill Cleaning?

Happy Thursday!

My buddy Connor brought up an interesting, niche business.

But before we begin, I have a 1 question anonymous poll for you here. Your feedback would mean a ton and dictate the type of content I dive deep on!

Grill cleaning.

Grill cleaning is one of those businesses that we all know exists…but don’t think of often. Here’s what I love about this business:

• Can be recurring

• Can be easily add an upsell offer (but almost never happens)

• Is very very visual (this is important)

  • Before/after marketing pictures are undefeated

  • Can build a viral social presence with short form/time lapse videos - icing on the cake

• Usually serves a higher income client

• Is underserved in most markets (after cursory research). If you want to see how under or oversaturated this is in your market, watch this and take notes! Or keep reading.

• Can grow exclusively with organic Nextdoor and Facebook posts

• You don’t have to have a truck

And the downsides?

• It takes forever (but does it have to?)

• Lower ticket

• Dirty

Connor and I discussed how we’d scale this biz on a podcast episode that’s coming out next week, but I’ll give you a sneak peek.

First of all, let’s estimate how big this market is. I’ll show you how my brain works, feel free to look away if you don’t like what you see:

• There are 334m Americans

• There are 142m American households. This includes apartments, homes, mobile homes, etc.

• 334/142 = 2.35, therefore there are 2.35 people per household in the US

• 70% of households own a grill, which equals 100m households. Each household usually has one decision maker, so we can’t assume 70% of babies and children are a potential grill cleaning customer as well.

• Of the 100m households that own a grill, I’d guess that 10% of them could be a potential customer. This is a big assumption, but there’s just not a lot of data to go on here. So we’ll use 5% as a backup number.

• This means that in any given market, 1.5 - 3% of the population is a potential customer. Here’s how I got that math:

• DFW has 8 million people. 8m divided by 2.35 people per household = 3.4m households. But only 70% of them own a grill, so 2.4m households.

• If 5% of them is a potential customer then thats 120k households, or 240k if 10%.

• When you divide the 120k or 240k by the 8m total DFW residents, you end up with 1.5% and 3%, respectively.

• I like converting household numbers to population numbers to make math easier when hopping from city to city. Make sense?

I’m assuming that DFW has the same humans per household as the national average, which it’s likely higher.

I’m also assuming that 70% of DFW residents own a grill, which that’s likely higher as well. So it’s a wash.

So for YOUR market, take the population and multiply by .03 if you want to assume that 10% of grill owners are a potential customer, and .015 if 5%.

So how big is this industry?

Well, from everything I’ve researched, you can expect to pay $250 per cleaning, on average. Larger grills are more and smaller grills are less.

How often do you need this? Every year? Every 2 years? Let’s say every year to keep it simple.

That means that there are 10m American households that would or could pay for this every year, if we’re using 10%, or 5m if we’re using 5%.

Kinda nice and clean how that math shakes out huh?

So this industry is worth about $1.25B - $2.5B, before any upsells. I’m simply multiplying $250 and by 10m and 5m.

If I somehow figured out how to acquire every grill cleaning biz in DFW and fully saturated my market it would be a $60m/year business before any upsells.

I already know what you’re thinking

“No way it’s that big. This is too niche.”

And respectfully, I think you’re wrong. Industries are much bigger than you think.

Tree trimming in DFW alone is a $500m industry, or about 8.3x - 16.6x bigger.

So to capture 5% of the DFW market would be a $3m business. Not bad! This would mean you have to clean 1,000 grills per month or 45 per day!

If the clean takes 2 hours and driving is 30 minutes per job, thats 113 man hours needed per working day, or 13 1-man crews. You’d also need a small facility, someone to help answer phones, someone to manage them, etc.

It’s a lot like a pressure washing business, but more niche. But everyone wants to start a pressure washing business, and how many people wanna do this?

How many companies are in DFW doing this and only this?

I counted 8. Now this doesn’t account for all the Chuck-in-a-trucks and guys without a website, but we don’t care about them anyway.

If this is a $60m local industry, then there’s room for 60 $1m businesses, right?

I’d say this is very undersaturated. But why?

• Homeowners don’t think to pay for this. More education is needed.

• Would-be business owners don’t think to start this.

But what do we KNOW to be true?

• Homeowners definitely ARE willing to pay for this. 1% 5? 10%? 30%?

• I don’t know of anyone that’s received cold outreach to have their grill cleaned. No one has ever sent me a mailer, a FB ad, a call, a text or knocked on my door.

• This is a straightforward business with a binary outcome.

The guy who can really win at this business is the one that will change how the logistics work.

• Go hit a neighborhood hard iwth direct mail (We’ll be there on September 22nd to get your grates. 30% discount but only on that day).

• Spray down the grill to let it soak

• Take everyone’s grates with you to your facility

• Tag them all with identifying info, soak them all together for X hours, spray them with a pressure washer.

• Bring them back to the homeowners’ grills and finish the job on the actual grill (I’m distinguishing between the dirty grill itself and the dirty grates)

This would save 60-80% of the time spent cleaning each unit. Which either means you can drop your price or increase your margins.

Yes, some grates would need a lot more manual scrubbing than others. I’ve cleaned my own grill many times!

If you want to hear about what I had in mind for upsell options, you’ll have to listen to the podcast when it comes out on Wednesday morning.

Or I may cover it in next week’s newsletter, because I wanted to cover it today but I’m out of time.

I hope you liked this one! Please refer friends to this newsletter at the link below. I know you know someone that might wanna start this!

Good luck!

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Thanks for reading!

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner