DoodyCalls
Jacob and Susan, DoodyCalls founders.
Jacob D’Aniello’s job can be really…
Well, let’s just say he deals with a lot of poop. Dog feces, to be specific.
Jacob was working as a technology consultant in the late 1990s when he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug that runs in his family. His grandfather started a furniture business; his father had a chain of independent shoe stores.
Together, Jacob and his girlfriend (now wife), Susan D’Aniello, started looking for something they could do together that didn’t take a lot of start-up capital, he said in an interview from the Charlottesville headquarters of DoodyCalls.
They knew they wanted to work outside. And, they wanted to create a new service or product that would win people into a new market instead of just stealing people away from competitors.
“I didn’t want a complicated business,” Jacob said. “I wasn’t looking to impress people in bars at night.”
He heard about someone starting a successful poop-scooping business in another part of the country, and quickly he realized that no one was doing it on a larger, professional scale. “We thought there would always be a market for people willing to pay for something they don’t want to do,” he said.
The business started from a Kinko’s copy shop here in Northern Virginia, where they’d spend Friday nights creating flyers and arguing about the best color of paper. They spent Saturdays passing out flyers, and planned to do scooping on Sundays. No one called for months.
Eventually, Jacob built a little website. And then one day, someone called and bought a six-month gift certificate as a house-warming gift for someone who had several large dogs.
“It was the first house we scooped. It was the winter. We had a cardboard box with a garbage bag in it, and one of us carried the box and one of us had the trowel,” he said.
They reinvested all the money back into the company, bought ads and started generating more business — most of which came from here in the dog-loving Alexandria area.
Susan was in school for nursing and work-ing part-time, and Jacob was still working in technology, so they scooped poop before work or after work — often dressed in his suit. “I was the most well-dressed pooper scooper in America.”
By 2004, D’Aniello left his job to focus on DoodyCalls full time. At the beginning, he took a big pay cut. Eventually, the business grew to a point where Susan was able to leave her nursing job.
After a few years, they started asking how they could help other entrepreneurs. They did so by bringing the business to other cities, helping entrepreneurs leave their day jobs and start DoodyCalls franchises.
The business has grown to 20 states. The company also provides dog poop stations at dog parks and in residential communities.
Susan does much of the marketing and franchise recruitment while Jacob takes care of other aspects of running the company. They have two children, and no dogs of their own right now — their dog passed away last year at age 16.
Working together all these years, Susan and Jacob have learned a few things: “You can’t treat your wife like an employee, and she can’t treat you like an employee,” Jacob said. Jacob said no matter what role they’re playing in the company, they focus on doing the best job they can do.
For entrepreneurs considering starting a business, Jacob said, “It’s really imperative to have family support. If you start a small business, it’s hard – it permeates your entire life more than you think.”
Learn more about the company at DoodyCalls.com.
