Meet Dave Galloway
From DJ Booths to Building a Thriving Portable Toilets Business!
Hey, it’s Alex!
This week, we’re spotlighting a conversation from late 2024 with Dave Galloway — a DJ-turned-entrepreneur who in addition to running an events business launched a thriving portable toilet rental business.
If you’re someone who loves hearing about unconventional entrepreneurial paths, you won’t want to miss this one — dive in below!
Alpha Sanitation Quick Stats:
📅 Time in business: < two months
🚽 Number of toilets: 36
📦 Number of toilets on the way: 28
💵 Average revenue per toilet per month: ~$200
⚙️ Cost per toilet: $1200
🏦 Financing: $100,000
📈 MRR: $7200
Before Alpha Sanitation & pivoting…
Alpha Sanitation is portable toilet rentals for special events — fairs, festivals, things like that.
Basically, anywhere that you would need a portable toilet outside, that's what we do.
I come from the events world, primarily as a DJ and talent booker, and while it’s a great business, I was always searching for other avenues to create revenue.
I’ve spent a ton of time in the entrepreneurship world, and I've always looked for new ideas.
Right now, all people talk about are creating courses, seminars, online products, and SaaS.
Nobody's really talking about this very antiquated industry — sanitation.
I was on all these thought leader email lists, attended business seminars, and listened to podcasts, but I just didn’t see myself in that world.
So, I started to look at other things…
Early on, DJing weddings played into my thinking a lot…
I’ve performed at a ton of them, and I knew there was value there, because weddings are just something that happens every single day all across the globe.
I never wanted to build something and have to convince people they need it.
So, I thought, why don’t I jump into a world of products where there’s already a clear need?
And I guess ever since I was able to get the DJ and entertainment business to a sustainable size — where it can run whether or not I’m involved in it — I've always been looking at ways to grow it.
We added photo booths and a couple other things, which were great for special events and weddings — there just wasn't a great enough demand.
So, I started to look around to other spaces and say, if my goal is to continue growing either this company or start a new company and grow that company, what would be another avenue to do that?
The more I looked into it, the more I realized there's not a ton of crossover into the actual DJ business.
We do special events, we work with the same people who book toilets on the other end of these events, so there were some relationships I could leverage, but ultimately it was just me saying, if my goal is growth and I've hit a ceiling on the DJ side of it, what are some other things that we can do?
Of course, going into toilets was a side step for sure. But the deeper I get into it, the more I realize that there actually is a lot of crossover.
From 0 to 1…
I didn't know going into it, but in terms of kind of taking the idea and executing it, there were a few checkboxes that I absolutely needed to have on the list.
It needed to be something that was scalable but could be started by one person — me, basically. I can't take all the credit, though…my 11 year old son is out there helping me every week. laughs
The idea, of course, is that eventually we're not the ones out there doing this every week. I’d like to get to a point where we can hire operators and drivers and other people to run the back end and then I can just oversee it. That’s the hope, at least.
To go from ideation to actual execution, it was more paperwork than you could ever imagine.
Probably more paperwork than I filled out in the 20 cumulative years of being a DJ.
As it turns out, there's a lot of environmental approvals, licensing, permits and permissions involved in this. Even the insurance part of this alone is huge. Two months of insurance payments are more than I pay all year on the DJ side of things.
And a big drawback of this sanitation business, I've realized, is I can't even acquire a single new customer without acquiring more capital first. But that's the nature of how this industry works.
So — there was a huge learning curve in the beginning. It was just kind of me sweating my way through that and filling out endless PDFs at my desk by myself. Thankfully, I had some great guidance from one of the suppliers that I work with. They were able to point me on the right track in a lot of areas.
The one thing that I did find very interesting — in the beginning, I thought it was going to take months of research to fully evaluate whether or not I should pursue it as a business.
Truthfully, I figured out I could learn 90% of what I need to get started in about two days, then I just made up a list of questions and took them to some people I know and we'll go from there.
The whole thing reminded me of that book, “the one page marketing plan” — you can spend months on the perfect proposal and market research, or you could start with the absolute essentials instead of trying to map out the next 300 steps.
On funding…
I started with a little bit of my own savings, and then I got a loan from the Business Development Bank of Canada, which I've got to say that's probably the easiest bank I've ever worked with in my entire life.
I went to their website, filled out a form, supplied some numbers from my existing business and the loan came through in about a week or so — for a hundred thousand dollars.
That's what I used to buy my startup equipment.
So, I guess the answer is all for less than $100,000 you can get this thing up and running.
It's still too early to predict, but with the interest that we've gotten and the contracts that we've set up for the next calendar year… I don't think it's crazy to suggest that we could break six figures in the first 12 months.
That doesn't necessarily mean I can repay that whole loan faster than I plan to, but I think it definitely puts me in a really good position to suggest everything about this is sustainable and profitable.
On creating something scalable…
The biggest challenge to scaling the DJ business was key man risk.
There are very few artists that have managed to build a brand that's scalable without them being at a specific location at a specific time, but it’s still frustrating — I have a remarkable team of DJs, but it constantly comes down to clients saying, well we are interested in having YOU at our event and if you're not available, we're just not interested.
Outsourcing in the DJ business is VERY tough.
That kind of inflexibility to scale was definitely one of the motivators for the sanitation company.
I wanted something scalable, and sustainable, too.
Because think of it this way: DJs don’t have an incredibly long shelf life, either. You’d have to be a truly legendary performer to still be getting gigs into your 50s and 60s.
Cultivating a business mindset…
I never did well in high school — until I got into Grade 11, where you can start actually picking your courses instead of just taking mandatory ones.
I started to pick a few business courses simply for the sake of trying something new.
And I remember, I took this marketing course, and it was the first time ever I started to get great marks. All my other courses were just Ds — maybe Cs if I was lucky — but in this marketing class I was maintaining an average of 100% the whole year. And I was like, I can do THIS.
From there, I took marketing at Fanshawe College in London (Ontario). I enjoyed that experience so much that when I was done, I went back and got another diploma. Then I got out into the real world.
I spent time in pharmaceutical sales and paper sales, and I was able to really learn a lot, but, ultimately, I love reading and I love podcasts. And there were a couple interesting things that I picked up literally just in the last 12 to 24 months that really instilled a certain mindset.
My family and I went down to Disney over Christmas last year.
When we were driving back, we passed through this oceanside town. I don’t remember the name, but there were all these cottages along the water, and it was just road after road of these beautiful cottages.
We started looking some of them up, and I think the cheapest one was $6 million.
And something just struck me then.
I just asked myself, how did all these people do it?
My guess is that a few of them did it by crawling their way up the corporate ladder. Some of them are probably the product of generational wealth. But regardless, as we were leaving that community, I was like, why can't anybody do this?
It really inspired me to say, if I'm going to make the move to have the kind of lifestyle that I want. Like, how much longer should I be waiting on this?
The first part was realizing that I didn't really need anyone’s permission to start.
But another thing came from Gary Vaynerchuk: He basically said, eventually, you have to stop consuming and start doing shit.
That was it for me.
I'd listened to literally tens of thousands of hours of podcasts over the last few years, but I hadn’t really started doing shit.
It was good to learn, but I realized there wasn’t much of a legacy there.
Would I rather be this guy who consumed more stuff than anybody in the world, or be the person who built things that didn’t exist before?
Landing first customers…
It's funny because I'd reached out to a couple people and just said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this to get a better understanding of how things work.
And granted, this was only from a handful of people, but all of them said the same thing — people weren’t happy with their existing service provider.
I’d worked with some of them for over a decade, so they just went, assuming you're bringing the same pedigree to this business that I hold you to in the other business, then it's a yes.
All told — I had two customers who said yes before I had even purchased anything, so that really gave me a spark of belief that it was feasible.
The other thing was that the entertainment — special events — aspect of it was just one side of the business. There was the construction world to dive into as well.
As it happens, I have a cousin and a family friend who work in construction. They're custom home builders. And I just asked them about the space.
Where do you get these things from?
How does this work?
Luckily, those conversations ended with them telling me that they’d support me if I did it, so I promised to give them a deal, and they said they’d be able to spread the word.
From there, I approached a couple other people, and basically said, hey, this is what I’m doing — would you consider it?
They basically said: we’ll have you do some of our smaller events, and if you don’t mess it up, we’ll give you the rest. Which was totally understandable.
On business development and scaling…
My whole plan for outbound was to cold call places that I knew used these things.
But I didn’t want to start doing it immediately.
I wanted to make my mistakes on some of the smaller clients so I could refine this process before I pitched some national or global construction companies,
Some of them I have absolutely no connection with, so I was literally looking up emails and phone numbers on their website and calling and asking who I should speak with.
Very old-school, boots-on-the-ground type stuff.
The first night, I sent out about 200 emails, and I think I got eight back — including a couple people who told me not to email them again. That's the nature of sales, I guess.
All that said — the bottleneck for me isn’t outbound sales.
My original game plan was to knock on doors all day every day until I could really get this thing flying, but it didn’t take me long to realize the number of toilets I have available is the limiting factor.
All of the ones I have are currently in use, and I don’t necessarily have the capital to buy more, so I can’t really go knock on doors and get a contract for 30 units when I won’t have 30 units available for at least a few weeks.
The ideal state is that I have access to a line of credit and I can order as needed.
Luckily, I don't have a big looming bill that I need to pay back every month. However, the thing that is holding me back from saying let's really dial up these sales is just the ability to get more toilets. I’ve maxed out my current capital access, so I’m a little stuck in that regard.
2025 plans…
My number one thing that I want to achieve in 2025 is to have a proper yard to store these units. Right now I literally have a friend who offered his space on the condition I find my own space in the interim, which I currently am — but it’s a process with a ton of variables.
I live in a rural community, so in a perfect world, I can find some sort of family or friend connection to a farmer who has an acre that they can parse off and sell to me. The rest of it is infrastructure.
The thought of building my own shop to be able to take care of the back end of the business is also part of the goal, but right now, it’s basically land leasing, land purchasing, and then eventually, infrastructure building.
I don't see how it's not capital intensive for at least three years.
But as long as I can keep generating enough of that monthly recurring revenue to keep my head above water, that's good enough for me.
I'm not looking to cash out on this anytime soon.
Biggest challenges…
Originally, I thought my biggest challenge would be staffing, considering the nature of the work.
Surprisingly, that hasn’t been an issue. I've had a few people who've just put up their hand and said, this is gross, but do it. They just have a hustler's mindset where they're like, you know, to them money is money.
I'm comfortable taking on the initial loan and using my personal savings.
I haven’t reached the point of taking on more debt, and I think I have a little ways to go, but that’ll definitely bring its own set of challenges.
A friend of mine said something funny about it all the other day.
He was like, “it's all just ones and zeros anyway…”
You start, and all the ones and zeros will be in the negative, and then you just work hard to reduce a decimal every month and try to get it in the positive, and that's it.
As long as your stomach can handle looking at the bank account and seeing that it’s in the negative, that’s the important thing, because you’re moving towards the positive.
Really, when it comes down to it, all we're doing is just betting on ourselves, right?
Managing routes…
Right now my route varies.
I can hit about 12 toilets in a single morning because they all happen to be in these three small towns that are all pretty close to each other. For some of the other ones it's like an hour there and an hour back, so each day looks pretty different.
But — I can tell you right now that I can service these 36 toilets in two days by myself. So if I was to work with a partner — not to say my 11 year old isn't a great partner, but he's not always the fastest worker — I think we could move through that even quicker.
An interesting contrast between sanitation and my events experience is the time sensitive nature.
In events, fulfillment is almost always time-specific.
It's very much, doors open at 5:00 or you're on stage at 7:05. If you're not there at 7:05, that's it, you failed and you're probably not coming back.
By contrast, in the toilet world, the bar is very low. It's basically just, keep this thing clean.
Whether I show up at 7am or 7pm any day of the week to do that, nobody seems to care.
I really like that flexibility, but I'm currently right on the threshold of answering the question of, do I want to clean toilets seven days a week, or is this a good time to start bringing in somebody else?
Either way, about two days a week I can get everything done and clean and that's with transportation time.
On competitors…
As I was getting this going, I realized — much more so than with my other business — people won't just buy from you to buy from you. You have to come with some sort of value proposition that makes sense for them, and there are typically only three, right?
Availability, price, or service.
There are a lot of nuances to that, I think those three umbrellas probably capture 99% of the reasoning behind why people buy a given product or service. So, leveraging those existing relationships, which I would put under the service category, proved to work really well for me.
Competition-wise, there’s nobody operating within 50 Kilometres of me, so staying as local as possible is key.
In terms of scaling it up from there, that's when I see some possible difficulties. My biggest fear, of course, is that some of these competitors — who have thousands of units, and could crush me, basically — are gonna start saying, we’re going to beat any price our competitors put out, and make it a race to the bottom.
I'm not looking to do that.
I'm going to try to continue to leverage relationships because that's always served me very well.
Currently our prices are very, very fair, and I don't think it's a sustainable business model beyond a few years because I don’t want to be a price cutter. I want to come in and be a true competitor because I think that’s what’s best for the industry.
It’s what I did in DJing — believing we all deserve more, and pricing competitively enough that everyone’s standard is raised.
Long-term plans…
That's really the biggest question mark right now.
My dream is to be able to solely focus on the growth of the company, so I'd love to get myself in a position where I’m just out there knocking on doors and shaking hands.
At the same time, as I learn more about operations and on-site activities, I want to develop a really broad knowledge base so that if there's ever an emergency, it's not like, well, don't call Dave because he doesn't know what to do.
I met a guy from Pennsylvania last week who's got over a thousand units, a dozen trucks, and about 25 people that work for the company full time.
I think that’s a nice benchmark to aim for.
I just don't have a timeline…
Is that a three year plan?
Is that a ten year plan?
We'll find out.
That’s it for this issue!
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If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!
Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry