Service Businesses

What if the pile of laundry sitting in your spare room was actually a business idea in disguise?

That’s more or less how Susan Toft tells it. She was a new mom with a full-time corporate job, staring at a mountain of unfolded clothes and thinking: someone should offer this as a service.

So she decided to be that someone.

Susan is the founder of LaundryLady.com, Australia’s number one mobile laundry service. She started solo in 2012, doing pickups in her van with her toddler in the backseat.

Thirteen years later, she’s running a $12 million business with 450+ contractors across Australia, a presence in New Zealand, a new launch in Canada, and expansion into the UK on the way.

Along the way, she landed a $1 million investment on Shark Tank Australia.

What if the million dollar business you’re looking for is literally in your own backyard?

William Milliken went from zero to 350 recurring customers in his first three months in business, starting a pet waste removal company as a side project. Last year, his business racked up over $3 million in revenue, all from the not-so-glamorous service of cleaning up dog poop.

And if that wasn’t enough, William turned his knowledge into another side hustle, teaching others through swoopscoop.com and the Poop Scoop Millionaire community. That’s turned into another almost million dollar a year business.

While he was a full-time student, Johnny Robinson built OrangeWindowCleaning.com into a $700k a year operation.

If you want to start your own business, it doesn’t necessarily take a never-before-seen business idea to have a never-before-seen impact on your life.

What if you could earn $5,000 in a single weekend taking rainbow-colored portraits that help people feel seen and valued?

Summer Ray built exactly that kind of business with aura photography, creating portraits that visualize someone’s energy field and command $44 per session.

From somalumin.com, Summer has earned $70,000 in just six months while keeping her full-time job.

If you’ve never heard of aura photography before, that’s totally fine. But whether you believe in energy fields or not, Summer’s strategic approach to building this business offers valuable lessons for any event-based side hustle.

This week’s guest booked $100k worth of work in their first 9 months of a new side hustle they had no experience with.

Haley Gallagher and her husband are serial side hustlers and were specifically looking for a side hustle they could do after hours.

Seeing an opportunity at a bar he was working security for, Haley’s husband asked if they could take on the cleaning contract.