A pit bull with a lisp and a loose stool. A schnauzer with a memorable schnoz. A duo of dainty maltipoos with disarmingly large frighteningly large feces. Just another day in the life of Michael Wright.
As the owner of Orlando’s The Poop Bandit, a dog poop removal service, Wright is easy to picture as a colorful mashup of your favorite Pink Panther characters: David Niven’s Phantom jewel (in this case, poop) thief only to be foiled Peter Sellers’ Clouse Clouseau — who literally steals the show. Or, in this case, the shit.
“It’s a crappy job, but someone has to do it,” Wright deadpans.
It wasn’t always this way. Michael Wright was once a professional talent manager, rubbing elbows with heiresses,
Hollywood producers, and Michelin-starred chefs. So how does one go from the jet-set life to, errrr, waste management?
“Well, that’s a loaded question. Pun intended.” Wright laughs. “Basically Poop Bandit started as a job for my oldest son, and named for my dog, Bandit. He — Lucas, not Bandit — was having a hard time finding a job when he turned 16, and I was like, ‘Well, why don’t we just create one?’”
Doing His Business
The pooper scooper business plan wasn’t their first idea, but it was one Wright kept coming back to. “I can’t say that it was my original idea. I knew someone in Michigan who had a scoop business, and he was very successful. Ran that business for, like, 20 years. So I did a little research, and there was nothing in the area like it. So one Taco Tuesday, my wife and I sketched out a business plan, came up with the branding, and put a one page website together. In all my years in business, it was actually the fastest idea-to-implementation ever. Tacos, cervezas, and then bam! We were in business.”
Wright is deflecting, of course, using his infectious sense of humor to keep the conversation light. Truth be told, The Poop Bandit couldn’t really be called successful five years ago. In fact, Wright says the business just stumbled along. “Lucas really just wanted to make enough to pay for his car insurance, gas, and have a bit of cash in his pocket. So he had a handful of customers, probably like eight or so, and that was it. Then when he graduated high school and went into the Marine Corps, the company just limped along. We kept a handful of clients, mostly friends, but that was it. I was in the shit, literally, with my other company, and didn’t have the time or resources to put into scooping.”
For more than a decade, Wright’s primary business was running Domestic Estate Management Association, an association for personal chefs, butlers, estate managers, nannies, personal assistants, and such. DEMA connected high-quality, vetted service people with high net-worth families.
Founded in 2007, he and a partner built the company from scratch, growing it from just a handful of members to 22 chapters across the U.S., plus one in Monaco and one in London.
“By 2016, we were poised to expand even further, but realized we were spread too thin. So that’s when we decided to double-down and bring on an investor. It was a real life version of Shark Tank, only not as fun,” he says. “The investor started stealing money from the organization within about six months, and the whole thing just mushroomed into a big, messy divorce in 2017. Friends I had for a decade. It was heartbreaking,” Wright remembers.
Fresh off the heels of that debacle, Wright transitioned into private service. “I was reeling from the partnerships and didn’t trust anyone, so I basically became an independent consultant. A headhunter talent recruiter for billionaires. They would come to me looking for people to run their homes or estates, and I’d find the people. Eventually that grew into consulting, where I’d go into their estates and diagnose their staff issues and, you know, help them with a battle plan to fix it.”
“Those three years were a lot of work, but it was really fun. I mean, I got to work and consult for some wonderful, high-profile people. One day I’m talking to George Lucas. The next I’m dealing with Hollywood producers and celebrities. It was exciting and challenging and really high pressure, everything that I loved.”
“…yeah, it’s been pretty awesome. I’ve had a few different successes and failures, but I’ve never had anything — anything — grow this fast in a 12- month period. I’m still shocked by it all. Poop. I just can’t believe it.”
Micheal Wright
And when COVID hit in March 2020, it all just … stopped. Wright’s private practice went from thriving to dying. “Obviously, no one was hiring, “ he says. “Especially the wealthy, because they didn’t want people coming in and out of their home any more than needed. So just like that, it was like a water pump getting shut off.”
Like most of the world, Wright just hung out for a bit. “I did what everyone else did, watched Netflix and gained 30 pounds,” he jokes. “But it was pretty clear to me after the first month that COVID wasn’t going away. I’m not one to just sit around, either. I kind of go stir crazy if I’m not working on something, so I started to revisit Poop Bandit.”
Duty Calls
Despite the chaos of COVID, he still had a handful of clients, so it was time to decide: will The Poop Bandit die, or will it try? “I still believed it was a great idea, with untapped potential in this area, but to be totally honest, I was having a massive identity crisis,” says Wright. “Here I was, a guy who gave advice to billionaires for 20 years, and now I’m going to pick up shit? There’s no nicer way to say it. I really struggled.”
For the same reasons it made sense for his son to do it in 2016, it made sense to Wright now: low overhead, high potential. So, in the end, getting over that mental hurdle didn’t require a therapist or psych degree. It just required doing the work. And landing his first really big account.
“I doubled down and worked those remaining 8 or 10 clients. I asked for referrals. I did some local marketing. I updated the website, focusing on SEO and Google Adwords. The business grew, but it was a painstaking process. One client at a time, inch by inch, scoop by scoop.”
But then one day, while driving through a new local housing development, Wright had an epiphany: He could offer the service to HOA communities. “In Central Florida, especially here in Winter Garden, there are tons of these communities that have pet stations and dog parks, and they are never being serviced. The bins are overflowing. The bags are always empty. And there is still poop on the playground, literally. I figured I could build a whole business just dealing with overflow, and I was absolutely right.”
In fall 2020, Wright landed his first HOA, then his second by the end of the year. And with each success, any personal issue he had with scooping, diminished. He embraced the “if you can’t laugh at yourself” adage and just decided to have fun.
And that he has. “In January 2021, it all just clicked at the same time, and I’ve been on an absolute rocket ship ever since.”
These days, the King of Ka Ka has a warehouse, three trucks, and five employees. And he’s actively looking to hire more people.
Though technically The Poop Bandit is five years old, Wright really believes the company is just a year old. “From June of 2020 through now, it’s been working hard, keeping my head down, doing what I know will work. Even when there wasn’t immediate success, you just keep doing the work. This year, so far, I have basically doubled the business every three months. It’s growing at just an incredible rate, better than I ever imagined.”
That says a lot coming from a guy used to building six-figure-plus businesses. But Wright is the first to admit, he’s in new territory.
“In the past, I’ve always built my businesses with the end in mind. I would figure out the big, audacious five-year goal, and then I would work backwards, figuring out how to hit that goal. And this is the first company I haven’t built like that. COVID made the entire world rethink business, to do it differently, and I’m no exception. Instead of going all macro on a business plan, I just decide to work really hard, try to make good decisions, treat everybody as well as I can, and offer a great service and go over the top with the service and the communication. And it worked. It totally worked.”
That’s not to say he hasn’t made plans for 2022. More trucks, more employees, more commercial accounts. Perhaps another warehouse. But his most audacious goal is “to develop a process to turn the pet waste into compost instead of having it just go to the landfill.” And 2022 is the year he tackles Profit First.
Getting His Sheets Together
“I’ll be honest. I didn’t think I needed accounting help,” says Wright. “I’ve managed my own books for so long that it just didn’t cross my mind to hire it out. But there’s just something about Rachel [Siegel]. She’s such a genuine, easygoing person. She’s not a hard sell. She just lays out the facts and lets you decide.”
The two had met as members of Central Florida’s Horizon West Networking Group last year, and Siegel became a Poop Bandit client during COVID. There was an easy camaraderie between the two, but it was Wright’s wife who first proposed the idea of hiring Go Figure.
“My wife is a smart woman,” he laughs. “Obviously, there are a lot of advantages to having someone else handle the books. My wife and I are both entrepreneurs and we like growing successful businesses, but we’re also at the stage where we enjoy our down time, too. So I was like, ‘well, I think I should talk to Rachel’—as if it was actually my idea.”
He and Rachel first started talking business over a cup of coffee. “I just asked her what she thought of our business model, what her philosophies are, that sort of thing,” Wright says. “She didn’t really push Profit First; she didn’t really need to because my wife was already on board with the idea. But I was playing it cool, like, ‘Let me let me read Profit First, you know, and get back with you.’”
Rachel encouraged him to listen to it on Audible. “She said, ‘All you do is drive around for the most part, so it will be much more entertaining.’” Wright listened to the entire book in 24 hours and hired Rachel the next day. “It made so much sense that I was mad I hadn’t thought of it myself! So hiring Rachel was a no-brainer. She’s a Profit First Professional, the only one in the area, and this is the system I’m going to want to do. So the next day I texted, ‘All right, I’m in.’”
“Mike gets so excited about things, and his enthusiasm just pulls you in,” Siegel says. “But we did have to dial it back a bit. We are working to get his books current, and we will do some Q4 and annual planning to make sure we set him up for success. But really, our goal is to start him on Profit First in January.”
“Funny story about January,” Wright recalls. “Last year, I was at a Horizon West meeting and we were doing a workshop where we wrote down our goals on a piece of paper and shared them with the group. Normally, most people write that they want to make X amount of dollars, or grow their business revenue by a certain percent. I didn’t. I wrote down that I wanted three trucks and a warehouse. That was January 2021. And it happened. It happened in the first three months of this year, maybe four. So January … yeah. The perfect time to start Profit First. The perfect time to start anything, right?”
So what would he write on that piece of paper for January 2022? “Oh shoot … I still have time to figure that out,” he says. “Stay tuned. But I’m sure it will be a shit ton of awesome.”
