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Resilience in more ways than one with ‘boring business’
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Twenty-eight-year-old Joel Burghardt of YXE Cleaning & Restoration has been leveraging the opportunity of “boring business” in Saskatoon since May 2024.
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With past experience as an electrician and “flipping” books to sell on Amazon, Burghardt says he was looking for a quick way to increase his family’s cash flow, with his wife expecting.
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“I saw a guy on Instagram making good money cleaning gutters,” he said.
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Then he bought an inexpensive ebook about how to start a home service business.
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However, Burghardt and his wife soon experienced a shattering loss.
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“Unfortunately, we ended up losing our daughter, and that kind of pushed me to go full-time into it because at that point. I really had nothing to lose,” he said about the aftermath of her death.
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“It started because of my daughter, and I went full-time because of her, too.”
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From a place of pain, Burghardt took a conservative approach to growing his business. Now, with one full-time employee, the mentality has paid off.
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Expanding to offer more technical services, such as carpet cleaning, water damage and mould remediation, Burghardt says he’s been able to pay for his business’s growth at each step.
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“I started small with like 500 bucks for gutter cleaning, and then eventually reinvested that over and over, and then it paid for all my carpet cleaning stuff, and now my carpet cleaning stuff has paid for all my restoration (stuff).”
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Recognizing that gutter cleaning isn’t “sexy,” Burghardt says many underestimate the potential for profitability in these kinds of endeavours.
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“When everyone thinks to start a business, they think of trying to invent something new that goes viral. Whereas what I did is I just looked at, ‘What is somebody selling in a different city and how can I sell that here?’”
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Technical thinking to thrive
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A friend of Smith’s, Allan Lopez, has also jumped on the momentum of providing niche home services in Saskatoon.
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A mechanical engineer by trade, the 25-year-old began GoFlow Building Services with his wife Rachel, an accountant, in August of this year.
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Seeking more hands-on work with a desire to own something, Lopez says he took the leap with his business partner and purchased the necessary equipment to provide furnace, air duct and carpet cleaning.
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Their aim? To attract clients from a DIY-averse, convenience-seeking crowd. Lopez says that in the months GoFlow has been operating, they’ve made back about one-third of their initial investment.
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“Worst comes to worst, we just sell the equipment and probably lose 50 per cent of the investment,” said Allan, who acknowledges their start-up strategy was slightly more expensive than a bare-bones approach, but says it’s nowhere near what a more traditional retail business would cost to get up and running.
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“(With starting a coffee shop), you’re probably looking at over $50,000 just to start,”
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While working through the early days of his company, Lopez says he thrives on the opportunity to apply his engineering mindset to solve technical problems involved in cleaning big-ticket items in someone’s home.
Olivia Grandy
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