Is anybody in here?
When I tell people that I own a porta potty business I get a lot of disgusted looks, but once I explain to them the business model and the revenue, they get interested.
And in 2025, we're projecting to do just over $4 million.
The more poop, the more money.
The truth is, I take pride in what I do, and we're gonna mix it up like a lovely stew.
I love coming to work every day, and I provide a service that everybody needs.
It's really nice.
Everybody goes, right?
My name is Daniel Tom, I'm 31 years old and I'm an owner-operator of a port-a-potty company based in the Bay Area, California.
We're right around the corner from some of the biggest tech companies in the world, like Google, Apple and Nvidia.
But we've managed to build what I think is a low-tech, AI-proof business.
In order to get into the port-a-potty business, I would recommend having at least $250,000.
Each port-a-potty brand new costs about 800 and a new vacuum truck is gonna run between 130 and 160000.
We're just completing our third year in business.
We started with one truck and about 100 toilets and we scaled that up to 12 dump trucks and almost 2000 portable toilets.
Right on, brother, thank you.
When people find out I own a porta potty company, most of the time their mind goes directly to events.
But in reality, the majority of our money is made on construction projects like this.
On this job, we have eight toilets that are cleaned twice per week.
Each of these rentals brings in $60 per week.
And over the course of a two and a half year project, we're gonna bring in about $7,800 per toilet.
Across the Bay Area we have almost 2000 port-a-potties rented out, spread out over more than 1500 different job sites.
I've cleaned so many port-a-potties.
The smell doesn't really bother me, but every once in a while I'll come across one after somebody had some bad burritos or something like that, and even for me it's hard to stomach.
So this truck is essentially a huge vacuum.
What we're gonna do is we're gonna take our hose, we're gonna turn on the pump, we're just gonna stick the wand in there and we're gonna mix it up like a lovely stew.
We're gonna pump everything out.
The biggest mistake you can make as a new port-a-potty cleaner is not checking whether your port-a-potty truck is set to vacuum or blow.
If your truck is set to blow and you put your wand in the port-a-potty and you open it, it's gonna blow everything that's inside that tank directly back in your face.
And trust me, I've done it once, it never happened to me again.
That's not a lie, it's a true story.
Right now we're in the storage yard where we keep all of our porta potties and trucks when they're not being used.
It's a little bit over an acre.
It's pretty much a junkyard that we share with a bunch of different people.
And our portion of the rent is about $7,000 a month.
In 2024, we did around $3.1 million.
And this year in 2025, we're projecting to do just over $4 million.
Our net profit margin is around 22%.
Our biggest expense is labor, taking up about 30% of our gross income.
In total, we have 19 employees.
We have 14 drivers, three yard staff.
I also have help from an admin staff.
I take home around 120000 a year and everything else goes back into the business, into buying trucks and more porta potties to put on rent.
Based on our revenue, it would be possible to take home more at the end of the day, but at this point in time we're really prioritizing reinvesting in the business to continue growing.
Our biggest expenses are labor, which is about 30 of revenue, fuel 8 of revenue, and paper goods, which is about 5 of revenue.
So this is another use case for a porta potty.
We're in somebody's yard.
They don't have any running water, no plumbing, anything like that.
They run a business out of here.
That's some nice art they got there.
They got some chickens over there.
They wouldn't be able to operate here if they didn't have somewhere to go to the bathroom.
They need our service.
Talking port-a-potty and revenue-wise, we'd like to get to 5000 port-a-potties on rent and at least 10 million in revenue.
It definitely is achievable in the Bay Area.
There's a lot of events, a lot of construction going on, and we've only been in business for three years.
There's so much market share that's out there available for us as long as we keep doing a good job.
So right now it's five o'clock in the morning.
We're heading to the wastewater treatment plant so we can dump out all the poop that we pumped out yesterday.
So these are the sight glasses where you can see the level of the poop in our tank.
And now that our truck is getting dumped, the level is slowly going down, and then we're gonna empty everything until it's all gone.
For a truck this size, it usually takes about 10 minutes for it to empty completely.
So, believe it or not, I actually went to college to be a PE teacher, but midway through my junior year I was offered a part-time customer service position at another porta potty company.
And I liked it so much that I decided to abandon teaching and dive in full-time after graduation.
And now 11 years later, I am an owner operator of another porta potty company.
My five year vision for the company is continued growth.
We just signed a new lease on a brand new property, has a warehouse yard space, it's completely paved and it has room for almost twice as many trucks as we have now.
The grossest thing I've ever seen has to be a unit that was at a public park and there was an event the weekend before and they didn't order enough porta potties.
So the waste was so high it was literally forming a mountain, and you could not sit down without your butt touching what was inside the tank.
