Erica Krupin and her husband were walking through their Michigan neighborhood earlier this year when she saw a sign: neon pink, planted in a front yard, complete with Kroopin’s Poopin Scoopin branding.
She knew the sign, of course. She just didn’t recognize the yard.
“I’ve never even seen that property,” she told her husband. “I have no idea.”
For Erica, that sign was proof Kroopin’s Poopin Scoopin had become the kind of business most solo service founders are trying to build: one that didn’t depend on her being in every yard, answering every call, and holding every customer detail in her head.
Today, Kroopin’s cleans 305 backyards of dog waste a week across Detroit’s western suburbs. Erica projects Kroopin’s Poopin Scoopin to hit $4500,000 in revenue. Q1 2026 revenue was up 55% over the same period last year. Erica estimates more than 150 of those properties are yards she’s never personally laid eyes on. Her crew provides service to them in bright pink gear, with the company’s wrapped vans making the brand hard to miss.
That first winter in 2018, after launching her cleanup business, she serviced 12 yards. She knew the customers, the dogs, and each property’s individual quirks.
The whole operation ran out of a 2007 Chevy Cobalt with VistaPrint magnets stuck to its doors. And like many businesses, there were moments when Erica couldn’t see how the business would survive. Two years ago, she was on her knees in her husband’s garage, crying, throwing things, and telling him she was done.
“Physically, financially, emotionally, spiritually,” she says, “I was tapped.”
Golden handcuffs
Before dog poop became her business, Erica spent 14 years as a pharmacy technician at the University of Michigan. It was stable, paid well, and secure. As she says, the job was “golden handcuffs.”
There wasn’t much room to grow unless she moved into management. She didn’t want to. Her father, who’d been an entrepreneur and struggled, urged her to stay put.
“Erica, get a job that’s secure,” he told her. “You know how much money you’re going to make. But I had this fire inside of me. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I just knew it was going to be something good.”
She tried other routes first. She sold jewelry through a multi-level marketing company. She tried a beer cart. She went back to school to become a physical therapist’s office assistant. Nothing stuck.
The business name had been sitting in plain sight for years. Her husband’s family name is Krupin, and “Kroopin’s Poopin Scoopin” was a running joke in the family. One afternoon, out of the blue, Erica asked him if she could use it.
The next day, she registered the business name, ordered those VistaPrint magnets, bolted a cargo trailer hitch onto her Cobalt, and started scooping dog poop.
When Erica went online to learn how other people built poop-scooping businesses, she found almost nothing. One industry Facebook community had fewer than 200 people in it. So she started a YouTube channel, figuring she might as well become the resource she’d needed herself. She now has nearly 10,000 subscribers. The content she made in those early years — scrappy, self-taught, “cringeworthy” by her own assessment — also taught her the social media instincts that’d later drive her marketing.
The garage floor
By the end of 2023, Erica had gone all in on growing Kroopin’s. She moved the office out of the garage and into a real space. She rebranded, buying new cars and wrapping them in her brand’s signature hot pink. For a field service business, vehicles are one of the biggest expenses after payroll.
Then the business began to unravel. An employee totaled one of the newly wrapped cars. Months later, she totaled another. Erica had to fire her.
“When I look back,” she says now, “I will say it was laziness on my part.” She hadn’t done the work of hiring carefully enough, and the business paid for it.
While scrambling to find an emergency replacement, Erica fell down a flight of stairs and blew out two discs in her back. Suddenly, the founder who knew every customer’s yard and dog could barely move.
These setbacks exposed more than a staffing issue. Erica had built a business that still depended too much on her: her body, her memory, her judgment, and her ability to pick up the phone.
Numbers don’t run off vibes
For seven years, Erica had run Kroopin’s largely on instinct. She had to learn how to run it on numbers.
She’d been building relationships with landscapers because lawn care was the closest business model to poop-scooping. The landscaping world had something her industry lacked: operators who’d already been through the pains of scaling.
Erica had met Charles Nelson a year earlier at LCR Summit, a lawn care industry conference. She asked him to teach her the parts of running a business she’d spent seven years avoiding. She initially asked him for three months of his time: “Just give me every other week, 30 minutes or something, just to help me out.”
She didn’t know how to build an Excel spreadsheet. She didn’t know what a man-hour rate was. Charles walked her through both, starting with her pricing. Erica had been charging at a man-hour rate of roughly $60 to $65. The business was actually operating closer to $80 to $90.
“No wonder you don’t have any money left over,” he told her.
That was the lesson she’d been circling since she found herself on the garage floor. As she put it herself: “Numbers don’t run off vibes.”
Alongside the business rebuild, Erica leaned on prayer, mentors at her church, and counseling. By 2025, the business had steadied. It wasn’t a breakout year, but a recovery year.
Outsourced and in the dark
There was still one problem she hadn’t fully solved: the phone. She’d always been the only person who knew what had been said on a call and the one who had to follow up.
Her first attempt to rectify this was a virtual assistant company. In one month, she spent close to $5,000 on VA support. The company she used didn’t provide call recordings, reliable notes, or real visibility into what the assistants said to her customers. She had no idea what was being promised in her name.
It was the sort of problem Charles had taught her to spot: she was paying for something she couldn’t see, measure, or improve. She canceled the contract with the VAs.
She already had another option in mind. A fellow poop-scooping operator named Justin Owen who crossed the $1 million mark early on had recommended Quo. Erica saw his operations manager handling calls alongside him at ScoopCon, the industry’s annual conference. She remembered thinking, that’s how a real operation looks.
Ahead of the 2026 spring rush, Erica put $20,000 into Q1 advertising: Facebook ads, Google Ads, and yard signs. She knew her phone was going to ring. By then, she had a team, a process, and the tools to back them up.
For the first time, Erica wasn’t the only person who knew what had happened on a call. Her team had the call transcript in Quo with notes about dogs, gates, trash cans, and property details, giving field techs what they needed before they ever set foot in a yard.
When her team can’t answer, Quo’s auto-reply sends a text with a link to her Jobber form so leads don’t disappear when they’re already on the phone or out in the field. The auto-reply, in her words, “saved my bahookie.”
The difference wasn’t just more calls being answered. Erica could finally hand off parts of the customer conversation without losing the record of what had happened.
Erica could also listen back to her own sales calls. The strong ones became training material. The weaker ones became something the team could break down and improve.
That changed how she managed. Instead of being the only person who knew what had happened on the phone, she could coach from the actual conversation. Her field staff told her the notes made them feel “comfortable and confident” walking into a yard for the first time.
The payoff
Even with a better system in place, the volume was difficult to manage. Q1 brought in 1,904 new service requests. Erica is now aiming to hire two full-time staffers to handle phones in Q3 2026, so fewer calls are unanswered and fewer leads sit waiting.
All the operational work she’s done is showing up in the numbers. In March 2025, Kroopin’s billed $31,000. By March 2026, that number was $43,786. Monthly recurring revenue crossed $30,000 in Q2, and Kroopin’s is on track to do $500,000 in sales this year.
The team now includes two full-time and two part-time field technicians, an admin, and a part-time hire who handles social media and in-person events.
Erica’s ad plans are getting bigger to help acquire even more customers: $15,000 for the fall 2026 rush. Then between $30,000 and $40,000 for Q1 2027.
The calls she didn’t expect
One of the biggest surprises for Erica hasn’t been the growth itself. It’s who’s calling for her services. In the early days, Erica thought of her typical customer as a busy parent: kids in sports, two adults working with no time to deal with the yard. That customer still exists. But more and more, she’s hearing from older women.
“It’s the women who are calling us because their husbands had a stroke, their husbands had a heart attack, they lost their husband, and their husbands did everything,” Erica says.
Those calls can run 15 to 20 minutes. Sometimes she prays with the person on the line. Some weeks, Erica says, one of her techs may be the only person who visits them, as their sons or daughters are busy. The phone calls have taught her that the need behind the service isn’t always simple. The person calling might be grieving, overwhelmed, or trying to keep a household running all by themselves for the first time.
She doesn’t think of those calls as a distraction. When budgets get tight, the customers who have had a real conversation with her are less likely to cut Kroopin’s first. And when she picks up the call herself, the numbers back her up: eight out of 10 incoming calls convert.
“You have to be committed to the day-to-day grind. If you don’t quit, you will see the fruits of your labor.”
“People want to talk to a real person,” she says. “They want to know someone has heard them.”
“We’re pooper scoopers,” she adds, “but we’re also people.”
Erica rebuilt the business so she wouldn’t have to be in every yard, on every call, or in every spreadsheet. She built it so answering the phone herself was a choice, not a necessity. Now she can choose where to show up. Most mornings, she still likes to take phone calls.
Her day starts early, at 4:15 a.m. — a workout, some Bible reading — and by 7:30 she’s at her desk, checking Quo and Jobber, texting her staff good morning, and calling leads back.
The thing she hears more than anything else is some version of: “Thank you for just calling me back.” Even when Kroopin’s can’t take the job, Erica still picks up the phone. If the customer is outside her service area, she recommends another company. People don’t expect that.
“Maybe they didn’t sign up,” she said. “But maybe we were a day-maker for them. Either way, we connected with someone who needed it.” For Erica, that connection is still the point.
“It’s not get-rich-quick. You have to be committed to the day-to-day grind. If you don’t quit, you will see the fruits of your labor.”
