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The second business inside the first: why so many operators end up selling a course
Eleven of 33 documented owners sell an explanation of their trade, and four more franchise it. The two who have put it beside the route's income say the route earns more.
Read enough entries in the database and the last paragraph starts to repeat. The owner builds the route, hires the crews, steps back from the truck, and then begins selling an explanation of how it was done. By our count of the entries as they stand today, 11 of the 33 documented owners sell a book, a manual, a course, coaching or a paid community about their trade. Four more sell a franchise. That is nearly half, short of the "every operator" the pattern is sometimes described as, and enough to need an explanation.
Who sells what
The teaching products come in four weights, and the difference between them is how much of the buyer's future revenue the seller keeps.
Brian Winch's Cleanlots manual, sold with email and phone support. Dave Menz's Laundromat Millionaire. No royalty and no territory.
Marcus Gram, Adam Hill, Cristobal Mondragon, Kyle Landwehr's Junk Academy, Robinson and Silesky's Home Service Academy, Steve Hunsaker's training community, Mobile Home University's boot camps.
Joshua Brown: $20,000 plus a 10 percent royalty, with total startup investment put at $50,000 to $100,000.
Augusta Lawn Care, Scoop Soldiers, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and 1-800-STRIPER. Augusta lists $49,999 to $139,999 to start. Scoop Soldiers runs $61,000 to $111,000.
Brian Winch sits at the light end on purpose. His entry records him saying the manual is not a franchise: no royalties, no territory fees, buy the book and go. Joshua Brown sits in the middle with a license. Mike Andes went all the way, and Augusta now counts more than 200 locations. Nick Huber is a fifth kind that does not fit the table: a media brand, a book and a family of agencies that grew out of describing the storage business in public.
What the teaching earns
Only one owner in the database has put a number on it. Marcus Gram says his course and ebook have earned about $90,000 to date. His vending route reported $500,000 in sales in 2022 alone, and he keeps roughly half of route revenue. By our division, everything the course has ever earned is about what the route paid him in four to five months at the 2022 rate.
Winch gives the same answer without a figure. He has said the teaching income is meaningful, that it has never approached the cleaning income, and that most of his revenue still comes from the lots. Nobody else in the ledger has published a split, so those two statements are all the evidence there is. Both point the same way, and both come from owners whose teaching product is at the cheap end of the table. A franchise system is a different size of thing: the $50 million reported for Augusta is systemwide revenue, the combined sales of the franchisees, and the franchisor's own share of it is not published.
Why it keeps happening
The entries do not explain the pattern, so this part is our reading of them.
A local service has a map around it. Winch's lots are in Calgary. Cristobal Mondragon cleans houses in Seattle and opened a second market in Atlanta, and a second market needs a second staff. A manual has no service area. For an owner who has filled a metro, teaching is the first product that can be sold to someone three states away without buying another truck.
The work is repetitive, and repetitive work can be written down. The Menear entry quotes a striping operator saying that once you have striped a few jobs you have striped them all. Luke and Heather Menear spent two decades painting lines before they franchised. What they sell now is the sameness.
They were already being interviewed. Most of the figures in this database exist because an owner sat down with UpFlip, CNBC Make It, Starter Story or a podcast. Two of the courses, Brown's and Mondragon's, are listed in the sources on their entries as UpFlip Academy products. An owner who has explained the business on camera several times has most of a curriculum already.
It follows the step back. Johnny Robinson and Sergio Silesky started their academy after they sold Orange Window Cleaning. Landwehr founded his in 2022, around the time an operations manager took over the daily running. Adam Hill teaches on a two-day week. The course tends to arrive when the owner has free hours.
What a course does to the numbers
An owner who sells tuition has a reason to quote the largest figure available. That does not make the figure false. It does mean the reader should check what kind of figure it is.
The Landwehr entry carries the clearest example. UpFlip puts Slam Dunkin' Junk at $2.5 million annually, the coverage does not say whether that is revenue or take-home, and reviewers of his course have raised the same question. We publish the number as he states it and label it. Compare Michael Haskell, whose $135,000 of 2025 revenue and roughly $82,000 of operating earnings come from documents CNBC Make It reviewed. Haskell sells no course. The second figure is smaller and easier to rely on.
Three questions sort most claims. Is the number revenue, gross profit or what the owner took home? Did anyone other than the owner see the books? And does it describe the operation, or the operation plus the teaching? The margin ledger labels each figure with what it measures.
The other side of the counter
Two documented owners bought someone else's second business, and both results are in the database. Ryan McCoy bought the Dallas Scoop Soldiers territory in 2019 and reported more than $900,000 from 1,100-plus clients within a year. His entry is careful about why: he had managed that same market as a company employee for two years before buying it, and the territory came stocked with customers. Joel and Hunter Davis opened an America's Swimming Pool Company franchise in 2019 and report $851,000 a year in revenue, with fees and royalties paid out of it.
Neither bought a course. They bought systems that came with customers or a lead flow attached, at prices the startup costs page sets beside the cold starts. No buyer of a course or manual is documented in the database yet, so we cannot say what tuition returns. The cold starts are the only comparison on file: Winch began with about $250 of hand tools, and Gram's first year with $10,000 of machines brought in about $5,000.
Not every second business is a classroom
Some owners added a second operation instead. Landwehr used the junk trucks to find property deals, since a hauler sees estates and landlord turnovers before they are listed. Clayton Roll stacked container storage, equipment rental and apartments on a dumpster fleet. Hunsaker added a permanent lighting brand to fill the ten months when nobody wants Christmas lights. Ian Hecht never ran the first business at all and sells dumpster leads to the people who do.
These are harder to start than a course and they do not depend on an audience. For a reader choosing a trade, they are the more useful thing to look for: a route that puts you inside a second market every week.
How to read it
In every documented case the operating business came first, usually by years. Winch walked lots from 1981 and published the manual in 2018. Menz bought his first store in 2010 and published in 2021. The course is evidence that the trade can be taught and that the owner eventually had time to spare. It says nothing about whether the trade suits you, which is what the picker is for.
We are not outside the pattern. This site explains other people's businesses, sells a deal kit built from the same entries, and is one of SideRoad's weekly builds. The difference we try to keep is that the figures here belong to the owners, with the source on each entry, and that the count in the first paragraph is 11 of 33 because that is what the entries show.
Common questions
Why do so many small business owners sell courses?
In this database, 11 of 33 documented owners sell a book, manual, course, coaching or paid community, and four more sell a franchise. Our reading is that a local service is limited to its metro, the work is repetitive enough to write down, the owners have usually been interviewed many times already, and the course tends to appear once the owner has stepped back from daily operations.
Do owners make more from the course than from the business?
The two owners who have addressed it say no. Marcus Gram reports about $90,000 to date from his course and ebook, against $500,000 of vending sales in 2022 alone. Brian Winch has said his teaching income is meaningful but has never approached his cleaning income. No other documented owner has published a split.
Should I trust revenue figures from an owner who sells a course?
Check what kind of figure it is. Ask whether it is revenue or take-home, whether anyone other than the owner reviewed the books, and whether it includes teaching income. Kyle Landwehr's $2.5 million figure does not distinguish revenue from take-home in the coverage. Michael Haskell's $135,000 was confirmed by documents CNBC Make It reviewed. The corrections page lists what we have corrected so far, with dates.
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