Failure Friday: “We tried to be everything to everyone…”
In this week’s Failure Friday segment, we hear from the founder of Cleanlots, a parking lot cleanup service that’s been operating for decades. In its early years, Cleanlots expanded too quickly, learning a valuable lesson before pulling back to its core competency.
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What It's About
A longtime business owner cleans up his priorities.
Notes from Chris
Episode 1994
I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more. It’s with this principle in mind that I offer you a weekly segment called Failure Friday: a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you’ll hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground. They’ll tell you a short story of something that went very wrong. The stories will vary, but often it starts with an idea, what they thought would happen and what really happened—and of course, what they learned. Today’s short story features Brian Winch, founder of Cleanlots. He’s been operating this litter removal business for a long time—more than forty years, to be precise. As he explains in his update, it started as a hustle but quickly took over and turned into a livelihood. Shortly afterwards, he made (by his own admission) a big mistake that hindered the business for several years. Fortunately, he eventually found his way out and learned a valuable lesson along the way. Listen to today's episode to learn more...MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Thanks to Brian for sharing this candid story. Cleanouts has been running for a long time and has clearly clung to that lesson on core competency.Check out the CLEANLOTS book! It’s an operations manual on how to start and run a parking lot litter cleaning business. You can find that on Cleanlots.com.
- The Man Who Paints Parking Lot Stripes: When an asphalt pricing estimator looks to make extra money, he finds a straight-up business idea and earns his stripes painting parking lot spaces.
- Retail Worker Cleans Up With Litter-Picking Business: Despite having little in the way of business skills, money, or education, this retail worker turns his father’s side hustle into a multiple six-figure business.
- College Student Earns $20,000 a Month Cleaning Houses: A Washington, D.C. student identifies problems in the cleaning industry, then starts a customer service-driven company.
