How to Bid Apartments/HOA’s as a Pet Waste Removal Business

Do you want to make more money with your pet waste removal business?

As a professional pooper scooper, one of the best ways you can make more money with your business is by landing big commercial clients, but you might be really concerned about not knowing how to bid correctly or if you’ll be undercharging for your services. I’m going to break down everything you should know about Commercial Pet Waste Removal and give you the framework that will help you successfully bid on these kinds of jobs.

What’s considered a commercial property versus a residential property? To put it simply, a residential property is someone’s home and a commercial property is a location used for business purposes. These could be considered Home Owners Associations or HOAs, Apartment complexes, modular homes or trailer parks, dog parks, and businesses that allows pets and dogs on the property. If you are speaking with a tenant or home owner of a property, that would be residential client compared to if you were speaking with a property manager for an apartment complex, that would be considered a commercial client.

Commercial clients like apartment complexes typically have their grounds crew or maintenance team manage the waste on the property, like scooping up the common areas, and emptying out the pet waste stations. However, scooping dog waste is typically the lowest priority on the list with all the other responsibilities they have like maintaining the apartments and processing the work orders received from tenants.

This is where you come in! You can provide a much needed value to commercial clients by taking on the job their grounds crew do not want to do as well as keeping their property clean for all tenants and pets.

The question is, how do you land these kinds of clients?

Realistically, these kinds of clients will come to you. They will find your business online and will contact you directly. You’ll want to have some sort of intake form to contact you and your marketing strategy should include that you service commercial properties, apartment complexes and HOAs, using graphics on your marketing material and adding verbiage on your business profile that you service these kinds of properties. You can also join any apartment association in your state and sign up to be a verified vendor or partner for businesses in the rental industry. These types of memberships typically cost an annual fee, but you’ll be added to a directory where property manager’s in your state can potentially find you and give you the opportunity to participate in networking events that can help you grow and connect with other business owners or property manager’s in your area.

If you do this right, eventually you’ll receive that fateful phone call…

Even though you’ll be feeling really excited and anxious getting your chance to land a big client, take a deep breathe and remember to just be yourself. You are a professional pooper scooper after all, and your professionalism has gotten you this far.

Before you can send your bid and provide your commercial pet waste removal prices, you need to have some preliminary questions to understand what the scope of the job will be.

Questions like:

How many units are on the property?
What is your budget?
Do you need waste stations maintained or only the common areas scooped?
Can I use your dumpster to throw away waste?
How many dogs parks do you have on your property?
What is the total size of the property that’s expected to be maintained?

Don’t be afraid to ask as many questions as you need to feel comfortable about doing a job you’ll be excited to do. These are businesses after all, and the bottom line is equally as important to them as it is to you. Imagine how miserable you’ll be if you under charge yourself because you didn’t ask the right questions and now you have a big client that’s not paying you the appropriate amount for the work you’ll be doing. Of course you can always have that hard conversation after the fact and start charging more, but setting the right expectations from the beginning will help both you and the client in the long run.

The best way to understand how big the job will be is to actually go in person and walk the property. So let your client know that you’ll be stopping by to check the property and try to see if you can meet them in person. This will give you another opportunity to build trust with them and personalize the customer experience. You should also ask for a map of their property to track in real time the highly concentrated areas along with the locations of the pet waste stations, since this will determine how long the job will take.

When you walk the property, be liberal with the grid pattern you typically do for your residential clients.

Your objective for the initial walk is to:

identify realistically how long the property will take you to explore and scoop
what areas need to be taken care of
the locations of the pet waste stations and if they are near a path or if you have to walk to them
and the overall logistics of how you’ll be exploring their property with a dustpan or bucket.

If you are servicing pet waste stations, you’ll need to determine how you plan on navigating between the stations. Since these stations are typically really spread apart, or placed in the middle of a yard area, it takes time to walk all around the property and find these stations. Maybe you can consider asking the HOA or apartment if they will give you access to their golf carts, or maybe a bike/moped to help you get to the stations off the path.

Once you calculate how long your initial walk took, double the amount of time because the first couple of appointments will always take you a lot longer. The property manager may ask you for a price right then and there but you can politely let them know that you will follow up later that day once you crunch the numbers to provide the most accurate bid.

Now it’s time for the most important step, creating your bid and submitting a proposal to your commercial client. Most commercial clients will ask you to provide a bid or pet waste removal service agreement that their board of directors or leadership team has to approve before hiring you since this will impact their business and bottom line.

When creating your bid, remember that the more information you spoon feed them, the easier it is for them to digest that information so try to break down the costs as much as possible. But before you can break down the costs, you need to figure out how much you actually want to get paid.

How long did it take you to complete the initial walk?
And how much do you want to get paid per hour?
Do you have to pay someone to help you?

When it comes to commercial pet waste removal, it’s in your best interest to bid according to the time spent on the job. Scooping common areas and dog parks will take longer because you have a larger area of grass you need to explore.

Let’s say that a property would take you 3 hours to walk each week, and your hourly charge is $60. Your weekly price for that property would be $180.

You then multiple your weekly price of $180 by 52 and divide that number by 12. Your monthly price for that property would be $780.

Since you asked for the number of units on the property, you can then break down this monthly price even more. Let’s say this property has 350 units, you can then divide the monthly charge of $780 by the number of units and this will be the cost of your services per unit on the property. This will cost the property $2.23 per unit to pay you $780 a month, and honestly this is the most important thing that matters to them. Most likely they’ll add some sort of “maintenance fee” on their tenant’s rent and having the cost per unit will help them decide how much the fee should be.

If you plan on using the cost per unit on your next bid, hit the like on this blog because it really does help out a lot. Thank you!

When servicing pet waste stations, add a separate line item in your bid to break this cost down. Are they supplying the bags for the station or do you need to supply them? If you are supplying the bags, your breakdown should account for how much the replacement bags will cost for each station.

Let’s say you charge $15 per station, including replacing the bags, and this property has 7 stations. The weekly cost for having their stations maintained would be $105 or $455 a month.

It’s helpful to provide commercial pet waste removal prices for all included services because a property manager may want to use you for just one of the services and not the other. For example, I provided my apartment complex the prices to both scoop the common areas and maintain their waste stations. They decided to only hire me to scoop the property and to let their maintenance team handle the waste stations. Commercial clients and HOAs can be really cheap, and the bottom line really dictates their decision making.

Be realistic with your pricing, and aim for $60-100 per hour depending on your area. Commercial clients are businesses like yourself, and if you try to charge too much, the property manager will just consider hiring a new grounds keeper instead of contracting you for services.

When you have this all figured out, type out your pet waste removal service agreement and send it to your point of contact. The only thing left to do is wait and see if they accept…

Congrats! Your commercial client was happy with the bid and they accepted your proposal, but that doesn’t mean you are out of the woods yet. Most commercial clients will provide you a list of paperwork they require before signing up, so make sure you have all of this taken care of so you don’t scramble at the last minute like I did.

First off, you’ll be requested to provide your Business or Contractor’s license from your state, which you technically should have if you are legally operating a Pet Waste Removal Business. They will also ask you for a signed W-9 form, which is used by businesses to gather taxpayer information that will reported to the IRS. The form requires you to provide your name, address, tax classification, along with your Taxpayer Identification Number, which is either your social security number or your Employer Identification Number or EIN which you can apply for through the IRS.

They will also request a copy of your policy for Liability Insurance to ensure you are covered in case of any accidents or damages that occur on the property or Workers Compensation insurance that would cover any medical costs or lost wages due to work-related injuries and illnesses.

Once you supply all of the necessary paperwork required by your commercial client, it’s time to send them your terms of service and request a deposit to finalize the agreement. You need to provide a pet waste removal service agreement to outline the exact parameters of the work you’ll do and set the correct expectations. HOA’s can be great, but don’t let them take advantage of you by clearly defining what areas will be scooped and any changes to the scope of work will reflect on their invoice. This doesn’t necessarily need to be a contract and you don’t have to lock your client in for a 1-3 year service unless you want to, but break down everything about your services so your customer can read and agree to, along with items like

the due dates for payments and how payments should be made
late fees if the invoice is not paid on time
any requirements of written notice for the contract to be terminated
and what situations would constitute a default under your agreement.

Understand that most commercial clients pay at a net 7,15, or 30 day schedule, meaning you most likely won’t see your money until a few days or weeks of performing services for them. Commercial properties are very slow to pay, which is why I used Jobber to require a deposit and send my apartment complex my contract to sign and agree to.

If you are not comfortable creating a terms of service from scratch, I recommend two options. You can look into online legal services like Rocket Lawyer, where they can help you create all kinds of legal documents like setting up your LLC or business contracts, along with getting quick answers from real lawyers. You can also ask any legal question and have an On Call attorney review your documents too. I went through Rocket Lawyer to set up my contract for commercial clients and I feel better knowing I’m protecting my business legally.

Maybe you aren’t ready to pay for legal services, so if you want to save time and stress from making a terms of service, the second option is I’m offering my pet waste removal service agreement contract as a template that you can use. This is the exact contract I made through Rocket Lawyer, you can customize the template with all the required information we discussed earlier in this blog and use it for more than one client since it’s a template you can change to fit your needs. You can find my contract template here! Disclaimer: Some of these links are affiliate links where I’ll earn a small commission if you make a purchase at no additional cost to you.

Once everything is in order, it’s time to get ready to service your commercial client. Try to look presentable or wear your business work clothes when servicing the property to promote brand awareness. You are a business, and how you represent yourself in public is an indication of how people will view your business. So have a positive demeanor and calm presence, maintain your professionalism whenever you talk to someone and don’t forget to smile. It’s easier to smile knowing that you’re getting paid hundreds of dollars from a single client. So if you want to know how much money I’ve been making since adding my commercial client, click onto the next blog!

And Ill see you on the next scoop!

And As Always, Acknowledge The Now. Bye!