The technology inside low-tech businesses

Daniel Tom calls Bay Area Sanitation a low-tech, AI-proof business, and with almost 2,000 portable toilets and 19 employees he has a point. No software empties a toilet. But most of the owners in this database who grew past one truck did buy some piece of technology along the way, and their entries are specific about what it was. The list is short, and almost none of it touches the work itself.

Cutting the drive

When Dan Spracklin took over Gray Brothers in 2013, it did about $1 million a year from 22,000 septic customers at margins of 10 to 15 percent. He made four changes. He added inspections, construction and emergency municipal work, he raised prices that had sat still for years, he treated the customer file as an asset, and he put GPS routing on the trucks. Two years later the company did roughly $3 million at more than 30 percent. In a business where the main cost is time behind the windshield, routing software is close to the only technology that lowers the cost of every single job. Our piece on route density explains why that number decides so much.

Showing the customer the work

Kim Hatch brought Starlink, iPads and digital reporting software to septic pumping, a trade where older competitors still hand over carbon-copy receipts. Her invoices are heavy with photographs of what the crew found and what it did. Nobody wants to look at the inside of their tank, but a homeowner who can see the job was done leaves a good review, and real estate agents in the county send her their referrals. Turner Septic runs 18 jobs a day and reports up to $200,000 in a peak month.

Sam Evans used the same idea in reverse. When the pandemic hit, You Call We Haul switched to contactless pickups: customers texted photos of the junk for a quote and left it outside. The business had done about $180,000 in 2019, and the change nearly doubled that the following year. A phone camera did the estimating visit.

Standing in for a person

The largest single cost in a small storage facility is a resident manager, and Nick Huber and Dan Hagberg run their 68 Bolt Storage facilities without one. Gate codes handle access, cameras handle security, online booking handles rentals and a central call team answers the phone. The same setup is what lets them buy rural facilities from retiring owners who still run things from a kitchen landline: the difference between the two operating models is most of the investment case on the self-storage page.

Johnny Robinson and Sergio Silesky did a version of this for window cleaning. In 2019 they moved the work to subcontractor crews and ran sales, scheduling and quality control from laptops. They reached $65,000 to $70,000 a month and sold a company that did not need them. At Rising Tide, the D'Eri family's car washes, QR codes at each station pull up a short video for any employee who forgets a step. The system was built for a largely autistic workforce, and the entry's point is that any wash would run better with it.

Taking the money

In vending the technology that matters is the card reader. Marcus Gram's $10,000 start in 2018 already included two of them. Joyner Vending did about $5,000 in its first year, then passed $200,000 in 2020 as card payments took over. Adam Hill, who grosses over $58,000 a month from more than 100 machines, says his hardest lesson was that resellers still push machines that cannot take cards onto beginners. A cash-only machine keeps working, but it brings in a fraction of what it could.

Owning the search

Ian Hecht is the one owner whose business is the technology. He never bought a dumpster. His site ranks for dumpster rental searches and sells the job to vetted haulers, roughly $100 a lead with about $50 of it margin, and it did $2.1 million in its second year on about $26,000 of advertising. His entry carries the honest risk: a search ranking can disappear with one algorithm change, which no steel box has ever had to worry about.

Joshua Brown's lesson about search was cheaper to learn. He was spending up to $10,000 a month running his own Google Ads, and a professional he hired cut that to about $3,000 with better results. Our article on how the owners found their first customers covers what came before the ads.

Where the capital still goes

None of this replaces the big purchases. Tom puts a rentable toilet at about $800 and a vacuum truck at about $160,000, pays himself roughly $120,000, and reinvests the rest in units and trucks. Hatch's most effective piece of equipment is not her software but a custom 1,400-gallon four-wheel-drive truck that reaches mountain-top properties no standard pump truck can, which left those customers with no other provider. The truck piece and the startup cost ladder show where most of the money in these trades goes.

Look across the entries and the technology that paid did one of three narrow jobs: it saved a trip, replaced a person who would otherwise be on site, or proved to the customer that the work was done. Nobody in the database reports buying software for its own sake, and the margin ledger gives no sign that the owners with the most technology keep the most. Every owner named here is in the database with sources. This site is one of SideRoad's weekly builds, and it runs on the same rule: buy the tool after the job it does is clear.

Common questions

Keep reading

• How long the founders took to reach $1 million a year
• Route density: the one number that decides a service business
• The truck is the business