Lazy Man and Money

Stacking a Business on a Business

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Dog Boarding Fun

I haven’t been coming up with many personal finance blogging ideas lately. My dog sitting business is going extremely well. Last year, as vaccines happened and people caught up on travel, I made twice as much as I had ever made in any other year. This year, I’ll make around 80% more than last year. Overall, it’s more than four times what I made pre-pandemic.

When I started dog boarding in 2015, it was just about making a little extra money, maybe $500 a month to complement my blogging income. Now, it is my blogging income that complements my dog boarding income. Make hay while the sun shines, right? The only issue is that dog boarding doesn’t scale. Every extra dog adds exponentially more complexity. Also, there’s a limit to how much people will pay to board a dog. That means there’s a ceiling to how much I can make.

One way that I’m trying to raise that ceiling is to add other services. Some suggested I should offer to bath dogs, groom dogs, or get into dog training. I’ve thought about all these, and they can be challenging to do when we’ve got a fairly full house. I’m looking for other ways to grow. For example, I’ve seen a mobile dog grooming truck come down my street. Maybe I could partner with them and get some money for the referral. I got a tip on a dog photographer. We might be able to work out something where she photographs dogs for an additional fee.

One of the easiest ways for me to grow is to eliminate Rover.com’s service fee. I think Rover.com is excellent and provides great value with booking software, escrow and merchant services, etc. They even do all my advertising and client acquisition. However, if I create a brand and advertise myself, I don’t want to send people to Rover.com to book me. Actually, I don’t mind booking Rover for the first stay, but when I’ve had a regular client for more than five stays, I’d like to manage that myself. Rover typically keeps twenty percent of the booking fee for itself, but I’m grandfathered in at fifteen percent. If I can transition a customer to my own website and booking software, I can give them a discount and still keep more money for myself.

My Kid Adds a Business Idea

My wife saw a thing about a local business doing a small business Saturday at a local restaurant. A table is $20, and she’s going to promote the dog boarding business as well as sell some high-end clothes she acquired over time – whatever hasn’t sold on Poshmark. The $20 also includes unlimited Bloody Mary’s, which may have been a draw for her.

My 10-year-old son has decided he will put his cooking skills to good use and make dog biscuits to sell. It’s a perfect fit for him. He got a recipe from the local animal shelter’s summer pet camp. Another of his favorite summer camps is cooking camp.

He’s picked a name for his biscuits, and we’ll co-brand them with the dog boarding business. The individually-wrapped bags will have a coupon code that will give the customer a dog boarding discount. I’ll also give my son a cut of any dog boarding sales that come from it.

My 8-year-old is contributing as well. He designed the logo for the business. It looks like an 8-year-old designed it, but that’s the point. He’s one of the best artists in his class, so it’s not bad.

I love these little experiments. Try a little tweak here and there and see how things go. Of course, I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Four Surprising Ways To Grow Your Local Business

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Happy June everyone! Things are super busy here. My wife had been traveling for the last 10 days only to come back and test positive for COVID. She’s doing well. The rest of us had it 4.5 months ago and haven’t caught it again, yet. It’ll take me some time to catch up.

I’m usually focused on things that are of interest nationally. I realize that the majority of the readers out there don’t care too much about things specific to Rhode Island. It’s easy for me to forget that there are thousands and thousands of local small businesses. There are lawyers, real estate agents, painters, plumbers, insurance agents, and electricians.

I cast a wide net to the whole world hoping (and often failing) to get a good number of readers. A local real estate agent can narrow their search to a couple of cities. It sounds a lot easier to me because there is less competition. Then again, that real estate agent will likely never experience the joy of someone showing up to his business from the other side of the world.

I’m starting to enter that world of running a local business. My Rover dog sitting business is doing well. So far, I’ve let Rover just send me customers. However, I think I’m going to start to explore getting my name out there myself. Rover.com’s finder’s fees are 20%. They do a great job with their booking software and they do all the advertising, so it’s not a bad deal. However, sitters could lower their prices by 8% and still give themselves a raise of 12% by doing it themselves.

With that in mind, I wanted to look at four ways to grow a local business:

1. Your Local BNI Group

About nine months ago, I had never heard of a Business Network International – BNI group. I was talking with a parent at my kid’s school and my wife mentioned that I had gotten into dog boarding and business has been booming. It was a small side hustle until everyone got vaccines and tried to catch up on 18 months of missed travel.

The other parent was a well-known real estate agent and asked me, “What would happen if they change the website?” Yep, Rover.com could put me out of business overnight. That’s never a good feeling. He said he belonged to a local cult group that meets once a week and shares business referrals. He invited me to check it out and I honestly only went because he was giving away Patriots tickets to a lucky visitor. I didn’t get the Patriots’ tickets, but I did see my other son’s best friend’s mom there. In fact, all the occupations from the first paragraph came from the local chapter. I get dog sitting business from a network of a network and I have some great people to help manage our rental property.

2. Telephone Book

Believe it or not, the telephone book is still a good place to advertise. I was surprised, but I came across this yellow page advertising article. It seems like it depends on the industry, but it really can work.

3. Direct Mail Campaign

I used to get a package of local coupons in an envelope every couple of weeks. It seems like it hasn’t happened since COVID though. It seems like most of the advertisers were for nails or spas. There were also a lot of products tied to new moms. I still went through each one and looked to see if there was a good deal that we could use.

4. Radio Ads

I was reading that radio ads reach more people than Google or Facebook ads. It sounds unbelievable, but I know I listen to a good amount of radio. They’ve got me as a captive audience in the car.

Final Thoughts on Local Advertising

I’m not sure if I’ll try telephone books or radio ads for my dog boarding business. It would easier to justify it if I was renting physical space instead of running a tiny gig business. I’ve had some luck with putting my business card at hotels that aren’t pet-friendly. They love having someone they can call at the last minute to save the day when someone shows up with a dog.

My best suggestion is to try a little bit of everything and do more of what works.

Building a Million Dollar Blog: Introduction (Part 0 of ?)

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“Who’s to say what’s impossible
Well, they forgot this world keeps spinning
And with each new day
I can feel a change in everything
And as the surface breaks, reflections fade
But in some ways, they remain the same
And as my mind begins to spread its wings
There’s no stopping curiosity
I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found
I’ll share this love I find with everyone.

Who’s to say I can’t do everything
Well, I can try”

– Jack Johnson, Upside Down

That feels like a blog title from 2009. I seem to remember everyone starting a blog with the idea of getting rich. I started Lazy Man and Money in 2006 and didn’t know you could make money with a blog.

It’s around 16 years later and I’ve made a little more than $600,000. I’ve had some offers to buy Lazy Man and Money, but never for $400,000. It’s at the point where the blog means more to me as a reflection of more than a third of my life than it does to someone else trying to make money from the traffic. It seems like in maybe 10 years it could get close to $1 million. That would be a cool 25th-anniversary milestone.

However, this article isn’t about Lazy Man and Money. It’s about the site I launched this year, KidWealth.com. If you are a regular reader, you’re probably a little sick of me giving it side mentions in every article. If that’s the case, you might want to click away now.

I thought it would be interesting to go through the process I’ve used to build Kid Wealth. Is Kid Wealth a million dollar blog? No, it is not. It isn’t even a 10 cent blog at this point. In fact, It’s about $1000 in debt. Ouch! That’s a bad ROI for my time so far. That’s okay, I’m trying to build an audience of parents interested in helping their kids become financially literate. I don’t plan on ever having ads or selling a product or service. Instead, I’d like to make money by providing great information and connecting people with valuable products and services.

Kids-Financial-Independence

Can Kid Wealth Become a Million Dollar Blog?

Well… a lot of things have a possibility of happening. Obviously, the odds are not good. It’s extraordinarily difficult to build a blog that popular. Instead of looking at all the reasons why Kid Wealth won’t be a million dollar blog, what if I went through a few reasons why it will be a million dollar blog.

  • Great Brand/Domain Name

    A lot of people tell me they like Lazy Man and Money as a brand, but it’s a mouthful. My fingers get tired just typing the name. Kid Wealth is short, easy, and doesn’t require an explanation. I was able to get almost all the social media accounts. It’s a brand that I can envision on national television.

  • I’ve Got (Some) Connections

    I start Kid Wealth, a personal finance website, with many connections to other personal finance writers. I had thought about creating a website around teaching kids programming, but I’m not active in the teaching, kids, or programming communities.

  • I’ve Got Time

    I’m on a 25-year pace to make Lazy Man and Money a million dollar brand. I hope to have another 25 years on Kid Wealth. That makes it easier to get to the million dollar mark. Also, I have inflation on my side. In 20 years, a million dollars would only be $550,000 in today’s money. Did I just cut that million dollar target almost in half?

  • I’ve Got a Budget

    I built Lazy Man and Money without using money to advertise it. I spent very little money to help grow it. I don’t mind spending on Kid Wealth. As I mentioned above, I’ve already spent around $1,000 (details to follow in a future post). It would be nice to say that Kid Wealth has made a million in profit, but I’ve found many of the hype bloggers stick to the revenue numbers and neglect the expenses. I’m hoping I don’t have to resort to that, but if I had to spend $50,000 to make Kid Wealth a million dollar blog, it’s a great, great, deal right?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter too much to me if Kid Wealth doesn’t make a ton of money. That’s not why I started it. As of now, I’m enjoying creating the best resource I can. There’s always something to work on. A few days this past week, I didn’t feel like writing new articles, so I spent time making the home page look good.

When Your Business Doesn’t Scale

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I’m very behind in my writing this week. It’s school vacation week and I’m extremely busy – but not for the reason you might think. It’s not that our kids are around taking up all my time. No, they have a different school vacation than the public schools, so they are still in school.

Instead, I have a house full of dog boarders. With so many families gone away on vacation, they need someone to take care of their dogs. I’m that someone. We’ve passed our busiest month ever (last August) and it is still the shoulder season. The summer vacation time is usually the busiest.

I keep raising rates, but it seems like that only makes me more desirable. Or maybe it’s that I’m still below the most expensive person by about 20% while having almost as many positive reviews as she does.

It sounds like a terrific situation. In a lot of ways it is. In one important way, it isn’t.

Dog Boarding Doesn’t Scale

Let’s say that boarding one dog is one unit of work. You feed it, give it walks, pick up after it, etc. Two dogs are like 2.5 units of work. You have to feed them separately so they don’t fight or eat others’ food. That requires a little coordination. Three dogs are 4.25 units of work because now you have to do separate feedings at different times. Each dog you have also makes the little things in life a little more difficult. Dogs quickly learn that I am the source of food, so they follow me everywhere. It’s not a big deal with one or two, but 5 or 6 following you everywhere can make it difficult just to walk.

When it rains, the unit of work doubles. The effective living space for the dogs is cut in half without a nice sunny, dry yard. Instead, we deal with muddy paws everywhere.

In short, each dog creates exponentially more work. You’d want it to be at least linear. For example, if I were a landscaper or a cleaning service, adding another client is adding one more unit of work. One client doesn’t interact with another in the same way as dog boarding. I feel like sharing the same limited resource such as living space is another reason why dog boarding doesn’t scale. However, landscapers have limited resources like equipment.

Some of the best businesses scale logarithmically. I was amazed by eBay’s business in the early 2000s. They just connect millions of buyers and sellers with very little human interaction (on their part). They build and maintain the software and it does most of the work. They rarely need a human to come in and settle a dispute.

So Why Dog Boarding?

The short answer is that the money is good right now. Many people are still catching up on a couple of years of missed travel. When they were stuck at home they got dogs. The supply of dog boarders is low compared to the demand of dog owners.

A business generating profits is nothing to sneeze at. It may not scale as much as I would like, but I can invest the profit and make that scale for me. Also, I’m able to do other work while boarding dogs. Although, as you may be able to tell, I’m not able to do my best work.

I have some flexibility in shuttling the kids to school and soccer. However, that’s becoming more difficult lately as I’ve started to get a steady stream of daycare visits. The drop-off and pick-up times that people need are when I’m generally least available. I’ve been raising rates on that service to discourage people from signing up for it, but so far it hasn’t slowed down anyone yet.

Capitalize on this $761 Billion Problem

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A couple of months ago CNBC published this shocking (but accurate) headline: A more than $761 billion dilemma: Retailers’ returns jump as online sales grow

When retailers have a $761 billion problem on their hands it presents an opportunity for you, the consumer. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.

Retailer’s Problem: Returned Merchandise

Since COVID hit, a lot more people are buying products online. It had been trending that way for years, but COVID sped it up. Retailers have become exceptionally good at shipping products out, but they aren’t good at taking them back and restocking them. Sometimes companies will just tell you to keep the product if they make a mistake or if you want to return it. It simply isn’t worth their time and money to deal with covering the customer support, return shipping cost, and handling/restocking the product. After they do all that, they can’t resell it as new, so they have to discount it from the original cost.

It’s not hard to imagine why all their profit margins go away.

Companies with brick-and-mortar stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy could at least accept the products in their stores and put them on a discount rack. That’s better than having to deal with shipping. It’s also easier to deal with customer support since brick-and-mortar retailers have had return counters for decades. Amazon doesn’t have the retail locations (unless they drastically change Whole Food) to do what Wal-Mart and Best Buy do.

How You Capitalize: Idea #1

The easy way to capitalize on this is to buy the returned products off the discount rack. I think I could do a better job of this. I follow several “deal” websites, but most often the deals are on new stuff. I rarely need something immediately from a store like Best Buy. A few years ago, I needed a new stereo receiver and Best Buy had a good one that was about 30-40% off, so I bought that one. I tried to buy a refurbished Dyson wand vacuum around Christmas, but their store was empty.

I’m more likely to buy cereal boxes that were banged up at a discount than anything else. If any readers out there have tips on how they buy refurbished, I would appreciate it.

How You Capitalize: Idea #2

Often I feel like there are fewer ways to invent a $100 million company nowadays. There used to be news all the time about companies in Silicon Valley getting bought and sold. I’m sure it’s still happening, but it seems like it’s not happening as much. There used to be dozens of search engines like Lycos, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc., but now it’s just Google. I used to follow all the tech news every day for all the exciting things that were coming around the corner. Now, “tech news” is more likely to report about “entertainment news” like Fortnite than a product or service that will make my life better. I just took a quick look at CNet.com’s home page and the top four stories center on Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

Okay, I got off-track. It’s time to get back on topic. The big way to capitalize on the retailer’s problem is to fix it. There’s a huge inefficiency in the market right now. I believe someone is going to step in and come up with a solution. If you can solve just a tiny sliver of the $761 billion problem, it’s likely to be a $100 million company.

Could you create that company? If so, it’s certainly better than saving $100 on a refurbished stereo receiver, right?