Business Spotlight: Scooping Up Profits

To some, it’s just animal feces. To Victor Grosso, it’s his bread and butter.

Grosso is the founder and operator of EntreManure K-9 Waste Removal LLC, and the business does just what it says. Grosso is a professional pooper-scooper.

It wasn’t Grosso’s career intention while working his way through the U.S. Navy, but a helicopter accident in the early 1980s changed his course and a joke about the difficulties landing a stable job led him to the waste removal business.

“It’s got to get picked up,” Grosso says nonchalantly. “Somebody’s got to do it.”

With that do-what-it-takes attitude, Grosso created a new career.

“I had a hard time finding a good-paying job and wasn’t collecting disability from the military. Every job I tried to do had some effect on my knee or my shoulders,” he says.

While vacationing in the late 1990s in Colorado, and after just quitting another job, he cracked a joke with his travel companions.

“I said, ‘I know what I’ll do, I’ll go into people’s yards and pick up dog poop. I’m sure people need that. I’ll call it EntreManure.’ They all laughed,” he recalls.

But the idea was born.

“As soon as I got back from vacation,” he says, “I hit the streets with my flier and started building my business.”

Grosso conducted market research – discovering a St. Louis outfit that collected $250,000 a year picking up animal waste – and launched his company in 1999 in Omaha, Neb.

“I didn’t even know people did this,” says Grosso, who has picked up after hundreds of dogs in three states and settled in the Ozarks in 2008.

Tony Jones, the owner of a repossession company in Springfield, hired Grosso about a year ago to clean up after his two dogs.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to scoop the poop,” says Jones of Allied Recovery Service. “He found a niche. Nobody wants to do what I do, either. You can say we both have a s----- job.”

Grosso, who is programmed in Jones’ cellphone as “poopster,” visits his Cherokee Estates home weekly for $43 month to clean up after Jones’ pit bull and coonhound.

“He ain’t cleaning up after a poodle. He’s probably got a bad back after cleaning my yard,” Jones says.

Grosso says it’s typical for dogs to leave 75 to 90 piles of waste a month, and his worst job was walking into 700 piles in one yard. “Yeah, it’s gross,” he says.

But it can be lucrative, and there are some serious businesspeople in the industry.

Matthew Osborn, of Columbus, Ohio, has spent 25 years in the business, earning him the label of “doo-doo guru” in the book, “Guide to Cool, Odd, Risky and Gruesome Ways to Make a Living.”

Osborn sold his scooping business in 1998 for more than $200,000 and today runs an international directory of dog waste removal services at Pooper-Scooper.com.

“Money can be made at this. The drawback is it’s a luxury service,” Grosso says, comparing it to lawn care.

He says EntreManure’s annual revenue ranges between $20,000 and $60,000, and income has been flat the last three years at about $40,000. Client homes range from trailer parks to golf courses, and he says for every 1,000 fliers distributed, he nets one customer.

“I tag every house, everywhere,” he says.

Working with more than 100 accounts, Grosso charges $34 a month for weekly service of one dog and a few bucks more for each additional animal. He says 90 percent of his customers, who include Mercy eye surgeon Dr. Shachar Tauber and Ryan and Brandi O’Reilly, are on a weekly schedule.

He grew the business in 2009 through an acquisition of Scoop to Poop’s clientele, when its owner moved out of the area. Grosso lives in Pleasant Hope, but covers yards in Nixa, Ozark, Willard, Republic and Springfield. One employee handles Bolivar, Buffalo and Fair Grove jobs.

Grosso says the service offers environmental benefits, too, because quick cleanup keeps rodents and flies at bay and promotes a cleaner water table.

For all the “Boy, you’ve got a crappy job” comments and the frequent pictures people take of his truck with its doggy doo-doo visuals, Grosso keeps a sense of humor about his business. Tag lines include “We’re No. 1 in the No. 2 business” and “Your dog poops and our shovel scoops.”[[In-content Ad]]