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

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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.

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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?

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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%.

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So how big is this industry?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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