Your 30-Day Launch Plan

How to use this plan

Four weeks, part-time hours, a few hundred dollars of spend. Every task comes from a lesson in this course, so when a step feels thin, the detail is one cross-reference away. The checkpoints at each week's end are honest gates: they tell you what is on track, not what is guaranteed. The ad-funded team that became a $200,000 operator bought two to five leads a day with paid ads from the start and still assembled its route one week at a time; a solo operator with hangers and a phone should measure the first month in yards kept rather than dollars banked.

Week 1: exist and practice

• Register the LLC (or file the sole proprietorship DBA to test, upgrade when the route is real), get the EIN, open the business bank account.
• Buy the checklist from The Under-$500 Start: rake set, bucket, bags, bleach, gloves, boots. Under $150.
• Call your municipality's solid waste office with the two disposal questions; write the answer into your future service terms.
• Get a general liability quote from two carriers; expect the high teens to about thirty dollars a month at start limits, buy the one that issues certificates of insurance easily.
• Run the try-it test from Is This Work You Can Do Every Week? on five practice yards in your target zone, timed.
• Pick the target zone: dog-dense, fenced, fifteen minutes end to end, one contiguous blob on the map.

Checkpoint: you are legal, insured, geared, and you have physically cleaned five real yards, one of which took you under fifteen minutes. If the five-yards day broke you physically, stop here and reconsider honestly.

Week 2: be findable, make the ask

• Set up the Google Business Profile: service area, photos of those practice yards (with permission), your price range published plainly.
• Design and order 1,000 door hangers with the first-clean offer from Pricing a Yard; hang 250 of them inside the target zone, obeying every no-soliciting sign.
• Tell everyone you actually know: one social post, one neighborhood group post, texts to the dog owners in your phone. First-clean pricing for the first ten.
• Write your quote script onto a card and answer every call inside the day, quoting from the price sheet, booking cards on file.
• Set the spreadsheet: client, address, dogs, gate code, rate, route day, notes.

Checkpoint: first paying job done, ideally a paid first-clean inside the $40-75 band, and 2-3 weekly subscriptions booked. Every quote answered same-day. If calls came but nothing booked, the price conversation is the problem; reread the script in First Customers and practice it aloud.

Week 3: build the Tuesday

• Group every client by street into one or two route days; run the first proper route day, arrival texts and completion photos and gate photos included.
• Convert first-clean clients to weekly in the same week, before the clean yard loses the argument: "You're on Thursday's route now, invoice goes out on the 1st."
• Hang the second 250 hangers, this time concentrated around the streets where you already have clients.
• Ask your first two reviews from happy clients, by text, with the direct link.
• Book the recurring billing: card on file, monthly, the 1st.

Checkpoint: 5-8 weekly clients on a real route day, first invoices scheduled, two reviews live. The route day should not have felt chaotic; if it did, the stops were too scattered and week 4 fixes the map, not the effort.

Week 4: systematize and look up

• Deliver month one invoices on the 1st, and confirm every card ran.
• Referral offer live: existing clients get a credit, newcomers get a discount on month one, per the structure in First Customers.
• Restock hangers around clients again; walk the zone once more.
• Write the winter policy now if you are within two months of snow, per The Rules of the Route, and put the spring-cleanup fee expectation in writing to anyone who mentions pausing.
• Do the month-one read from Hard Truths and Failure Modes: churn line, ad dependence (should be zero so far), per-hour test on the route as built.

Checkpoint: 8-12 paying clients, one route day that runs itself, money arriving on schedule, and a map that is one blob instead of confetti. That is a launched business. It is small, and it is real, and month two is mostly month one repeated with more doors.

The route is alive. Everything past this point, what to do with it once it outgrows you and where this course hands off to the rest of the catalog, is deliberate depth for later.