Too Good to Pick Up Dog Poo?

By Sean Goldsmith

DoodyCalls built a franchise around dog poo. Before laughing, investors might want to ask whether prestige is getting in the way of the numbers.

DoodyCalls has spent more than 20 years franchising one of the least glamorous jobs imaginable. Before you laugh, look at what it costs to open, why customers keep coming back and whether franchise investors are letting their egos choose their businesses.

Tell somebody you have bought a restaurant franchise and they will probably be interested. Tell them you have invested your savings in a business that picks up dog poo from people’s gardens and they may wonder where your life went wrong.

They might also be the ones missing the point.

Franchising has a bit of a snobbery problem. We like attractive shops, recognisable brands and businesses we can proudly tell people we own. Yet none of those things tells us whether the franchisee actually makes any money.

DoodyCalls sits at the other end of that conversation. Its technicians remove pet waste from residential gardens and communal areas, while the business also installs and services pet-waste stations. There is no fashionable product or impressive shopfront involved. There is simply an unpleasant job that customers are prepared to pay somebody else to do.

That may be a better starting point for a business than many investors care to admit.

Franchise Investors Can Be Terrible Snobs

A restaurant looks like a proper business. There is a shopfront, staff, equipment and customers walking through the door. Unfortunately for the franchisee, all of those things cost money before anybody has bought lunch.

DoodyCalls currently puts the initial investment at $76,450 to $93,850, including a $39,900 franchise fee. The business is home-based and does not need the expensive customer-facing property required by many restaurant, retail and fitness concepts.

That does not make DoodyCalls a better investment. It does make it difficult to dismiss simply because somebody would rather tell their friends they own a restaurant.

Franchisees put real money at risk, often alongside years of their working lives. The sensible question is what the investment buys, what it costs to operate and whether enough money can remain after the bills are paid. How impressive the business sounds at dinner should come some distance behind that.

The Dog Keeps Producing Your Next Job

The DoodyCalls model has one rather useful characteristic: the customer’s problem does not stay solved for long.

A homeowner may replace a fence once every couple of decades. A dog owner who decides they no longer want to clear the garden themselves has a problem that starts returning almost immediately after the last visit.

That creates an opportunity for recurring residential work. Communities and commercial properties provide another source of business through common-area cleaning and the installation and servicing of pet-waste stations.

Repeat customers alone do not make the economics work. Geography matters. A technician driving half an hour between small jobs can be busy all day without being particularly productive, while a dense group of customers in several neighbourhoods can produce a very different result.

For a prospective franchisee, route density, retention and scheduling deserve more attention than the novelty of the service. The business needs enough paying customers close enough together to keep technicians working rather than driving.

The Joke Stops at $365,634

DoodyCalls’ current franchise material reports average 2025 gross revenue of $222,114 per territory and $365,634 per franchisee among the qualifying businesses included in its FDD data. Some franchisees operate multiple territories, which helps explain the difference between those figures.

Nobody should confuse gross revenue with profit. Technicians, vehicles, fuel, marketing, royalties and other operating costs still have to be paid. A serious buyer should want to know what remains after those costs before deciding whether this is an attractive investment.

The figures do, however, make the business harder to wave away as a joke. DoodyCalls signed 24 new franchise agreements and added 24 territories across 14 states during 2025. The business was founded by Jacob and Susan D’Aniello in 2000, began franchising nationally in 2004 and became part of Authority Brands in 2021.

DoodyCalls also says its network picks up more than 10 million dog deposits every year. That is an appalling amount of dog poo, but it does make the underlying customer problem rather difficult to dismiss.

Disgust Can Be a Competitive Advantage

Entrepreneurs spend plenty of time looking for businesses with clever barriers to entry. DoodyCalls has a much simpler one: lots of people do not want to do the work.

The same principle helps support rubbish removal, pest control, drain cleaning and plenty of other unglamorous service businesses. Customers do not need to love the category or share photographs of it online. They need to dislike the problem enough to pay somebody competent to make it disappear.

There is something useful in that for franchise investors. Fashionable categories attract attention and competition, while unpleasant jobs can be easier to overlook. Nobody appears to be queueing around the block for the chance to spend their working day picking up after Labradors.

That does not mean DoodyCalls has the market to itself. Independent operators can provide the same basic service without franchise royalties, so the franchisor still has to prove that its brand, systems, marketing and support justify what franchisees pay for them.

A buyer should therefore be asking about customer acquisition costs, cancellation rates, revenue per customer, technician productivity and the time required to build a dense territory. Those answers matter considerably more than the smell.

Your Ego Doesn’t Pay the Royalty

People do not make investment decisions with spreadsheets alone. We imagine ourselves owning the business, telling friends about it and putting the title on LinkedIn. A restaurant, gym or fashionable retail concept can satisfy something beyond the desire to build a profitable operation.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy the business you own. The problem comes when status starts influencing where you put tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

DoodyCalls has taken a simple and unpleasant problem and built a franchise around removing it. It has relatively modest property requirements, the possibility of recurring customers and more than two decades of operating history. None of that proves an individual franchisee will make money, and its gross-revenue figures should never be treated as profit.

What it does mean is that the business deserves to be judged on its economics rather than the reaction it gets when you tell somebody what you do for a living.

If the glamorous franchise consumes considerably more capital and ultimately leaves less money in the owner’s pocket, I am not sure the person picking up dog poo is the one we should be laughing at.

What We Can Learn From This

Franchise buyers should be suspicious of how much prestige influences their investment decisions. DoodyCalls still needs to be tested on route density, customer retention, labour productivity, acquisition costs and franchisee profitability, just like any other franchise. The useful comparison is how those economics stack up against more glamorous concepts requiring substantially more capital and operational complexity. As traditional storefront franchises become more expensive to open, businesses investors once considered beneath them may deserve considerably more attention.

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