How StayBusy CEO Carter Olive grew to $100K revenue with a 4 person team in 2023.

guys his family's painting business did 2.7 million bucks in Revenue but he said guys I want to go after our nine figure deal let's make this a Marketplace for any Home Services car detailing painting you name it cleaning they'll do it he put together a 97 Grand Slam offer for folks in Vancouver to use his app to get their whole condo clean for 97 bucks 200 people took advantage of that in q1 so far this year in 2023 he's hoping to do 5 000 jobs completed this year and those jobs get completed over 1500 contractors who ideally start making a living on his app stay busy.ca hey folks my guest today is Carter Olive he helps homeowners get things done quickly by easling hiring contractors for jobs around the house is it two times founder and a golf attic Carter are you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it man all right man is tiger ever gonna be back to his old form or no has that guy gone forever I saw him limping into the Genesis Invitational this week so I'm hoping he can scrape out one last win but we'll see I mean he's got the passion right yeah yeah we'll see what happens all right so talk to me about the business how did you get into this space were you doing a bunch of manual work yourself or your families in the business or how did you how did you come across it yeah so uh I started in the space doing painting actually um I was grandfathered in uh through a family family member they owned the business they were just a boomer who was retiring um looked to pass on the business to somebody and I was like sure I'll do it I didn't want to be a painter I've got a finance background but decided to take a look at the numbers and just jump Jump Right In um shortly after taking over the business I realized that there's really no technology in the control wait wait Carter before he tells that story uh since you're a finance guy what were you most concerned about looking at the numbers at the start uh accounts receivable okay interesting all right now tell the rest of the story we'll come back to accounts receivable in a second okay cool uh but yeah no really just um I realize there's no technology in the space and there were just so many cool startups that were happening um Uber at the time was one that was really eye-catching and then I went to Dubai to meet with a friend of mine who is like a startup incubator and there's a great company out there called Urban company and basically what I wanted to do is I wanted to take what these other companies were doing and just see if it was applicable to the Canadian Market um so we launched uh on-demand home services so you can hire anything from dog walkers to Plumbing to painting simple Services right at the at the you know Mobile touch of your fingers so that's what we've been doing uh we're niching it in Vancouver um the way that we're bringing it to Market is we're doing a lot of direct mail which is a little bit non-traditional for uh SAS real quick hold on hold on one sec the website today focuses on painting but you just said I mean are you are you more raw today than what your website says yeah yeah I know the painting is uh the way that we launched it so we launched it as a painting service offering more but we're actually currently changing the text and just revisiting that landing page because more has become more popular I guess yeah we just decided to focus on one service rather than telling everybody that we do everything yeah no I think that's great and there's text on the site I imagine it's old but it says you're doing 500 paintings per month excuse me per month what's that updated today are you still doing about 500 a month uh yeah I would say about 500 a month but more so just spread out across the services channel so I wouldn't say it's more it's 500 painting it's more just 500 um services that we're booking so and what is actually what are the what are the big what are the top three today painting and what are the other two oh house cleaning for sure interesting okay car detailing yeah everybody just wants to get into a nice clean car I mean you're in a Condo building right so oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that 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car detailing and reply instantly when someone pushes a button in your app so let's start with the supply let's start with the supply side first where do you go find 100 car detailers in Vancouver that are ready to respond to your consumer's requests in the app Facebook groups easy interesting um Facebook groups just contact I mean this is like some tricks to the trade that I had to use but just contacting admins and getting their respect um and just being integral and empathetic towards like the group the group posting rules um and then just reaching out to people and letting them know what you're doing um looking letting them know that you're looking to network and just have these coffee conversations um and then on the other side of things like getting people to click to click yes right and book that service um Alex harmosi does a great piece on offering something for free or offering something way cheaper than what it's worth um so that's how we got people to say yes is we use direct mail to just basically send them a grand slam offer so it was 97 for a full condo clean this is under 100 bucks to get your whole condo cleaned um people were just like oh that seems like a no-brainer and it was right I mean for 90 100 well you're a finance guy though how do you make the margins work you got to find cleaners in Vancouver willing to clean a whole condo for under 97 bucks and and still have room for your margin yeah in the beginning though you don't like in the beginning really we're just trying to break even like we're just really trying to get the trust because we want the app to be sticky right we want people to trust the app and continue to use other services right so it's really just like the uh implement or the the first click that we're trying to to get and it's really not about making a margin so much on that first click um but again to like house cleaners all these sorts of services right like they offer you know low end um production so Carter how many folks took you up on that on that grand slam offer uh well in the we just did this Grand Slam off we're starting in January uh and then we had 200 people in the first month wow okay and then and then were you able to break even in all those 200 cleans e around it yeah yeah I mean sometimes obviously you go above and beyond uh to just go the extra mile to satisfy the customer and that's something that we encourage people to do regardless like we're trying to build the brand here we're trying did you hold was that ever I mean one of the key points of what Alex talks about in his book 100 million dollar offers is you know if you get 97 bucks that's great gets them in the door but if you can drive up the average cart value because you upsell car detailing and other things that's great so I mean when you look at the 200 that took the Grand Slam offered they all pay only 97 or did anyone upsell to other things so what we're currently working on right now is like how can we upsell through the application right and keeping these people as contractors so that's I think are one of our challenges at the moment is like we want people to increase their like their purchasing I want them to purchase more services through the application um but we just don't know exactly like what are the most demanded Services because if we put in the application we do this this this and this and you can purchase this this this um it's almost overwhelming and people don't really know what they're getting so really just trying to simplify the product offerings and that's what we're trying to find like the next thing that we want to offer the next up sale that's a grand slam how well eventually you can't keep doing grand slams where you break even like eventually you need to make a margin right so um I guess do you empower the contractor that you hired to go clean the condo what do you pay them about 97 bucks yeah pretty close so you really make no money there do you empower the contractor to upsell the client on the spot like can the person doing the cleaning upsell car detailing on the spot they can yeah how do you get them to do that and did did any of them do that for the first 200 Grand Slam cleans so some of them did but where we are finding a bit of not not trouble but we're trying to bring these people on as independent contractors um so that they can continue to like work for themselves but also you know work under our branding um so that's something that we just go back and forth with a little bit and we're just trial and erroring as we go um more or less though we're really just trying to um give people like we want to be also SAS which is a little tricky because we would love to eventually begin charging these contractors to be a part of our platform if that makes sense and that's where we're hoping to see the margins increase a little bit more if that means yeah that's definitely a Playbook I mean we've got a lot of hunters on that run marketplaces like get spiffy in these guys but it's really hard the first five years for the marketplace and then they launch software that helps con paint contractors run their paint operation right and you already have the upsell like you can sell them directly because they're already in your Marketplace but it's really hard the first couple years to get it going it sounds like this was passed down to you from family when did the company launch what was the first year stay busy yeah stay busy's first launch was last year so did you spin that out of the family business that's been around much longer no not really uh the family business is more just like a commercial painting company um it's not technically it's not doesn't have any technology behind it at all and he's really just seeing and eating the market and wanting to create an awesome product that had a higher opportunity right so V1 Upstate business was really to help the family business manage their own paintwork and then now it's like well now the your family businesses aren't the only painters there's 100 other painters on the platform now totally totally it's more though to like even out like going back to Harmony too like he just talks about how sometimes you have like a level eight skill but doing a level four opportunity right and if you have a level 10 skill and you're doing a level four opportunity you know your ceiling is so low so we just wanted to be or for me personally I wanted to be in a space where I felt like I had a level 10 opportunity um to the point of I was just like listen like the painting company yes I can take it to seven eight figures um but if I have an application that's really awesome and it's really changing the way that the space is going um that's like a nine-figured opportunity right there so I wanted to start something of a problem in an industry that just felt dinosaur so how many total jobs did you complete last year in 2022 uh we didn't actually complete that many because we felt like the year was a lot of testing we're testing how low was it like like 10 100 500 no we're we're a little higher than that like I think we were totaling a thousand um but it still felt like it was morally generationy yeah we had a totally different model last year where it was more along the lines of just like okay here's a job you know here's a pay us a percentage we didn't like that right we felt like what percent thing it just what percent are we charging people we're charging him what were you saying okay so on a 97 clean you would mark it up 10 bucks that's your 10 markup yeah but we're doing painting right so the jobs were like a thousand two thousand five thousand ten thousand so that's where we were making money last year um but it just wasn't like reliable right and what was the average what was the so of the Thousand you did last year what was the average project price the average project price was around twenty seven hundred wow okay that's cost painting car detailing every everything just averaged no no painting only a thousand from last year painting yeah oh oh I see I see okay so that's what is that is that 2.7 million that's 2.7 million I'm painting Volume last year yeah yeah okay that's pretty hot I mean it's pretty healthy um interesting so I guess yeah not really it was reliable right because like for us like I mean it was great to pump up our tires and everything but just to like bring things back to reality the model I didn't like because I couldn't rely on it and here's here's the other thing too is like we're getting these leads like we're paying to acquire these leads right whether it's through Linkedin like using Duck Soup or whether it's Facebook using these Facebook groups whatever Word of Mouth doesn't matter but at the end of the day like we're only making money on the leads that we provide and if the contractor closes the deal so that's where the struggle was is we were like hey well you know we can't do we can't do a sales Academy as well yeah I mean did you make money on the 2.7 million last year of volume or no yeah of course okay but I mean it's not it's terrible what do you mean I guess I don't understand what you mean to say you can't rely on it I mean if you sell the painting first and then you come back and upsell the car detailing and the full house cleaning and the cleaning happens every month now it's recurring I guess why do you feel like you can't rely on that stream well it's just more so like we felt like we couldn't rely on it because it was costing us so much and we couldn't like we weren't doing the selling if that makes sense like we were having the contractors do the selling on our behalf so we were sending them over we were like listen like this is your job go give the estimate go give the price right and then if you close the deal we receive that commission so what's your goal this year that's why your Project's done uh in terms of projects then we're probably looking at I would love to do like 5 000 honestly and how many more things to verify the model um not as much if I had to guess because we're focusing solely on Carter not as much as in a number what's your number how many of the 5 000 you think away painting uh I would probably say 500. interesting you really don't like painting even though that per job price is it's much higher than 97 cleaning job but the reason I don't like painting I actually hate painting I don't like brushing or rolling um so many things go wrong in painting it's not simple like it's not a simple and get spilled client doesn't like the color um if you have other trades in the project itself right it affects your margins because the efficiency timeline is stretched out um there's just so many things that play like material costs um you just can't accurately you can't accurately guess the material costs right it's in between 10 or 15 percent right depending on what materials you use sometimes it's more expensive less expensive um this is not it's just it's not a simple service yeah so for me yeah project costs are higher but it's just in terms of like output it's just so much more work go clean the house I don't I don't mean to rush you Carter just we're about out of time here it's a quick show real real quick on the supply side how many contractors do you think you'll pay at least a dollar this year to complete all the jobs oh 1500. okay so one so 1500 to 5 000 jobs so one contractor can do multi you know ideally he stays on your platform can do multiple jobs yeah that's right interesting well Hey listen one day you hopefully you know have 10 000 contractors and you can sell them a SAS products and that becomes a nine figure exit for you we'll see what happens but in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book oh uh the hard things about hard things uh by Horowitz number two is our CEO you're following or studying uh Alex hermosi number three what's your favorite online tool for building stay busy Duck Soup the Google extension Yep they're actually they just came on they just broke seven million bucks in Revenue they're growing quickly number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh eight and what's your situation married single kids single uh that's not your in a relationship but not married yeah good correction there you don't want you know they hear this that's not good for you all right uh last question or sorry second last question how old are you today uh 26. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. okay uh that that's a good question something that I knew it doesn't get easier it gets harder but it doesn't get worth it guys his family's painting business did 2.7 million bucks in Revenue but he said guys I want to go after a nine figure deal let's make this a Marketplace for any Home Services car detailing painting you name it cleaning they'll do it he put together 97 Grand Slam offer for folks in Vancouver to use his app to get their whole condo clean for 97 bucks 200 people took advantage of that in q1 so far this year in 2023 he's hoping to do 5 000 jobs completed this year and those jobs get completed over 1500 contractors who ideally start making a living on his app stay busy.ca check it out Carter thanks for taking us to the top awesome thanks man appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to 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