My name is Casey McDaniel. I grew up in Manassa, CO. Population 900.

There aren’t many opportunities back home. If you’re lucky, mom and dad own a farm that you can work on while you grow up and you take assume ownership of the farm when they get old. If not, you either have to make something of yourself (which is tough in such a small economy), piddle around your whole life, or move. Most jobs are heavily agriculturally based as you can imagine with little upward mobility.

I decided to move. After graduating high school, I served a two year mission for the LDS church in Baltimore, MD where I learned a lot of things about life, sales, communication, and also Spanish. When I got home in 2019, I knew it was time to work. I bought books about the stock market, got a job at McDonald’s part time and worked hard to get a scholarship on the track team.

All year I looked for opportunities to make as much cash as possible in between semesters. I almost did landscaping in Utah. I almost got my CDL and drove trucks with my brother in law. I almost YOLO’D my small life savings into penny stocks.

COVID hit in March 2022 and most of my opportunities were gone. My cousin reached out to me and said he was selling pest control services door to door in Raleigh, NC and I could make a ton of money. I recruited a friend to come with me to make it more fun. April 27th, 2020 I was in Raleigh. I worked like a dog that summer. I generated about $75,000 in sales and made 32% commission. Making $25,000 while all my peers worked at Lowe’s and netted $6,000 opened my eyes to the opportunities the world has.

I spent the entire summer around guys that made anywhere from $80,000 to a quarter million dollars in that same time frame. However, I hated it. The work was hard. Getting rejected and yelled at all day was not easy mentally or physically. I had no plans of working another summer. One company trip to Vegas is all it took to get me on board for another summer.

This time I recruited 6 friends to work with me. 2 quit right away, one transitioned to be a technician midway through summer (Carl), and the other three worked all summer long. The only problem was that the company we worked for was hot garbage. They employed the least reliable, most untrained people of all time and that made it really difficult to sell my service and not feel like a total scumbag scammer.

My cousin and I decided to start our own company closer to home. I was only a Junior in college so it had to be where I was attending school - Grand Junction, CO. The population there is about 200,000 at the very most.

We built a financial model in excel and figured we would each be netting $1.3 million in less than 3 years! Boy were we wrong.

We paid someone on Fiverr $50 to create a logo, filed an llc and opened a bank account. We each put $5,000 into the pot and got rolling. I built our website on Wix. He contacted two suppliers and negotiated our first purchase order for weeks leveraging each others prices against the other. Finally, one supplier won our business and has sice received over $100,000 in purchase orders.

That first order cost us $8,000. That’s what it cost us to purchase our freedom. A measly $4k a piece. We each had a pickup that we used to service homes. We started knocking doors on March 15th, 2022 in the cold. Our first customer is still with us.

Remember Carl? He was my roommate at the time and had 3 months of technician experience in Raleigh. We hired him to spray all of our jobs that summer. He worked out of my pickup truck until May. At that point we bought him a brand new 2015 Nissan NV200 with 60,000 miles on it. Rather than spend $4,500 wrapping it, we spent $300 to get the vinyl stickers that we applied ourselves. Oh, and we put black rims on every vehicle we buy. That has been our MO ever since.

In the first 9 months of business we generated $180,000 in revenue almost entirely through door to door sales. We netted 74.8% that first year. Margins have unfortunately dropped since then. The perks of being small. Our total marketing budget was $500 a month and I am not so sure we did a good enough job managing our campaigns that we made any money from it. Carl went back to school that fall and my partner and I sprayed all the jobs all winter long. You wear a lot of hats when you own a small business.

Next week, look forward to an in depth writeup on year 2 in the bug business, our growth strategy, when we hired employees, and all the challenges that first full year presented.

APTIVE ENVIRONMENTAL PARTNERS WITH PE

News in the industry: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/citation-capital-partners-with-aptive-environmental-to-propel-innovation-and-expansion-302231586.html