Septic may be one of the most overlooked businesses in home services, but it might also be one of the best.
In this special compilation episode of Owned and Operated, John Wilson brings together two of the biggest conversations we've had on the septic industry, featuring Chad and Kyle from Epic Septic alongside Micah of Homefield. Together, they break down why septic has become one of the most compelling opportunities in home services and what it really takes to build a scalable business in the space.
From pumping and repairs to installations, route density, marketing, and franchising, they share the economics behind the business, the operational challenges unique to septic, and the systems they're using to grow across multiple markets. Whether you're looking to buy a septic company or simply want to understand why so many operators are bullish on the industry, this episode is a complete deep dive.
In This Episode:
• Why septic is one of the most attractive home service businesses
• The economics of pumping, repairs, and installations
• How pumping creates long-term customer value
• Why modern marketing is a competitive advantage in septic
• Pricing, route density, and improving profitability
• Scaling across multiple markets and states
• The infrastructure challenges every septic operator faces
• What buyers should know before acquiring a septic business
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🔗 CONNECT
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John Wilson → https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbwilson1/
Chad & Kyle (Epic Septic) → https://epicseptic.com/
Micah Findley (Homefield) → https://www.homefieldonsite.com/
Breaking $5M Workshop → https://www.ownedandoperated.com/upcoming-events/oao-workshop-breaking-5-million
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💰 SPONSORS
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Service Scalers
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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
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I don't know what it is about Septic that fascinates people. They love shit.
And we call it a brown color industry.
We are currently trying to figure out how we can make a billion dollar septic.
We'll be out with the franchise. So we've been like working on this thing for months and months and months and months. So we have um our own energy drink that we've created. Brand is something that we've started to build the beginnings of a lifestyle brand around the septic world, which is like the weirdest thing you could possibly conceive of.
Septic is a black box to people. They have no idea what they're looking at, they don't know anything about it. We see very few people try to fix stuff on their own, and so that is your lowest hanging fruit.
Well, the pumping is like easy money.
It's easy money. Anybody can do it, and then you have the install side of it that can range from $12,000 one-day job up to $2 million job. It's gonna take about two years.
Let's explain what this is. So someone goes and pumps a septic, you have to get rid of it. So all of our trucks are somewhere between 3,500 and 4,200 gallons. Okay, yep. Like bigger trucks. Yep. And you fill up a truck with 4,000 gallons of sewage, it's gotta go somewhere. Yep.
So you take it to you can uh you can do what's called land spread, which is like literally spreading on drive into land, you open it up, and you drive that thing up and down until it's all out.
Yeah, which is funny. Um, so you can do land spread. You can like the most common way is a treatment plant. So like the most city, county your city's sewage plant, you go drop it off. It's a giant concrete box, basically. You open up the end and it just dumps. And and they hate septic trucks. Yeah.
Just so you know, because like if you think about it, um, like those plants, I mean, it's a giant aerobic plant. That's uh that's all it is. And so they're designed to take in so much sewage. And so the all the waste coming out of your house is like, I don't know, 95% water, right? Showers and everything like that. A septic truck is 95% solid waste. Yeah, right. So every time you're going in there, you're like uh supercharging there. So they actually don't even like it. Yeah. Um, and so every literally every area we're going into right now and we're registering new trucks with those pumps, they're regulating or they're limiting the counties that we're so they're saying it has to be in one of these three counties, and we have manifest and we have to show them. Uh, they're saying that they're saying they're just about to straight up stop accepting new trucks. Yeah. Or they're saying that any new trucks are gonna be literally triple the price. Yeah. So we're at eight cents a gallon. Some of them saying uh, you know, any new trucks they're bringing on after January one are gonna be at 24 cents a gallon because they're trying to limit it. And so that's one of like these puzzle pieces that any time that we have to go into place, the very first thing we do is start calling around to all the wastewater treatment plants. Um just fine. Yeah, because that's uh, but again, fortunately for us, that's not our only source of business. That's our lead generator. So for us, um, we're trying to be competitive and we're trying to be profitable on that, but we're not trying to hit our licks from pumps because I'm trying to get because what the whole goal here is, is if you look at a septic, like a residential septic customer, and you look at them on like the lifetime value of that, we're at like, I don't know, $500 to $1,000 per year. So if you add in the pumps, the maintenance, the repairs, and then eventually these things fail, and you either have to get your field replaced or your whole tank replaced or or the entire thing. So if you look at that over about a 10-year, uh, it's about a thousand dollars per year there. So our cost of customer acquisition is lower than any other uh business that that that that we've been in. So for like digital, I mean, I think we're 10 bucks. Oh yeah. Uh yeah, I think our cost per click is like, yeah.
Well, it's a it's a highly it's an unsophisticated industry. Absolutely. So, you know, the fact that you would even market it all is like, what do you mean? So to most of the industry. So I remember signing up for it and getting six dollar leads and being like, Oh yeah, what it's nuts.
So, like the guy that lives across the street from my dad, right when my dad moved there, this guy's got the nicest house in the neighborhood. Uh, went over there and started meeting him. I said, What do you do? He goes, I own septic company. Started realizing he's the largest company uh in the town that I'm from. Yeah. And I went to go Google him, doesn't have a website.
Most marketing agencies will show you clicks, impressions, and maybe even traffic, but none of that really matters if the phone's not ringing. And that's why we partner with service scalers. They are built specifically for home service companies and they focus on one thing, which is driving real, high-quality calls and book jobs. This is a no-brainer. They're offering a 60-day money-back guarantee on LSA management, Google Business Profile Optimization, and website builds. If you don't get more visibility, more calls, and better leads, then you don't pay. If you want more book jobs without the marketing headache, click the link below and book a free strategy call with Service Killers.
A couple uh year later, I invited him to breakfast just to go learn more about it. And I said, Man, why don't you have a website? He literally, like, no one's ever asked him that. He thought about it and he said, Don't need one. Yeah. He said, you know, Daddy got us in the yellow pages in the 80s and be working it, you know. And so we go in. Um, most of these guys, if they have a website, it is uh very it's a Wix website. Um uh they don't do, they're not Google guaranteed, they're not on uh local service ads, they maybe have seven or eight reviews. So it is the absolute lowest bar that we could even imagine on that side of it. And so that's what we do is on the pumping side, we're able to go in and grab up just because we're the only one showing up. I mean, within six months, we're you know, we're we're we're LSA, we're pay-per-click, we're in the Map Pack, and we're in the top three. I mean, from our websites, I mean, we we go really down the rabbit hole on the SEO side of it. So within six months, we're pretty much covering 90% of the top, and so we can get the phones ringing. So we have to figure out how to make sure to take that and be able to turn it into a full customer relationship. Because if I can get a new lead for 35 bucks, right? And we don't roll any vehicles without charging something, right?
So oh yeah, well, okay, walk me through that.
Yep. So uh so on the pump trucks, we're getting a credit card before we're ever rolling. So we let people know, and this is where the confusing part comes in because we have to tell people, hey, it's X amount up to uh certain amount of gallons. Well, they don't know how many gallons it is, we don't know how many gallons it is. Um, so we so we really have to educate the customer on that side of it. What a lot of guys literally will do is um, hey, it's so they'll so they'll advertise 300 bucks, right? They get out there, oh, we don't know where your tank is, $150 locating fee. Call the customer. Okay, oh, well, then we got a dig fee, right? Then we got to do all that. Next thing you know, you're paying over a thousand dollars. And so um, so on the pumping side of it, um, yeah, so if you call, you want to send a pump truck out there, we're getting a credit card on file. Um, and then for any of our service vehicles, I would say on average, it's about 95 bucks for a service call, uh, which includes up to about a half an hour worth of a worth of a technician's time. Um, so I look at a lot of other, you know, just home service businesses or franchises. I saw some guy on Twitter the other day said something about uh, you know, the quickest way to lose money is uh to get a $40 LSA click and somebody to call just to tell you that your price is too high on something. Yeah. So we're trying to avoid that completely, right? And so uh before we before we roll any truck, uh, we're getting a credit card on file and you have some type of service fee that goes along with that.
That is interesting.
Yeah, yeah. Cause I'm not um the only time that we'll actually send somebody out there without something like that is on a new install. Um, you know, we'll send one of our estimators out there to actually get that. Um, but even then we're giving them a price over the phone very quickly, right? In this range, you know, it's normally $10,000 to $15,000, but we won't know that until we get engineered plans back. So yeah. Even on the inside.
I think that makes a ton of sense, man. So when we first bought it, like AR and Septic was one of the biggest pain points ever. And it was sort of like a ridiculous pain point because, like, why would we have AR for $200? So it'd be like $50,000 at a time. And we're like, this is crazy. Why aren't we just paying? And then I ordered a dumpster for my house to go do it, like, do a model in my basement. And they wouldn't come out to my house without a credit card. And I was like, Well, that makes total freaking sense. So then we did that, and like AR went.
Yeah, our DSOs for most of our companies are five days, like like there is everybody, and even on our installs, I and uh I mean, we're getting paid 50% up front before we do anything, so yeah, that's that's much different from me coming from restoration. Totally, you know, we had negotiating for payments a few days later and some guys literally their average days to pay was like 90 days, yeah. Yeah, and we're like, yeah, I mean we've gone through that.
We have a restoration brand here, and we've gone through that. So we talked industry, we talked septic business.
I want to talk a little bit about home field. Yeah, what are we doing?
Yeah, the best way to try to describe this is because like we were talking about earlier, most franchises are here's your playbook, yeah, all of it, stick to the plan. Yeah, because we know um that the bar is really, really low to get the phone ring, what we're looking for is capacity builders. So, meaning that um if I can get your phone to ring, so the here's something that we really miscalculated whenever we started off is the amount of work we were gonna start off with and the amount of installs that we were gonna have just from digital advertising. So our very first new location started up, and I think they had 12 installs in their first six months, yeah, which is what we were we were not planning on doing that, right? So um, so what our what our real model is is start off on the pumping side, do the repair side, build your capacity there, get cash flow coming in, sub some stuff out, do what you can, and then slowly build out from there. So if you look at that, you have to because I mean Jay and I, I mean, literally took us probably a year and a half before we ever even started thinking about selling our first first one to say, all right, step by step, when we bring people on, what challenges are they gonna run into as business owners? And how do we kind of combat against that? And how do we build out the the support in order to be able to get them through that? So um, so that's our business model. So I'm not um our typical or our um our ideal owner is probably not a first-time business owner. Um, I know a lot of franchises out there, especially in the service businesses, say that they're good for, you know, kind of first-time entrepreneurs. If you do not have some type of background in scaling and being able to recruit, attract, and retain top employees, this probably isn't for you. Um because again, we don't most franchises or just most businesses in general, you start up a home service business, and the first bucket that you have to get past is getting your phone to ring, right? Yeah. We kind of skip past that step and go straight to okay, can you get good people on that are able to do this work and do it well and be able to show up for the customers every single time? Those are the people that we're really, really looking for because what we're telling people is listen, we can get your phone to ring 100%. We're gonna set up all the technology and get it all to you, but you have to answer the phone, you have to impress the customer, and you have to actually get out there and be able to do it. So um the way that we built Home Field is um, so the very first thing that we do is we have a full internal marketing uh um uh team. We don't do anything. Um, we have outside people, kind of contractors, build our websites, but other than that, the people that run your LSA campaigns for you, run your pay-per-click campaigns, run your social media, those people sit in my office. So I don't trust any digital agencies out there a hundred percent. I I I just don't trust them. So we do that a hundred percent. So whenever you come on, uh so the very first thing that we do whenever somebody comes into the system is one, we have to understand their market. So like I said, we go do all the public information uh requests, how many systems, how many systems, that type of stuff, what the rate is feel like 10%, 8% is like a good like if 70,000 systems is the number you gave me.
Like, is that a target? Like what's good?
Yeah, um, so that's a good question. And it really depends upon uh it's harder to nail down in areas that don't have service agreements because you know you're gonna have your pumping, your repairs, and yeah, in your installs. So it's kind of hard to know exactly. But yeah, I mean, if you have 30,000, 40,000 systems there and you're looking at 10%, but um, you really kind of have to break those numbers down. It's it's a lot easier to do where there's service agreements because if you have an X amount of service agreements, you know you're gonna get so much work out of that off of there. But yeah, we normally target minimum 30 to 40,000 systems in an area. Um, our FDD says it's based upon population. Population really doesn't matter. Uh like the one we just did up.
Number of tanks. I mean, New York City has all the all the people know tanks.
There you go, right? Um, same thing. Like we just did Collin County, which is north of Dallas, which is McKinney. I mean, it's growing like crazy up there. Yep. I think that territory is like 1.2 million people, but 800,000 of them are on sewer, so it really doesn't matter. So it's so it's a number of tanks. So minimum we like to say about 30 to 40,000, but like we looked at like there's one county in Texas that literally has 70,000 systems.
That's a lot.
Yeah. So first thing we do is we have to understand the total addressable market there, how many systems are in the ground. Then we move on to licensing and this is just septic.
This isn't like Greece, because there's a lot of other things you can pump.
Yes, so our location in Phoenix does. So she is very heavily into commercial.
Yeah, we're doing we're doing grease too. It's it's an interesting business. But it's a whole nother business. It's a whole other business. But you know, when we bought this thing, I thought this was like it was crazy. Because there, some of these businesses, like some restaurants, if you're bad, yeah, right. If like there's if you're not doing a good job with your internal grease like containment or how you rinse or whatever, like the sewage, the city knows who's dropping grease in their sewers. They know exactly who's dropping. There's no freaking question. So they'll come and hunt down the perpetrator of clogging their city sewers.
Yep because everybody knows exactly who it is. Oh, yeah, it's wild.
And they'll make these guys pump like twice a week. They will. Once a week. Yeah. So we have contracts that are like a hundred thousand dollars a year. Like one business. What do you all dump it at? Uh yeah, they get the grease. Yeah, the grease gets really hairy. Okay. You have like one place will accept grease around here.
Do you know who owns it? No.
I think it's the city, but okay.
Well, in certain areas, just so people if you're thinking about getting into this and we look and like because our other location is in Phoenix, yeah, fantastic. I mean, there are homes right in the middle of the city that are on septic because they do vertical trenches there, they do vertical pits. So they do interesting, they'll literally do a four or six-foot-wide pit 60 feet in the ground, and so they're able to do it on a lot less space to be able to do it there. But they do a lot of grease. But the only place to dump grease at in Phoenix is owned by Liquid Environmental, yeah, who is their competitor out there, right? And so they have to take 20% of their grease from outside companies. So, of course, they set their price right at where they're still gonna retain 80% of the market. Yeah, and so grease is becoming uh again, if you want to get into it, it's hard. It is very, very hard because a lot of the times the place that you're gonna take it to is owned by your competitor. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so we do that.
We actually didn't get to talk about that, but I do I'm gonna plug that for later. Like, I want to talk about like the infrastructure of building out the treatment plants.
Yes, and so that's yeah, we do we we need to talk about that because any we looked at this, yeah. It's a uh and so that's any how much how much is it?
Like I'm in Ohio, like what should I expect? A hundred thousand, a million.
Oh, I would say over a million. Uh it it's not so like um our partner in Texas, he is, and so like this is what's weird about septic. There's not a septic store that you go buy your parts from. Right. Right. Um, very few places have actual, and whenever you do, you're paying really high retail prices for it. Most of the time you're buying it from a distributor who is one of your competitors. Yeah. Okay. So our partner in Texas, he's the in he is the infiltrator distributor. So if you go build a wastewater treatment plant, you could literally buy it from uh from infiltrator. He knows how to do all that. The problem is is the environmental side of it. So you have to get sign-offs from the cities, you have to do ecological surveys, you have to do all that. To actually build one of these things, yeah, maybe a million dollars. But all the other stuff that goes around it, probably I shoot, it could be up to five million dollars. And then it depends. Some of them can process grease, some of them can't process grease. So we look at it on a spectrum and say, on one side you have land application, that's the easiest, lowest cost thing to do there. On the full other side, you have a full-on wastewater treatment plant that's like a mini version of like what your county uses or something. Then you have a lot of different things in between there. But the people that we're bringing in, we're telling all of them we need to be looking at this and you need to be thinking about how you're gonna keep vertically integrating. And if you need to buy your own land to do your own uh land app or that type of stuff, you need to be thinking ahead of this right now because these are barriers that you're gonna keep facing up against as you keep growing. Um, because where you're gonna dump this stuff out is one of our major concerns out there.
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Go check it out at bigreputation.ai slash okay the specific comp uh comment in one of the videos that you talked that you have septic, someone says, nice intro. This is Patrick Sears 163, but you never actually talk about how to scale to 100 million. What would that look like? And these are good questions. How many trucks? How many employees? Back office requirements, how big of a service area? Since septics are mostly rural, that's a lot of square miles. Like maybe the the last comment is everyone thinks rural when they think septic, but there's also lift stations, there's also grease traps and grip traps and all these things that can happen in the suburban. We're not urban influence at all. Yeah, and and the infrastructure is not gonna be, you're not gonna run city sewer anymore, and it gets expensive even to hook it up. Like septic is septic to septic, and it's like one of every three homes in America. Yeah. So it's like a significant quantity. Um, but to get to that 100 million, I think in in our instance, we're talking about getting to 1 billion. Do you want to unpack the billion?
You can do that. Okay, so your numbers guy.
Yeah, so I mean, like when we're talking a billion, we're talking enterprise value. So if we're gonna back into what is a million dollars worth of enterprise value, if you could truly build a national brand in this industry, you're looking at probably a 20x multiple on this. And so this is something where that would be an EBITDA multiple, like profit, let's just call it. Um and so out of that, you're looking at how do how do I get to like a number that's not insane? Um, we're talking like $50 million of EBITDA. Um, and when you get you have your videos, you're talking about after all the admin, like so your gross margins, like you can run 70% on the pumping side, and then you have your big repairs or maybe you know the lower margin work that you're doing on like the install side. Oh, let's just say you're running 20% net profit. So you're gonna say 20%, okay, I'm gonna multiply my 50 million by five. So I need to get to a quarter billion dollars, 250 million um in revenue. Now, how are we gonna do that?
You don't actually think you need that much.
I don't even think you need that much.
I don't think you need that.
We know some people and they're multiples and what they're gonna get. Like you're if you would ever, not that you would ever sell Wilson, you're gonna command a super premium multiple because you're an institution. And when you go to Google, you're a thousand and you're number one, and your Google is informing all the generative answer engine, AI, you know, voice call. Like you have a behemoth, people will pay a premium for that. So if if we're looking at each other.
Well, I just mean like, sorry, just to unpack the PL a little bit more. Yep, I don't think you need that much revenue. Oh, and revenue. So something we've learned that this year, and that's been kind of interesting. So we went from one, we had we ran multiple locations back in like uh four or five years ago. Yep. And then we merged them all into this one. And then this year we're like, hold my beer. Yeah, or hold my hold my. So so we went from uh one to we'll have four locations at the end of congratulations. But like that started, the first one was January 1st. Yeah. So we um and what has been wild is the it I guess depends on how much you guys centralize because you're a franchise, so maybe you can't centralize as much.
We can do a lot of back office for folks. Okay.
Um, and so because the centralizing, like I think 20%, I it probably ends up being like 40%. I would imagine, yeah, after centralized.
From your mouth to God's ears, like we gotta be careful on the multiple or like the profit that we talk about just because we're regulated by FTC.
So, like, I'll give like uh just my quick uh how it worked for us, because I would imagine it would work the same.
Yep.
So we went from one location to again, we're about to close on our fourth one, and uh it's three states, and then we've centralized most of their but we basically deleted their overhead, which I know like obviously it's gonna be independent operators, so like a different thing for you guys. Um but net doubled. And uh like overhead is a percentage of revenue went from like 34, which was like already pretty tight, yeah, to like we're in the high 20s, inclusive of marketing. Yeah, yeah. And like that's five percent swing is millions of dollars.
Well, but what was the biggest number? Like what of that of that five percent, what was the the things that you cut? What was what was the makeup?
So well, part of it was like a big focus on gross profit. So our gross profit went like raised your prices, we raised prices, but we also focused on higher profit like jobs units. So like rest we have a restoration department, and that's a 75, 80 percent gross margin. Yeah, so like, okay, well, can we do more of that? Septic, can we do more of that? Can we go bring on the next driver? Can we add another shift? Um, what was the other ones? Uh like sewer replacement, which is a little a little bit tangential here.
Um jetting and all the other things associated with that.
And then, but like less on HVAC, because HVAC, like if you're best in class HVAC, you're like 51, 52% gross profit.
Yeah.
If you're best in class septic, you're 80%. So like it's like, oh. Okay, well, how do we just maximize gross margin and uh hit harder? So that was a big part of uh what happened. And then we centralized call center, dispatch, accounting, marketing. I mean, we centralized a lot in a very short amount of time. So these branches, they're like two to three million dollar revenue branches, like they went from having a 45% cost structure to a 10% cost structure like overnight.
Phenomenal.
It was wild.
Can I ask a question about your operation? Are you running these 24 by 7s or how does your work hours work? For septic? Yeah, well, let's say a septic, yeah, or or broader, but yeah.
Uh no, not 24-7. Like we have like AI phones picking up. We have yeah.
Well, the the one thing that we observed when Kyle was getting behind the wheel is the nights and weekends. Your comp your competitive landscape is already a bunch of hooligans that are out there. But if you're gonna do the nights and the weekends, your competitive landscape is like nothing because no one is willing to work.
And you can rotate drivers every alternate nights and weekends. So you have a roster of drivers, yeah. And you we command, we I mean, we charge $350 for an emergency fee, and weekend fee. So that $750 ticket turns into a thousand. I mean, should we talk about average ticket price? So yeah, yeah, our Austin. So for pump outs, right? So the goal for every time we step on the house is a thousand dollars or more. Yeah. Okay.
We average a thousand and change average customer value for our you know, stub mu stub year of 2025.
Do you have that you said that's Austin? Austin. Have you looked into like my example here? Yes, 260 is a lot for like where we're pumping, which to me is hard to believe because everyone else I talk to, anywhere else in the US, it's like five. Ohio might be the lowest in the US.
So a lot of a lot of a lot of so what we've observed is in certain regions, because we've done a lot of national research. Obviously, we have a compliance team that goes into these different markets, does a lot of research. Reverse engineers it, licensure. Hey, what do we need to break into that market? What we found is that there's it's a good old boys network, and a lot of them price fix. They'll say, hey, they agree on price, they agree on price, not price fix, that's a bad word. Yeah, they agree on price, like, hey man, like we all need to make more money. There's plenty of work out there. Hey, you're here, let's all be here and let the best man win. Um, if that hasn't happened here, it probably should because like no, it definitely does. That's crazy.
The charge, John. You're like, you we do. You do, yeah. So wait, okay. All right, so it's we're the most expensive. Time out.
It's 260 up to like we were competing against 180. Yeah.
So but if you look at the economics, if you look at that, so I I've watched your video and 260, it blows my mind how still 70% gross margin on that. I mean, yeah, wow, yeah.
Well, and then how you have systems that are also well over a thousand, so you get that 1500 aerobic system. I don't know how big aerobic is in your particular service area. Yeah, yeah.
Because it's like 2,000 gallons or 1500. And you do high, so it's a high volume game for you uh here. For us, it has to be, it has to be volume.
You get route density and you get route density, we have to like map it.
And that's why, you know, I someone commented on the same video, like, hey, you know, who's getting eight? Yeah, it's like, well, we gonna have to get eight.
Yeah, we get three to four, yeah, yeah.
And if we could do 700, that'd be awesome. Yeah, but yeah, no, we we are currently, I think, $15 ahead because we're always like, Yeah, there is a good old boys club. I don't know that, like, I don't know if it's price fixing or what you call it, but everyone knows what they all charge. Like, we're all kind of friends with each other, yeah. And then we just be 15 bucks more expensive, yeah.
Well, you you have the brand to command a higher price. That's the thing. So when if I'm a homeowner and this is something that we've observed, like I one, I want to feel that the job's getting done right. And if I have like, you know, a brand that does it, it's not as polished online, or they don't answer the phone, or they show up, they're super unprofessional. Yeah, I think I'm getting taken advantage of. Just put you, I'm putting myself in the customer's. You're going to someone's home. It's a personal experience that's so we can we can command a higher price because number one, again, education is so important.
We every single one of our sales reps, every single one of our technicians have a process. They they show up to the home. The first thing they do when they go to the house, they knock on their door and they introduce themselves. Hi, my name is Thomas. I'm gonna be taking care of you today. Do you mind walking over to the septic tank with me? I'm gonna give you a crash course on what type of system you have and what I'm gonna do today. I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna take before and after photos, and after we're done, it puts a bit of a PDF, send it to them, and they'll have it for the records. And people love that, and they'll pay a premium for professionalism and also just like you being awesome at what you do.
Well, and your emergency response business in many ways where it's like people are coming to.
I don't run septic that way. I don't I don't think we optimize septic. And I've I've said this a lot. Like, there's probably so much more we can do on septic. And the problem is it's like if it ain't broke, don't have 300 grand a month, so it just gets over it. Yeah, because the rest of the business, like it's higher, way higher.
Yeah, it's a small, but I I really do think like if you got into the window.
And we know there's so much to and it's almost like annoying because you look at it and you're like, God, we could do that.
Let me let me ask you this, John, on the septic side, because I'm very curious, right? Yeah, um you just do pumping.
We stopped doing replacements.
Okay, yeah, so no installs.
No, now it would be an easy we so we stopped doing it a couple years ago. Um I think for like the independent operator, they should be doing installs.
Yeah.
I think that we ended up not doing them uh for like a variety of reasons.
It's it's general construction. It's a it's time and it's time.
It takes like our business is our business is built to do like we're gonna do $40 million this year of like same day, next day shit. Yeah, and septic is like 30 to 45 days of permitting and approvals, and like we are just not designed. So I mean, so but like the independent operator on a million of pumping, you can probably do a million to two million of replacements. So like it is real for the case.
So replace replacements, replacements is okay. So you know this, but there's like three years, like sometimes four bucks. Like, so yeah, pumping, maintenance and repairs, installs, and then real estate for resale inspections is he's where we're at. Totally. Yeah, the majority of our income outside of pumping comes from same-day repairs and maintenance. Yeah, so you asked me a question. So, like with LPD systems, low pressure doses systems, I don't know if they're out here, sometimes they're regional, but um the lines get clogged. So if you don't maintenance your pump, all that sludge gets sucked up into the pump outside. Yeah, and you have to you have to jet it. Yeah, we start at $5,000 a jet, and people pay it because if you don't do it, your whole system's gonna get told you now you're gonna pay $30,000 for a new system.
Yeah, or God forbid it backs up into your house and then you've had a very, very expensive.
But those those jobs are super quick to do. So in and out in a day. Honestly, like we're building it on the install side, it's kind of like its own business. It's like very project management, install. It's like, but the day-to-day is emergency response, pumpings lead generation for maintenance and repair. Maintenance repairs lead generation for pumping. They're they go hand in hand. And if you're not uh so for us, I'm not saying you're not doing this, but your technician, we train all our technicians to do a diagnostic inspection and identify, and a lot of them are trained to do pump replacements the same day. We have we stock our trucks, we have a big storage compartment on them with two or three uh grinder pumps and sixteen hundred dollars grinder pump and fifty percent margin, it takes 20 minutes to replace. Yeah, that's super easy money. And you being a plumber, you probably know that.
Uh yeah, but just to summarize that one thing that I'll I'll talk about as a revenue secret is jetting. That's have been a significant driver for that.
All our trucks have jetters on them.
Because you're not this is a mar high margin, low labor. Like this is a it's it's all the beautiful things that you would want. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Um well, I think in general, like drains is sort of this incredible section of uh yeah, sewer lines and so that's where the franchise, Zoom drain or Ruderman, yeah.
That's their whole business model is jetting out the city.
Yeah, you can build a monster in that region. Yeah.
On the subject of, I want to make sure that we still answer the question from our man. Um, well, there was this. I think a hundred million of revenues it's uh I think could get derive that enterprise value of a billion from your vantage point and a knowledge of multiple.
I I don't know about that, but I do think I think if the question was like, how do you get to a hundred million of revenue? Like, okay, that's 30 branches at three million apiece, and you centralize as much as possible. Like that doesn't feel that crazy to me.
It does not, yeah. Yeah. And you would be the guy to be able to say that because you're doing that with congrats on the third third state, right? Yeah. Which third is this? Which state is the new one? Are you allowed to disclose? Okay. That's a future episode.
It's actually Wilson's. Yeah, I I actually have tried to pitch uh and I in a like a roll-up idea I had um that never went anywhere, but I did try to reach out to a few people, was literally just buying other Wilson plumbings. How many? There's a lot of them. Oh wow. Oh, yeah. There's one in Columbus, there's one in Michigan. And I was like, let's just I won't even have to change the brand. This is gonna be awesome.
You should put that out into the universe just because some guys are gonna come back at you and pay. Hey, I'm actually looking to sell.
If you own a Wilson plumbing, I would love to buy.
Can I pitch you another Wilson idea? I was pitching your colleague um over here, the other John. Um so for us, like we talked about this lifestyle brand that we're oddly building. You're drinking the brand right now. Um, we use Wrangler for jeans. So we're in conversation with Wrangler. Um, Wrangler, you can buy them at Walmart. Um, we we these are kind of a stretchy little thing. We can get them for like $34. Um, but when we get into big brand mode, we're buying like thousands of these things. Yeah. Um, why not Wilson Athletics? Could your merch be Wilson? And then you kind of you could create Aura off of this Wilson Association. Has that been a conversation or a thought or anything that you proceeded?
It was like a it was a fake thought for a minute. So, like 10 years ago when we didn't have enough money to invest in like brand. We I was like, babe, here's what we do. Yes, yes. We all need logoed hats. Yes. Let's just go get the ones with the W. Dude.
Yes, watching that.
We did do that for like three years. That was our like logoed hat. It's so great.
Yeah, because your cost on that's very bucks.
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These brands out there, like that brand association, they're gonna put some media out there for you. And not that you need more media because you already have such a thing, but like it's Aura. Like that you can be in the game at your scale of that third state of deriving aura. And that's where these bigger brand endeavors, and it's gonna be a it's a cost, it's a line item that you're already spending. Um, but to have that type of association, or maybe it's Russell Wilson, who you're co-doing charity with, but your Wilson name has legs, whether you put out into the universe acquisition of the enterprise.
All you need to do is tell the Cleveland Browns to bring Russell Wilson to his sunset tour to Cleveland, yeah, then you guys can have a brand deal. Anything sounds good.
I had a client, and this this is another way you could drive media from it. Um, tiny little business. It's called Scotty Vest was the business. It wasn't time. Scotty Vest. Yeah, Scotty Vest. Um, he was on the Shark Tank, great entrepreneur, just a master of stunt marketing. This guy put um, do you remember the Sky Mall magazine that you would see when you'd go flying? Yeah, yeah. Um, there's an audience here on TikTok that's never heard of a magazine. But Sky Mall, they were in bankruptcy. And this guy out went out there and he issued a press release talking about how he's acquiring Sky Mall. Yeah. Sky Mall went for like, you know, it was a big, big organization, even though it was, but but every single media outlet picked up this. Every guy, everyone was talking about who is this Scott Jordan guy who's gonna be buying Scotty Vest? And it became this thing. And so it was in 24 hours, 40 media placements that he got there. And it was all because he was gonna, and so if you're to go go out there and talk about bringing Russell Wilson for his hero tour here to like there's there's something that's provocative and interesting. And we talked about like you're talking in SEO and you're talking about truck wraps and all these different things. The next frontier is like, how am I gonna look good in an AI engine? Like, how do I show up first? The best proxy is what you're already doing on Google is gonna be translated over there, but it also is factoring in these other breadcrumbs on the internet that don't have that backlink style value. And what that is, is your podcast, like all the things that you're doing on YouTube and this media that you're gonna get, even if it's just a conversation, you know no longer have to be stressing about the backlink and AI, and this is like a winner-takes all because a lot of this is a voice response that you're getting from people. It's like, who am I gonna get while talking to Siri? It's gonna be the number one thing that shows up. And so you're going into an industry where a thousand winner-take-all markets are gonna be existing and you're already winning and taking all, and that will continue, you know, to well, anyways. That's my high horse on brand and brand ideas. And I wanted to pitch you on the Wilson thing.
I the the Wilson thing is good. I I like both of them. I think that's pretty funny. Uh, I don't know enough about football, but I'm getting some context clues that he is a football player.
I was a football player. Okay, yeah. Now I'm just a watch-up old dad. Oh, Kyle was a good one. No, no, I meant Russell. Yeah. Russell Wilson. Oh, yeah, Russell Wilson is two-time. Literally don't know. Married to Sierra. Okay. Is he married to Sierra? Yeah, he's married to Sierra. Oh, okay.
Yeah.
What was that? I don't know what song that was. I don't know. Yeah.
Now we're getting out of our wheelhouse. No, it's cool.
But so how are you like I'm trying to imagine. So how many locations are there now?
We're also two two two corporate locations. And again, we're new to France, but we plan to be off the I mean, we could say it this is on the record. Yeah, so we'll play. Let's talk about Josh. Yeah, we plan to be in 16 states by the end of this year. Yeah. So that's that's that's what's in the pipeline right now. Uh and then Josh, um, so Josh Cohen, who is the founder of Junk Luggers, he's a big thing. Have you heard of Junk Luggers? Yeah, junk luggers. So he he's he grew to 350 locations cross-country, sold it for 100 million, yeah. Nine figure exit. 100 million, nine figure exit. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Josh, sorry, yeah, but you're welcome. You could text me later. Yeah, um, you're welcome. Um, very successful, and we're like, um, okay, we're new to franchising. We need somebody who has experience um to go try to have this. All junk call poop is.
Yeah, so that's that was a franchise, junk luggers was just junk luggers was his franchise. Are any of those non-franchise?
Which ones? The one hundred is not the franchise. All of them are franchises.
It links itself so beautifully to that.
Yeah, because it was 1-800 that got junk was a pioneer, and then junk luggers followed, and they just kind of carved his up. But so he he grew it, exited. We're like, man, who understands what we're trying to do? Okay, solid solid waste to liquid waste. Okay, yeah. We got introduced to Josh through proxy of a franchise consultant, and now he's gonna be he's he's gonna be the C he's gonna be the CEO of a franchise energy. Oh, nice, yeah. So he's he's an and financier, right? Yeah, so he's a he's a big investor in our company, and he brings not only just him, but his whole team that was responsible for bringing John Vloggers to that hundred million dollar exit into our organization. Oh, that's so we we're ready to go. We've built out so many systems and processes. Because here's the deal you know that, so you know Ohio, Septic is from regulate regulatory licensure. It's Texas is very different than Ohio, right? It's different state to state, but even county to county. Yeah, so you have to have a centralized like compliance team to go to these markets and reverse engineer. Like, how do you how do you start these? Like, yeah, some some of them like all you need is a pump truck and register with a local dump station and then a permit to dump, and you're up in operational, like in Alabama, for example, you have to wait six months and go through a big licensing thing. Wisconsin, it's a hundred, it's 1,200 hours just to be in the center of the house. Ohio was a 45-minute open book online. So you want to hear Texas? Texas is this. So, like, okay, like plumbers, you have to do 10,000 hours to get your journeyman and whatever how many hours to get your master. In Texas, you take one course, okay? It's three days long. And then for for septic. Okay, so to get your installer one. So there, okay, so there's installer.
There's installing and there's so there's no license.
So the only thing in in in in pumping in Texas, you just need to get CDL, permit your truck, yeah, and dump. There's no license requirement in Texas for pumping. I mean, it's a less less stringent. What the big uh regulatory TCQ Texas Commission Environmental Quality, you take uh your level one installer test, which is three days and a test. And then, but you also take you the simultaneously, you could take your basic maintenance provider test, be able to do maintenance. Um, those are those are your those are your bears' entry. And then you can go be a license, you can go install, you can go work on pumps, and then but there's certain types of systems that fall under level one. In order to work on a level two system, like an aerobic or these different types of systems, you have to be under the supervision of a level two. But you can become a level two within a year if you if through a certain path, but that's the highest level of licensure in Texas. Is it is a year, a year and a half of three-day courses, yeah, once every year.
Way different than plumbing. Way different than plumbing.
And but guess what? The biggest issue that we find, which is which is the bottleneck, which is why we're investing big into education, is transferring the knowledge that Uncle Joe's septic had to this generation. Because there are there are very few legacy operators that are giving it to their kids. And that knowledge is is the kids don't want them. The kids don't want them. Yeah, um, but if you it's it's if if somebody takes the reins for education to attract people from outside the industry to bring them inside, it gives them a skill set that sets them apart that's not competing with Wilson plumbing, they're so-and-so septic, and we give them a professional brand systems and processes, they're 95% of the way there and they're crushing.
Yeah. Um there's two topics I want to make sure that we cover on this. Um, one is how to diligence a territory, which will dovetail off that. And the other is like, why a franchise? Because I feel like it's a valuable, unspoken thing. I've seen you have brokers that have come on before. I don't know if that gentleman was a friend of yours prior, but um talking about like when you buy a business, build a business, franchises is like hidden adjacent category. Um, but diligence doing just a dovetail, you're looking at septic density. Um, county records can oftentimes do that. You're gonna go and you're gonna look at your dump stations, how much they cost, is there are they at capacity already? Do you even have people even have a dump station? Yeah, like what proximity? Yeah. Um, and a lot of those people give you information because sometimes the counties are like, freedom of information, what act? I ain't giving you anything, or I'm gonna give you one location. I can't give you my entire database here.
These are like the final boss, they are the final boss. It's it's kind of like sometimes I hear people like talking about the upcoming disruption, and I'm like, honestly, good luck with the final boss. Well, it's gotta be it is gonna be Betty Sue who requires a paper printed permit and literally a cash in an envelope for that permit. Like, pop off.
Yeah, pop off, dude. And guess what? Uh it's you almost have to politic your way to get the information. It's crazy.
Yeah, you gotta go, you know, hey, nice. You gotta be on the board, we gotta do this. They have like strategies for specific municipalities because it's so ridiculous.
God. And so the dump stations will oftentimes give you that same information. For example, in Austin, how many registered trucks are dumping at the Austin wastewater station? It's 300 trucks every month. Are ready, and so we can build a market you know model off of that. Total adjustment. And then, yeah, yeah. And then thirdly, it's your competitors, like, you know, shadow shop the daylight, just like we were shadow shopping your Wilson uh conglomerate here, and that's where you're gonna derive a lot of information on pricing. And then you can just figure out like if there's a lot of competition and I can come in and I can grab five or 10% market share, I win. Who cares about doing how many septic systems and all the other diligence? All I know is I can beat better than Joe's septic. Let's go. Um, and so that was one topic that I wanted to talk about, those three stages of diligence. The other is why the F are you gonna want to franchise? Because there's a you know, three types of people that we're typically hearing from. One is someone who works at Google or Facebook or Netflix or whatever, that's like all the bits that I'm pushing all day long, AI is chomping away at these. And I my job is.
I have to imagine this becomes a more and more. So you have to move an atom at to the weight, that you're gonna continue to create wealth. Hey, I'm not saying this is like it's gonna go extinct, like white-collar jobs aren't gonna go extinct, it's gonna change, right? It's gonna change. But you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna go from moving bits to having to move atoms, right? Like actual physical labor is gonna be more of what people are gonna pay a premium for because number one. So if you look at Ford Ford trucks or Ford manufacturing, they they did a recent case study. Ford is uh uh attempting to pay 40% more than the average mechanic. Like they're paying like $150,000. Oh, I saw this, and yeah, yeah, and they still can't get anybody, and that's gonna continue.
Yeah, what's that? What's the guy's name, the CEO's name? Oh man, but yeah, he did an interview about that. Yeah, like in last quarter.
Is he um Farley? Is that yeah, is Chris Farley's uncle? He's a he's related to Chris Farley. I think so.
Yeah, no, I I remember that article, and it was yeah, he was like paying $120,000 for a mechanic that you know, like that's fucking. And it's sort of like a great mechanic job. You know, yeah, it's like clinical.
Yeah, yeah. And so you're coming in um from those like displaced individuals who are gonna come in super high on the scale of like management, um, good communicators, um, good planning, yeah, um, but you know, probably haven't stuck their head in a septic tank. Have you ever done a ride-along, by the way, on your pump trucks and done all that stuff? Okay.
I mean, I'm a licensed plumber. I'm the older of this, yeah. I forget there is not a lot I have not seen. That's impressive. Yeah.
Well, because we would encounter a lot of people who are like, ooh, like it's a little bit tough for my tummy here. But like, if you you're gonna have to, if you're gonna lead from the front, like you're doing, be out there.
One of my most memorable one, like I so I I learned under a guy named Art who's probably never gonna listen to this podcast. So I have no problem. Problem naming the art. So like I was I was 17 or something, because I, you know, family business. So I have born into it. Started working at uh 10. So like it, I was 17 and I was doing a ride-along with Art, and we he was like showing me how to replace a uh sump pump. Yeah, not septic, but like I feel like this gives you a good feeling, yeah. Uh, literally for the story. You're the right size, let me drop you in here. Pretty much, yeah. I'm like, you know, I'm a uh yeah. So so we're we're in a McDonald's replacing a septic or uh uh a pump, like a grinder pump. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm 17 years old. Yeah, like I don't, I don't know shit about shit. I already know where this is going. So like I already know. So I don't, so I'm like, he's like, all right, so undo the check valve. So I start undoing the check valve, I'm doing my thing. And um, and I'd never done this before, and he didn't tell me to unplug the pump. So I so I undo this check valve, and I'm I'm like, I'm pulling it apart, and I just get blasted in the face with McDonald's drain water.
You know what we call that? Being baptized.
Who's getting baptized? I still taste it.
Oh god 20 years later, can I can I tell you a similar time? My first week, I was like, oh man, it's a great idea. My wife, I'm like, baby, it was going off so well. We're making money. You get to the dump station.
Meanwhile, she's like, shower in the back, burn your house. She would love me in the house. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I still have a four-month-old baby actually.
He has a pretty specific smell.
Yeah.
But anyway, here's my story to that. I have one for you. So I'm at the dump station. I have the sexy truck, right? I'm the new kid on the block. Everybody's asking me questions. I've done it before, and I forgot to put the pump on the truck back to vacuum.
Oh, yeah.
Okay. It was on pressure. So I go to open the back, right? And I open it, and I mean, I don't know how many PSI those vacuum trucks have, but thousands.
Yeah.
All over me. Like, I'm talking a hundred gallons of poop until I can close it. And I am sitting there, and there's a line of 10 trucks behind me, and they're all months. You made their months. Everyone is laughing, and I'm like, man, I'm giving this truck away. I'm like, I'm like, how am I gonna tell my wife? Like, I have I literally came home with just my boxer. She's like, Where are you? I'm like, don't ask questions, please. Where's the shower? You know, I'm like freaking out. I have like this hand sanitizer piece full of sconneria. But I have some street cred. That's all I'm trying to say. Yeah. It was that was that was like my first week, and really made me second guess. But not saying that's gonna happen to you because we're gonna train you really well. You need the right to do it.
I feel like, look, man. Yeah. Dra drain stories are drain stories. Wild funny. Yeah.
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