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Somewhere in a Virginia suburb, a man pulls up to a house, walks the lawn with a scooper and a bucket, and charges twenty bucks for ten minutes of work. That errand became a franchise network with over a hundred territories and system-wide revenue in the tens of millions. Nobody puts that business on a vision board.
The top 7 unusual businesses making millions of dollars rarely show up in startup pitch decks. They sell services that are boring, dirty, or faintly embarrassing, the kind of thing people would happily pay to never think about again. That combination turns out to be a licence to print money.
1. Pet waste removal: charging people to do the unthinkable
Jacob D’Aniello started DoodyCalls in Charlottesville in 2000, back when “pooper scooper service” sounded like a joke. Two decades later it runs on a franchise model with roughly 140 territories across the United States and revenues reported in the tens of millions.
The economics are almost rude. A weekly visit costs the customer $15 to $25, takes a technician eight to twelve minutes, and repeats every single week for years. One truck can service 60 to 80 homes, which works out to well over $60,000 a year in recurring revenue per route before a single new customer is signed.
The moat is pure squeamishness. Roughly two-thirds of American households own a pet, and a decent slice of those owners will never kneel in the grass with a bag. The franchise sells trust and a clean lawn; the customer buys dignity.
2. Head lice clinics that charge $200 a visit
Lice Clinics of America built a franchise of several hundred locations across more than 30 countries on a technology spun out of the University of Utah. The AirAllé device blows heated air across the scalp to dehydrate lice and their eggs, replacing the old shampoo-and-comb marathon with a session that takes about half an hour.
Treatments run $150 to $200, and parents pay it without blinking at 9pm on a Sunday because the alternative is three weeks of laundry, combing, and quiet panic. Mobile operators like LiceDoctors drive to the house and charge a similar fee for the convenience.
Why the margins hold up
There is no inventory to spoilage, no perishable stock, and demand is guaranteed by the school calendar. September and January are Christmas for lice clinics, and word of mouth spreads through parent group chats faster than the insects themselves.
3. Goatscaping: renting livestock as a landscaping crew
Goats On The Go turned a herd of hungry animals into a franchise. Customers with poison ivy on a hillside, kudzu behind a warehouse, or blackberry brambles on a slope too steep for a mower pay $500 to $1,500 per job to have goats eat the problem down to the dirt.
Municipalities, utilities, solar farms, and parks departments are the big accounts. Goats reach terrain equipment cannot, they leave behind fertiliser instead of diesel exhaust, and they work for free once the fence is up. Operators charge a setup fee, a per-day grazing rate, and often a second fee to come back and rotate the herd.
4. Dog DNA testing so landlords can catch the culprit
PooPrints, run by BioPet Laboratories in Knoxville, Tennessee, swabs a dog’s cheek at move-in and stores the DNA profile in a registry. When a pile appears in the common area, staff send a sample to the lab. A match comes back with the apartment number, and the fine lands somewhere between $100 and $350.
The company serves thousands of apartment communities and charges $50 to $75 per dog for registration. Property managers love it because the alternative is paying a grounds crew to patrol for evidence every morning.
5. Trash bin cleaning: 60 seconds of work, billed monthly
A truck-mounted pressure washer lifts a wheelie bin, blasts the inside with hot water, sanitises it, and lowers it back down. The whole cycle takes about a minute. Customers pay $15 to $30 per bin per month to never smell that particular smell again.
Do the arithmetic on 1,000 subscribed households with two bins each and you are looking at $30,000 to $60,000 a month in recurring revenue, mostly from a single truck and a two-person crew. Franchises in the category now operate in dozens of markets.
6. Swimming pools rented by the hour
Swimply lets homeowners list their backyard pool for hourly rental, the way Airbnb did with spare bedrooms. Listings have passed 25,000 across North America, with hourly rates typically between $40 and $100. Hosts in warm states have reported clearing five figures in a single summer while spending nothing extra on the pool they were already maintaining.
The company has raised more than $40 million in venture funding, which tells you investors believe the peer-to-peer pool market is real and not a novelty. Birthday parties, swim lessons, and people who simply want a quiet afternoon without a public pool’s crowds do the rest.
7. Canned mountain air and rented chickens
Vitality Air started in Banff, Alberta, in 2015 by trapping air from the Canadian Rockies into bottles and selling them for $20 to $32 each. Buyers in smog-choked cities took the gag seriously enough that the company reported healthy six-figure sales early on and now ships to customers in Asia and the Middle East.
Rent the Chicken works on a similar principle of charging for something charming and slightly absurd. Households pay roughly $400 to $500 for a season with two laying hens, a coop, feed, and a support hotline. The birds go back to the farm in autumn, and the customer keeps the eggs and the story.
What all seven have in common
Strip away the novelty and the same machinery shows up in every one of these operations.
- Recurring revenue baked in. Weekly pickup, monthly bin washing, seasonal rentals, and registry subscriptions all bill automatically long after the first sale.
- Disgust or hassle as a moat. Competitors do not rush into a market built on poop, lice, or rotten bin sludge, so pricing stays comfortable.
- Low tech, high margin. A pressure washer, a trailer of goats, or a heated-air device costs far less than a factory or a software team.
- Franchising as a growth engine. DoodyCalls, Goats On The Go, and the lice chains expanded by selling operators a proven playbook rather than raising venture capital.
- Emotional buying decisions. Customers are not comparison shopping on price at 9pm with a screaming child or a party starting in an hour. They are buying relief.
The pattern is worth studying if you are hunting for a niche. The next seven-figure oddity is probably something you would never put on a business card: a mobile service for something sticky, a rental for something seasonal, a subscription for a chore nobody wants to admit they hate. Look at the jobs people quietly outsource, then look at what they are already paying someone else to handle. The money is usually in the task nobody wants to talk about at dinner.
