The Pomp Podcast - #1166 Laura Spaulding On Making $18 Million For Cleaning Up Crime Scenes

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Laura Spaulding is the founder of Spaulding Decon Industries, which is a full service restoration company for crime scene cleaning. In this conversation, we talk about the economics of cleaning a crime scene, prostitution, drug busts, and many more topics. This is one of the most wild episodes yet. We also break down all the finances and businesses Laura has been involved with.   ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th in Miami Beach hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of bold discussions, covering topics from investing, emerging tech, longevity, space exploration, entertainment and more.The speaker lineup includes names such as investing legend Cathie Wood, NYT bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire Christian Angermayer, master of Contrarian Thinking Codie Sanchez, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson plus many more. Listeners will receive an exclusive 40% discount on VIP and Insider Pass tickets with code POMP40.  General Admission tickets are free of charge. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Laura Spaulding from Crime Scene Cleaning.

In this conversation, we talk about the economics of cleaning a crime scene, prostitution, drug bust, and many, many more topics. This is one of the wildest conversations we've had on the podcast, but we also break down all the money and business behind the various aspects of Laura's life. I hope that you guys enjoy this conversation, and once you get done, jump on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with, and what you don't agree with. The feedback is always helpful as we continue to improve the podcast for each of you. Here is my conversation with Laura Spalding. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guest as a specific inducement to

make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I thought a great place to start this conversation would be the economics of a crime scene, which sounds absolutely absurd, but literally your business, you guys go in after a crime has occurred, after the police have done all their work, You got to clean it up. Someone's got to do this. But it's a business. You're an entrepreneur. How should we think about what the actual economics of the crime scene are? Like when you guys get the phone call and you're like, there's a murder or a crime at X address.

What happens? Yeah. I mean, the easy ones are somebody died in the bed, decomposed. That's pretty easy. Cut and dry. The harder ones are, you know, granny died on the third floor and melted through the second floor and is dripping into somebody else's bathroom on the second floor how does that happen that's because she was just left unattended yeah left there for a while nobody checked on her so she just decomposed and we've literally had a melt through floors before so that's you know a big big crime scene and we're using the term crime scene but is it always a crime or could it actually just be natural death or or uh is it yeah i kind of use that term as an umbrella really um it most of the cleanups that we do i would say are unattended deaths okay and

you get called to come do one of these cleanups uh do you go with a clipboard and you check out the scene and then you call back and you're like okay here's what we need do you guys show up like a cleaning truck like how do you arrive on scene so every truck is outfitted to clean up any type of biohazard scene okay anytime so you're ready to go we have a two-hour response time we're there we're ready no matter what so um that is advantageous obviously because it's a sense of for people and how do you think about pricing right like uh it's not exactly i'm going to the grocery store and i got like a price tag on on the product it's not amazon i don't think people are going on clicking some buttons uh when they call do they try to describe to you what this

scene is and you just quote them a price is it a monopoly where like they pretty much call you and you just send them a bill for whatever you think it's worth later how does that work it's a little bit of all of the above okay so there's no uh like you said um kind of market for this type of thing So what we do is we try to be, we're not the most expensive, but we're also nowhere near the cheapest. So what we do is we utilize software to kind of tell us, based on the different markets that we're in, what the average going rate is for a particular labor or replacing subfloor, you know, personal protective equipment. There's a line item for literally everything. So I really never quote over the phone. I always kind of go to the scene because there's so many things that you can't see,

especially someone that's calling on the phone. You know, they're like, I looked at it for two seconds. I don't want to be in there. It's on the floor. And I'll even say, what kind of floor is it? And they'll go, I don't remember. Like they're so kind of traumatized by it that I'll say, listen, I'll just come by and take a look at it.

And it takes me kind of two seconds to say, yep, it went through the drywall or, you know, it's when you've been doing it. How many times are you getting called by, like, a family or a relative, a friend, something like that, versus, like, you're getting called by the government, whether it's law enforcement or somebody like that? I would say 99% by the family. By the family? Yeah, maybe 1%. Okay, so most of the clients are actually, like, private clients. They're not actually the government.

Right, correct. And when you get on scene, what are you doing? Is this, like, somebody comes to clean your apartment or your house, and, like, they kind of show up, they got some supplies, they, you know, work their way around? or is there something that, uh, has to take into account the actual, you know, there's a dead body. Uh, so what do you do? So the body is typically always removed. Um, there's been maybe less than 10 cases where I got there quick enough to where the body was still there. Um, and those are just kind of, wow. You know, it kind of takes you back, especially when it's like a shotgun suicide or something. There's just parts everywhere. Um, so you're just essentially you're doing the opposite

of what like a Molly made would do a Molly made, you know, if they were in this room, they'd probably start vacuuming from there and vacuum their way out. We're cleaning from the door in, so we're not cross contaminating. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, you're, you're literally just going item by item and the attention to detail is so precise on it. So it's not like, Oh my God, I forgot to, you know, dust the lamp. It doesn't work that way. It's like, Hey, you left a tooth behind, you know? So it's kind of catastrophic to make a mistake like that. You want to be extremely thorough what do you do with the materials after you get done cleaning up like let for example uh there's a tooth or there is you know other things that have been left behind

what do you do they get bagged red bagged and then they get autoclaved which is it kind of looks like a submarine but it's uh essentially a giant microwave it heats it up to about 330 degrees somewhere around there uh some of them will have a shredder attached to them some don't so it just gets essentially heated so that where the point of any disease would be dead non-viruses and then it just goes into a normal landfill believe it or not wow yeah all right how much do you charge for this so it varies per job but in general it's probably about seven to eight hundred dollars an hour okay and what do you make from like a profit margin or something like that it's about 85 profit margin so even though you have physical labor you have cleaning supplies you have

uh, you know, vehicles, you have all these different things that most people would associate with a kind of a small business in the real world and kind of the Adams, not bits world. You still can operate with an 85% profit margin because there's just not a big market for it. Well, there's, there's not, it's a, it's definitely a niche service, but you got to think too. It's, it's also something that a lot of people don't want to do, which means that you can charge a premium for it. And why didn't a lot of people not want to do it? Is it just because it's disgusting Yeah, I mean, it's disgusting. I think the physical fitness required for it is really the primary thing why we lose employees. Maybe they just can't physically handle it. Most people think, oh, they must be just emotionally wrecked by it. And actually, that's never been an issue.

It's always been the physical. You're wearing personal protective equipment, a full respirator. It feels like you're breathing out of a straw. Sometimes you're in attics cleaning up people's brains. You're working with power tools. It's just a very uncomfortable, sweaty, hot, nasty environment. Why are you working with power tools? We're cutting up subfloors.

We're cutting drywall. Sometimes we're cutting beds and just a bunch of different things apart. Anything that's been contaminated has to go. So really, not only are you guys cleaning, you actually are deconstructing things. Oh, absolutely. If they've been contaminated. Right. Do you also participate in what I would consider more like general contracting work of rebuilding?

We subcontract that out. Okay, to somebody else. Yeah. All right. How big is your business? We did about $12 million last year. We'll do about between $16 and $18 million this year. And where do you get customers from?

Are they just Googling? Yeah, essentially. you get a lot from online presence. We've got a lot of national contracts. You got to think that property management, 1,000, 2,000 people under one roof, essentially. A lot of stuff happens in apartments. A lot of stuff happens in hotels. So we kind of try to target our marketing to the bigger vendors, the B2B. And when you do, let's call it $16 to $18 million, how much of that is in one single market versus it's actually nationally across evenly split? Yeah, that's spread out over 33 markets. Okay. Yeah. And you have full-time employees in each one of those

markets or you're contracting out and we have franchises in each location. Okay. Yeah. And how do you pick those franchisees? Not very well. Interesting. Okay. That's a, yeah, that's a science that I would definitely say I've not mastered. It's, it's a difficult thing to pick the right franchisee for a particular brand what is the uh worst case scenario that you've had with a franchisee we would need another podcast to go over all that we have all the time in the world you know um we've had i mean we've had them lie cheat steal pretty much across the board um we've had one that just kind of a lot of a lot of them have this uh notion that they they they buy into a franchise and they're just going to sit on the couch and wait for the phone to ring.

And that's not the case at all. Like the, the, the point is it's, it's business in a box, but you still have to work. Like we, we don't go down there for you. So, you know, we've had, um, evasion of royalties where they'll, uh, try to take cash on the side. Um, they'll, uh, God, it's, it's just endless. We've, we had one that failed out and became a prostitute. um that's a interesting strategy very interesting you know uh how did you figure that out uh she told somebody she told somebody the business isn't working i'm now a prostitute she can't she can't run a business so she's just gonna sell her ass essentially interesting yeah was she successful with that i don't know yeah i i don't get royalties from that part yeah

also i guess you kind of only have to manage yourself yeah exactly yeah i mean maybe it's easier business that's a higher profit margin i would assume yeah that is uh interesting how does the uh franchise work what do they have to pay to buy a franchise and then how do you structure the royalties so it's it's uh pretty inexpensive considering you know franchises at a whole it's about let it's less than 160 000 they pay eight percent royalties and a three percent national brand fund it's not that bad no not at all yeah i mean what do you think the national average for franchises is probably like 300 to 500 well i mean you've got the high end like mcdonald's three three four million just to get in and you don't even own the land um and then you've got

home-based type businesses that are less than 50 grand so you know it's really i don't i wouldn't know what the kind of the average is yeah so you guys will do 160 and how much of that is the owned and operated uh you know locations i guess or like cities versus the franchises they're all franchise operated. They're all franchise operated. Okay. Correct. What has been good about the franchise strategy? It gave us the ability to, so one, let me back up a little bit. So one of the biggest issues when I first started the business all the way back in 2005 was everyone said the same thing. We didn't know anybody did this. We thought the police did it. So I thought the police did it until you sat down in that chair. Exactly. Well, I was a police officer prior

to that. And I didn't even know who did it. So what does that tell you? So I knew I had a huge hurdle to overcome. So by us franchising and kind of spreading our geographic, you know, abilities there, we're able to reach more people so that they don't have to do this themselves. And that's what people were doing previously. Yeah. Either that or, you know, uh, hiring unqualified people to do it and maybe just not getting it all. And then wondering what that smell is you know two months later that's crazy yeah that's sad so how did how did you start so i was in law enforcement for seven years and uh like a beat cop or something else yeah i did beat i did undercover narcotics undercover prostitution and uh what's that like which

part both the narcotics and the prostitution the prostitution was fun narcotics not so much why was it fun um just get screwed with guys and try to lure them into a situation well you I mean, that's the part that was, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. You didn't have to lure anything. I mean, it was like, are you kidding me? Like, how does it work? Like you're just go stay on the street? No. Yeah. So there's a couple different types of stings. Uh, the particular one that I did was street, um, where you're literally, we would go into an area that was known for heavy prostitution. We would kick out the real prostitutes, make them go to a different area, and then we would take their place essentially. And if you guys know that it's known

for prostitution people in the area know it's for prostitution and i swear to god i mean within 30 minutes it looked like a chick-fil-a line they were just lined up there was uh probably two of us on one corner two of us on the other corner and they could hardly keep up with arresting all of them like it was that way it was insane and so what the guys pull off was the conversation um they would say um how much for a blow job oh they would just straight up ask like there's no code language they're getting right to the right to the point yeah right to the point and and then you back then it was cheap oh like how much 20 bucks for a blow job i don't know who we should be judging more on that side of the market yeah exactly okay so 20 for a blow job yep then does

the officer get in the car no no that's the key you never get in the car okay why well i mean you're a sitting duck if you get in the car because there's security concerns right so i say hey i'll meet you around the corner i don't want anybody to see me getting in your car and then they would go around the corner and a 300 pound burly man would meet him and all of a sudden 20 doesn't matter anyway exactly got it and uh what are the types of people that are doing you know this was shocking to me okay because i was 23 at the time i i watched a lot of cops okay so i was 23 i was very naive okay and i thought you thought it was like drug addicts and stuff that's what i thought i thought this was just gonna be oh my god was i wrong white

collar total white collar yeah every once in a while you'll get the roofer or something on their way home um we got an fbi agent on duty in his fbi vehicle come on swear to god hold on on his lunch break on his lunch break rewind rewind this during the day during the day you were doing a prostitution sting as a beat police officer undercover and an fbi agent on duty in his car on his lunch break, pulled up and tried to get a blowjob? Oh, no. He went around the world, so he had done it before. And he was in his 60s.

Yeah. What is that conversation like once he gets arrested? He looked like someone had shot his mother. Like, he literally got out of the car, pulled out his badge, and he just, like, put his head down, and he knew his life was over. Yeah. That was it. And his life was over.

Because... He loses his full retirement. he he gets fired he's probably divorced i mean you name it his whole life is over over a forty dollar bang literally on his lunch break that's just what i call good judgment yeah something like that all right what about the narcotics things by the way just so you know i break down the economics of a lot of stuff on this show i've never broken down the economics of prostitution well you know we can talk about the profit margins because they're excellent okay explain um well i I mean, you know, $20 for a blow job, it takes five minutes, so do the math.

Five minutes if he's any good anyway. So the narcotics is a bit different because I worked in Kansas City's worst neighborhoods. So being Caucasian was actually a big disadvantage for me. So we were buying a majority of crack, cocaine, a little bit of weed and meth. so but crack by far was was the drug of choice and you're in your uh young 20s you said doing yeah i was 25 okay and is it strategic that they're using you because you're a woman because you're young a combination because you're white like well the prostitution was very strategic it's because i'm a woman so they would essentially go to all female officers and say who's interested

and over time and i'm like hey i'm a glutton for punishment i'll fucking try it so um but i i didn't realize how much work it would be like you would think you know hey i'm standing on the corner this is easy you know but it was like a fucking chick-fil-a line like it was insane when you say it's a lot of work is that because you didn't have to go back and do all the police reports no i didn't have to do any of that though it was a lot of work because of the volume so literally you're trying to make a deal with a guy and have him go around the corner and you're seeing the next guy that's coming up and trying not to fuck yourself because he's going around the corner and you're supposed to be following, you know what I'm saying? So it's, it's very

strategic on how you're making this deal, but you're also undercover. You're, you're not letting them know. Cause I didn't ever did the busting. There was guys waiting for them when they went around the corner. Yep. And then around the corner, basically you was a SWAT team. Yeah. And you don't want the people in line. Exactly. You got it. So you almost have to like slow your role a little bit a little bit so we i was with a another female officer and we would kind of play off of each other like i would lean into one car she would lean into the other and then we would you know send them to a different corner do you have a gun with you no no gun no wire yeah so basically you're kind of out on your own oh yeah and basically there's another officer there but

neither one of you oh they're around the corner you have other officers but i'm saying yeah she didn't have anything either i mean yeah you're you're wearing you know and that's another kind of misnomer that oh you're supposed to dress all sexy and stuff we dress like we were fucking homeless really oh yeah like oversized clothes um i put black out on my teeth it's a um it looks like nail polish but it's black okay when you put it on your teeth it looks like you have no tooth in that particular area because it's yeah so the more gross you look the more that they believe that you weren't a cop oh that was that was interesting yeah are they worried about cops yeah because they would they would always say this is another big misnomer so for everybody

that's looking for prostitutes out there i'm helping you out hey hey boys listen up all right listen up i'm helping you out so they would always go if i ask you if you're a cop you have to tell me right and i'm like yeah i'm not a cop that's the biggest misnomer ever you can say whatever the fuck you want yeah i don't know where they're getting that from well probably because they watched tv or something yeah or stayed at a hampton magnum pi or some shit i don't know but that's not true and so you could just say whatever you wanted yeah i could say i'm a fucking rocket scientist yeah how do you think about um what do they call it uh entrapment like i used to watch like uh i remember uh i would watch cops and they would always have this one thing it was like in

boston i don't know why if they thought idiots were in boston or what was going on you know hey boston whatever yeah but uh they would put uh a bicycle out on the sidewalk and they wouldn't chain it up and they would be up like in a you know office building or a hotel or whatever they had a little binoculars on within 20 seconds someone goes by grabs a bicycle jumps on hops off and then they would go and they'd get them right uh and it was like again chick-fil-a line like literally all day long oh yeah all day long uh and people would always be like that's entrapment it's not okay what like where is the uh like what is entrapment and what isn't entrapped so what i had to do was i just had to get them to agree to a sexual act for a monetary value and it

didn't have to be cash one guy offered me a whopper i'm like you broke fuck okay whatever it's a whopper he still gets arrested so it's any type of negotiation that sex for monetary value yep so when they come up and they say hey you want to party well that could be taken in any way and i'll say sure what do you want okay well what do you do like they're trying to dance around it and I'll say blowjobs 20 fucks 40 yep and then they'll go all right I'll take the blowjob bam there you go got it so you can even offer oh I can say whatever but they have to agree yeah and it's like this weird thing right where uh there is the monetary value and I guess like they didn't actually commit the act but they committed the negotiation that's it it's just

gonna go yeah because I'm not getting in the car yeah but but like that's the whole thing right is like i guess also there's probably people i'm thinking of like the hardcore uh libertarian audience would argue like they didn't actually do it yeah i can see your point right and so like the way the law is written is it's the agreement of the negotiation yeah but you know after doing this for several years i'm like why the fuck are we doing this this is just such a waste of taxpayer money really like legalize the shit out of it pay your taxes go buy it have your diseases tested and have a nice day like why the fuck am i on the corner here trying to catch you know the white collar guy on his lunch break yeah it just seems mute how much of it is uh where there's prostitution

there's other things going on that was that's the or no the law that's what that's what they that's what they would say is it it's a precursor i don't know if i buy that i would say that's that's hard for me to wrap my head around it really is you know i got a 60 70 year old man with his wife in the car no will you fuck us both i'm like yeah sure no way yeah a 60 or 70 and he's hooked up to fucking oxygen at the time no way yeah i'm like dude i'll kill you is that is that like a uh uh i guess like a bucket list oh yeah that was a total bucket that the fbi guy that's a bucket with a whopper that's definitely a bucket list yeah like the 60 70 year old guy you almost kind of kind of feel like hey man like what's up with this he's like hey i'm dying yeah

he's probably like but his wife was with him and what was she saying does she get in trouble for that uh they both got arrested yeah because she solicited it as well yeah damn i know imagine not at her age she's probably like ah fuck it yeah but still that's kind of crazy all right and so what's going on with the narcotics though so the narcotics is uh a lot more dangerous um you have a gun now still no gun no wire okay so when i first started in narcotics you have a choice if you carry a gun and it gets discovered you're likely going to get killed 100 if you wear a wire and you get discovered you're likely going to get killed so what's your choice it was like okay fuck it i won't take either so i never i never carried either um and you're by yourself

or you have other people with you um both so we would run in partners but i would go into crack houses by myself he would go into crack houses by himself when we did street buys we would just drive around and street by together um so it's a little bit of combination so a street by let's just go in uh reverse here so a street by you're basically driving around in a car it's you and another person in the car uh you're both police officers and you just pull up there's somebody standing on the side of the street they're obvious you can tell who's dealing and because they're basically walking but not going anywhere uh and as you pull up you're just hey you know i want a baggie of whatever and they tell you a price you have money and then you

guys are arresting no we're not at all we pull we never break our cover yep we pull off um if we're doing street bust then we'll they'll bust them right there but many times we'll just continue to buy from and make a case and when you guys are doing this is it like you pull off and they immediately arrest them because doesn't that kind of tip them off that like you were the cops or no uh yeah but they're selling like chick-fil-a yeah so it's it's there's no shortage of buyers put it that way so sometimes they get it sometimes they don't but you know it's a decent size city and i'm buying all over the place now are you targeting the drug dealers or the drug buyers or both uh dealers the dealers dealers yeah which again you know i had this come to jesus

it's futile it really is this is why i i just don't believe you're ever going to make a dent in the drug trade uh it's a waste of taxpayer money if these people you know if if you have people in those economic conditions they're going to do whatever it takes to survive i would probably do the same if i grow up in that in that environment so if that's what it is then that's what it is i mean you have a supply and demand issue you're never going to change that I think it's a waste of taxpayer dollars. And so what should the government do? Legalize it all.

Just legalize all the drugs. Tax the fuck out of it. Yeah. And like 50% tax? Yeah, 50% tax. Like just the bigger number, the better. Then you're not going to have the fentanyl issue. Explain why.

Because fentanyl is being cut into different things. And by cut, you mean basically diluted down using other things. Yeah, I'm sorry. So for people that, you know, if you're buying Coke, you're profitable. For all of you drug addicts, you're good. You understand. but for everybody else here's what cut yeah exactly here's what cut means when you're buying coke it might not be 100 coke it's probably got some fentanyl in it so when you have these rocket

scientists make you know cutting it with fentanyl they don't know how much fentanyl is too much how much you know and that there's a lot of people dying and they don't even realize they're taking fentanyl and that's probably one of the bigger problems right now i would agree yeah yeah i would agree the um uh there's a corridor in the northeast where uh for probably 2000s 2010s there was tons and tons of percocets and kind of all the the pain pills and everything that was all running through there um and now uh there's still some of it but fentanyl has become the drug of choice it is uh and it's interesting to watch the trends change uh but the problem is you know yes you can overdose on some of that other stuff but not nearly as easily as you could accidentally

take some fentanyl oh yeah just a granule will kill you yeah pretty crazy do you think china is uh pumping that into the united states absolutely and it's a way to kind of eat away at us from internal it's pretty smart i mean yeah unfortunately if it is smart because if you give americans a surplus of anything they will over consume i love talking to my european friends because we're always like yo big gulp yeah exactly right we got that yeah everything's 10 times the size right like you guys are savages over here cars our houses our drinks our food plates everything is like 10 times the size yeah yeah but the human body can still only handle so much drugs agreed yeah yeah um all right so when you're doing uh all those drug busts and everything

how much is the government spending on this stuff a shit ton yeah so we have confidential informants and that was they get paid yeah you know at that this was back in 2000 so um my informant was getting uh we called it a hand-to-hand she was getting 40 per hand-to-hand which means she's literally from the dealer's hand to her hand is 40 bucks every time that's a dealer hands her drugs uh-huh she's getting 40 in her pocket yep she was at the end of the day making more than me yeah she could probably do that a couple times every 20 minutes oh god yeah she just did it she would go run with us two days a week eight hour shifts and she was making double what i was making salary and i'm like what the fuck that's crazy yeah and then who

sets that price at the time at the department i guess yeah i have no idea just tell you we paid her in uh unregistered cash yeah unregistered cash yeah so the cash that we use to buy deals is always photocopied the serial numbers are always traced because then when we bust you and we pull it out of your pocket we know you can't say we didn't do it yeah yeah yeah but the unregistered cash you guys would go to her yeah and in cash is she paying uh income tax on that shit come on now come on now so the government is paying confidential informants uh cash and then they're not paying taxes on it yeah maybe if we tax the confidential informants we could get the national debt down or maybe if we don't have to have them at all we can get the national debt

maybe we tax the dope we can get we can uh get the debt down i mean that probably actually would put a dent into some issue california is no longer in debt i mean not california colorado i'm sorry is no longer in debt yeah it's interesting yeah all right and so when you're doing this at what point are you like all right i'm done with the prostitution and the drug dealing not that you were doing it but yeah yeah yeah so hey guys what's going on i hope that you're enjoying this conversation i wanted to interrupt for a second to tell you about an event that we're hosting on march 4th at the miami beach convention center it's called lyceum miami and i've gone and asked some of the most popular guests from this show over the years to come in person at the event

it's going to be awesome we have everyone from kathy wood to vivek ramaswamy chris williamson cody sanchez and many many others i also even have a couple of surprises for each one of you if you show up the best part about this event is it is completely free to attend that's right all general admission tickets are free you simply need to go to lyceum miami.com lyceum miami.com will get you free tickets on march 4th at the miami beach convention center and if you're a big baller and don't just want to get a free ticket, you can also get a VIP or an insider pass. If you use the code POMP40, you'll get 40% off. They get you all kinds of cool things like the night before a cocktail with the actual speakers and a couple other perks.

Go check it all out at LyceumMiami.com and use code POMP40 if you want to be a baller. I can't wait to see all of you there. Go ahead and click on the link in the description and let's get back into this conversation. The drug dealing was, it was one of those come to Jesus moments where, you know, I had some pretty close calls. What was the closest one? You know, I got robbed once. I mean, that's a gangster right there, robbing the police. Well, they didn't know I was the police, but yeah.

I was swapping out cars almost on every two or three days just to not, trying to change my appearance, you know, just constantly trying. Once you work the same area over and over again, you don't want people to get it. But I had a gun pulled on me in a crack house. When you're walking into a crack house, these people are desperate. And they're all in line waiting for their rock. What goes on in the crack house? They're typically – it's interesting. It's like going to the fucking DMV.

Everybody's just sitting there looking at each other, waiting for their turn. And that's the way it was. And the dealer would always go in the back because they never want you to know where they're hiding the dope. But my job was to act like I'm a dope addict, but I'm literally counting every step that I'm making. If there's stairs, I have to count that amount of stairs. I have to remember if I see a dog, if I see children, if I see any fortification whatsoever, like there's like a lot of, you know, visual memory that I have to do. and then i have to debrief that i'm writing it down as soon as i get back because once they do go bust this you know if i say you know the door is purple and it was a fucking duplex and the door was actually red that's a big deal you know we just busted the wrong house and that that is a

big big deal it's a lawsuit i could lose my job you know there's just a lot involved in it basically what you're doing is you're gathering intelligence yeah but it's so precise how many stairs did i walk up did the guy have braids did you know how tall was he how much did you think he weighed you didn't see where he got the dope did you see which direction in the house he went to you know i've had him pull it out of their gum line before i've had him pull it out of their ass literally in their butt cheeks i've had him pull it out of the freezer in the ice cube trays i mean you name it but i have to really remember that while i'm also paying attention to 12 crackheads next to me trying not to fucking stab me or rob me yeah and when you're doing this uh and you go

back and you debrief, I'm assuming it's the SWAT team or the DEA or whoever, are they then practicing and kind of running dry runs? They do it one dry run. So they'll go by and I have to count how many houses from the curb or how many houses from the corner street it was. They'll literally count it, verify it. If they're confused in any way, they'll put me in an unmarked van with tinted windows and they'll say, are you sure that was the house? And I'll be like, yeah. you know thank god i never made any errors and then uh you're not with them when they go do the bust no yeah yeah uh far away were you ever in a crack house when a bust went down no no so basically you go in you're getting the uh intelligence you're getting the drugs you're con

you know um kind of completing a buy you leave yeah and then from there they're going dogs chase me the pit bulls you know from oh man i mean it's i think a lot of people don't realize that the the generalizations around crack houses drug dealers you know the dogs uh where they hide the drugs watch any movie like it all it's fucking realistic yeah it comes from reality i mean these tv producers are doing their due diligence no question there was a show on a and e years ago uh where they followed the dea oh yeah it was fascinating because you know they meet five six o'clock in the morning right and they go and they're kicking in somebody's door and you would watch and actually one of the uh craziest parts is uh you can go find the house you can usually

even find the person find the drugs in many cases it's very difficult to do even if you have dogs or whatever and it reminded me uh i was in the military and and uh before we went to iraq they gave us uh an entire training kind of module on how to search these homes and so you go into essentially like a replica home oh yeah and you're practicing you're practicing and you're like man i'm a genius i found this gun i found this knife i found this i found this whatever you get done you got like five or six things and they're like okay come back in with us uh-huh next thing they pull out like 47 weapons oh yeah right they like the floorboard was a false floor this and you know you got to move this thing and hey you idiots didn't check underneath the table and all of a

sudden you just start to realize like there was levels to this and then if you're literally your freedom and your economic uh earning ability is predicated on your ability to hide drugs or hide the money yeah you're gonna get creative yeah and the thing is is if you could you know these people are not dumb if you could put them to use for something legal and good they're pretty fucking smart they really are like they they have come up with amazing ways to hide dope to try to skew the dogs so they can't smell it what do they do their coffee grounds yeah motor oil um you know just wrapping it and it's it's pretty fucking genius and you know the mules that they use uh just it it's ingenious some of the stuff that they're doing but you know you always

have to stay kind of one step ahead of them and the only way to do that is with cis or undercovers because basically you have to have the inside information you have to you have to and you said that people had them in the ice cube trays yeah and their butt cracks and the inside of their mouths and upper lip uh where else would they have the drugs usually um what's the most common area is it just like in a drawer somewhere no so this was actually pretty pretty good because you know they always say possessions nine-tenths of the law so they had to be in possession of the narcotics in order to bust them so what they would do is they would have trash on the side of the road looks just like trash they would hide their dope in bags underneath the trash so when you came

up to buy, they don't have anything on them. Once they felt confident with you, they would pull it out of the trash and then give it to you. So if you went to bust them, they just ran. And if you caught them, they have nothing on their possession. It's all on the street. And you can say, it wasn't mine. Yeah. It was somebody else did that out. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It, um, uh, it's crazy because i think a lot of people see the videos that go viral online yeah of the dirty cops planting drugs yes well and uh obviously it happens right yes videos of it etc uh but it's always these weird things where you can't let the few bad apples or even if there's a lot of bad apples ruin the people who are doing good work but at the same time to your point the problem may be

so crazy that the entire approach to trying to solve the problem is wrong and we have to step back and kind of think about hey there may be a different way to address this and it isn't necessarily kind of in this abrasive we're going to arrest you we're going to put you in a cell all that it may just be we're going to let you guys do this but we are going to make it economically painful i agree you know we've been doing the same thing for 100 years and it's not working like at what point do we realize this is insanity we need we need to switch of what we do but also you know there is a set of rules that we play by you know law enforcement has a more stringent set of rules than drug dealers do but drug dealers even have a set of rules like it's

very taboo for them to shoot a cop because they know the wrath of the world is on them at that point so you know we have a set of rules they have a set of rules and sometimes those rules get crossed and uh i think on both ends it's the frustration you know in the law enforcement it's what what are we fucking doing here we're just every day i'm clocking in clock it out and it's the same people, the same amount of drugs every fucking day. And then from the drug dealer side, it's I have no opportunity. I have no education. I have no ability to make enough money to support my family. And they're preventing me from doing that. So I get both sides. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. At what point do you say, hey, I'm done being a cop? Yeah, to well, 2005. Was there a

specific incident or it was just kind of you'd been doing it for a while and you want to do something else yeah it was just kind of that light bulb moment with narcotics um and then i'm like what the fuck like this is you know uh a glass ceiling it's you're i'm never i'm just tired of being poor essentially you know at that point i was 31 years old i have a fucking roommate i'm like what is this you know and this is actually an interesting point a lot of people don't realize uh most cops in america do not make that much money oh god i made 42 000 after seven years yeah now i make that in a day yeah it's like what the fuck well what's crazy about it is i mean that's basically teachers right very similar yeah uh firefighters right i mean there's a number of

these roles that i think most people would point out and say like hey that's important for society you're not getting paid a lot no i agree and teachers uh it's a problem especially in florida when you look at what you were getting paid was that the main driver or things like getting a pulled a gun pulled on you no it was a main driver yeah it was just i'm like i can't do this it was that and it was why why am i going to continue to do something that's not making a difference and put my life on the line for it and then have to work for idiots in the same thing it's like man this is just a trifecta of shit you know did the police chiefs and those folks did they understand what's happening in the street or they were too removed oh fuck no yeah no they're

sitting in their office you know chilling and their bodyguards and their media and yeah they don't give a shit there's a uh story i hope i don't get the details wrong but uh this guy brian grazer um he's a big hollywood producer uh he wrote a book um about uh what he calls curiosity conversations so for like 40 years yeah he would basically call up or write or whatever just interesting people that he saw in the news or he heard about or whatever and he'd be like hey i'm gonna be in your city or you're coming to la or you tell me where to meet you anywhere in the world but like i would just like to sit down with you and learn from you yeah and uh i can't really offer you that much but like let's have a conversation because i'm curious about like

your yeah and uh the way he tells the story is i think it was the day the rodney king riot started in la he had a meeting set that morning with the la police chief and he was like for sure they're cancel on this nope he went to the police station went up and he spent like 30 minutes or an hour whatever it was with the police chief whoa and he was like it was one thing to talk to the police chief right it was another thing to talk to him uh about situation happening outside but he was like but the most curious part was seeing what was happening inside that room while there's chaos outside he was like it was cool calm and collected wow and so like you hear it and again you know he's writing this years later and there's kind of a memory or whatever,

but like, it's interesting because you, you see this like very different, they're very insulated remembering of the situation. Yeah. And like, if you, I'm guessing if you were to talk to a street cop in LA during those riots,

they're not cool, common collected, right. They're dealing with a whole different situation. Oh yeah. Yeah. Pretty crazy. I think that,

you know, it's, it's all over the media now because everybody and their mother has a camera. It still happened 20, 30 years ago. Just nobody had cameras back then. You know, I remember we were supposed to take pictures of domestic violence incidents of injuries. And I'll never forget the department couldn't even afford a fucking camera. We got grants from domestic violence organizations that gave us Polaroids, shitty Polaroids that we took pictures with. and that's what we did for our we had to hold on to the physical picture and turn those in as evidence now my five-year-old has a fucking cell phone you know what i mean like i didn't even have that when i was 23 yeah yeah that's crazy yeah and so when you go to leave you knew that you wanted to start uh servicing and cleaning and i started it before i left okay explain so i asked

the department i said this i've had switched departments at the time i went to this kind of fucking small Mayberry bullshit department. And they prevented us from working off duty. I'm like, God, talk about insult to injury here. You're paying a shit. And then you're preventing us from making any more money. And why did they not want you to do that? Control. It was just systematically control. So I said, Hey, I'm not working off duty in law enforcement, but I want to clean up crime scenes. And they, they were like, okay, well, as long as you don't do it in our city, then it's no conflict. You can do it. Perfect. No problem. Two months went by and they were like uh hey we changed our mind um it's either the job or the business and i was like

fuck off and i quit really yep why do you think they changed their mind control probably making a lot of money yeah and so it's one of these things of it's all control she she uh she seems to be successful we didn't care when she has to be exactly we didn't care when she wanted to you know sell fucking blow pops on the street but now that she's making real money yeah we want we want curb that. Got it. And so how did you get started? Uh, you know, I lied to the bank. Okay. And I, uh, cause they wouldn't give me a loan. And I said that I wanted a new windows for my house. So I took a home equity loan of 15 grand. That's all they would give me. So I started out door to door, just go into apartments and hotels and funeral homes. And

that's how I got my first jobs. And do you remember the first one? yeah uh the first one was a um double homicide on christmas day wow yeah relatives they just killed each other fucking had it out yeah like a okay corral yeah i mean in the house whatever happened to let's go in the backyard and fucking fight it out oh no let's pull guns and fucking shoot each other yeah so uh the mom of one of them hired me and she's sitting at her kitchen table and i'm fucking cleaning up the blood from and you're doing it yeah by myself and uh there was so much blood that it leaked into the um pantry went through the baseboards the drywall into the seal plate i'm like motherfucker my first job couldn't be simple

yeah no it's got to be horrendous and when you showed up that first time you have like hazmat suit on and everything yeah or yeah yeah so you pretty much you know what the game yeah i was trained at that point and i was ready to go i had all i had the basic equipment that i could afford with the 15 grand my blood i call it a blood vacuum it's a hepa vacuum personal protective equipment respirators you know gloves disinfectant all that when you say trained like you went to like a school i went to a school yeah no they don't do that i went to a private school it was it's no longer there but it was a company in uh dallas texas got it so you go and they basically teach you how to do this yeah they taught me how to do the actual physical operational part of it

they didn't teach me any business how do you price this who's your clients you know that kind of shit and when you get there how long does it take you to clean the double homicide well it it took me about two and a half days now i could probably do it in about six hours yeah that's crazy yeah it was a lot it was i mean two bodies that's a lot of blood and as you're doing it like mom's just sitting there at the fucking kitchen table watching me i was like okay this is fucking weird talk about feeling like you're under a microscope but you know after all these years i've gone through to where some people i think they find it therapeutic and they want to watch me clean it up other people are like i'm fucking leaving call me when you're done and that's the majority but

you know i've had one where dad was um he had cancer he didn't want to be a burden to anybody he's probably in his 70s so he put a pillow over his head and shot himself and the adult daughter hired us so we're in there you know it's pretty cut and dry it's on the pillow it's on the the mattress and we're cleaning it up and i find a piece of his jaw in the uh on top of the mattress underneath the pillow and she sees me she insisted on watching she sees me pick it up and before i could throw it in the red bag she says oh no no don't do that and i'm like okay she's like i want it i'm like i didn't know what to do i was like what the fuck what do i do so i was like okay and i give it to her i come back the next day to finish the job

and she's wearing it around her fucking neck what's jewelry her father's jaw yeah i mean dude i've never been in that situation so like i feel like i was like what the fuck yeah is that the craziest thing that you've seen a family member do uh it's fucking up there let me tell you what are some other ones uh you know i had a guy once that called me from michigan and he said hey my mom died and he was just fucking real like playing about it. No sadness, no nothing. My mom died. Can you go clean it up? Yeah. What happened? I don't know. She decomposed. I'm like, God damn. Okay. So I go over there and I look at it and she had been there for a fucking long while. She smelled the high

heaven down the street. And I was like, okay, you know, it's going to be whatever amount it was. and he's like oh by the way can you throw everything away inside the house i'm like everything he's like yeah and i go well do you want me to save the pictures and stuff for you like are you coming down for the funeral oh no we're gonna have her cremated just throw it all away i was like what the fuck like some people are just bam that's crazy yeah that i felt horrible because i'm like no wonder the lady fucking decomposed nobody gave two shits about her Yeah. And when that happens, like sad. Yeah. But also, um, they're there for so long, like they just break down. Yeah. The body just breaks. It does. The body does an amazing job of breaking

down quickly. You know, you start decomposing 15 minutes after your heart stops. So, you know, the blood and liquids and everything is going to go out of whatever orifice that, that it has, you know and the skin just becomes flaccid and if they're laying on the floor and the temperature is just not really cold in the room their skin's going to stick to the floor we've had to pick up their scalps before because when they remove the body the whole back of the scalp stayed attached to the floor so you know these are not fun not fun yeah yeah not fun and when you guys go into uh do this now how many people go in is it like one person or no it's never just one yeah two to three two three two to three for a bio any more than that and you're like stepping on each other

yeah yeah it's kind of like ghostbusters like you show up you got all your equipment you got your yeah basically you're on yeah and when you're in there like okay i get the cleaning part i get the removal of all the stuff but what are some of the other components that go into the job that people may not understand tons of maggots what does that mean there's just the maggots you know everybody is surprised like wait well wait a minute the how did the maggots get in well all you have to have is one fly in there to lay their eggs and then that creates thousands and thousands of maggots and uh i like to say that these maggots are my best employees you know they're eating up the scene i don't even have to pay them and they never call in sick and so how do you think about the

business now like when someone when you meet somebody at a coffee shop or something like oh what do you do oh they shit themselves what do you say they're all you know i it depends like a cleaning company well if i'm in the mood to chat um i'll say you know i'm a crime scene cleaner and they'll be like what the fuck what's the craziest thing you ever saw everybody always yeah yeah exactly um if i'm not in the mood to chat i'm just like oh i own a cleaning company they're like oh she's a janitor yeah well yeah whatever you want to think man that's fine i'm A janitor that does $18 million a year with an 85% private margin. Shut the fuck up.

Yeah, exactly. When you think about this business, is there an opportunity to go and get the government contracts or it wouldn't be that lucrative? So there is, but it's very strategic. So certain cities have the ability to have contracts. Miami happens to be one of them. Miami is the only city in Florida that has the availability for a contract.

so you have uh pretty much the entire state of california surprise surprise has the ability to have that um and then it's that sounds like there's zero uh corruption or other things going on well as if with everything right yeah so uh there is it really depends on geography and you all have built a huge name for yourself through social media yes which uh when people think of social media, I think they think of influencers, consumer brands, maybe technology companies. You guys are cleaning up crime scenes. Yeah. But you've got a million subscribers on YouTube. Yeah. You have tens of thousands on Facebook. I don't know how many you have on Instagram or other platforms, but it's a lot. Yeah. Why did you think to go into the internet

from a social media and marketing perspective? So for two reasons. The first one was, remember when I first started, I, everybody thought the police cleaned it up. So I knew I had that hurdle to overcome. And I thought, what is the way to reach the masses? And this was easy. It was free and it gave us the ability to essentially tell people, police don't do this. If you don't hire it out, you're doing it. You know, it's, it's you as the property owner does it. And number two, we got a shit ton of inquiries of this is fascinating. Like, how do you do this? Or how do you do that or true crime like you know that's kind of the big thing now so i knew that we would hit two needs uh just by posting the videos so we took an educational approach where we don't hide

anything like you know nothing's proprietary it's not fucking rocket scientists right so we're saying hey this is what we're doing this is why we're doing it and this is how we're doing it and it took off and like are you like hey here's how you clean a scalp up off a wood floor totally and you explain like absolutely the materials you use or whatever absolutely and are people just like masochists uh are they just like weirdos no i think people want to watch people are enamored with curiosity right you're always curious about something that you don't see every day or something wow that's interesting i had no idea right and i think people kind of have a morbid curiosity with what happens to you when you die do we really even know the answer to

that other than we decompose and nobody knows what happens after that. So I think there's a huge interest in it. Look at the true crime podcast. Look at the most popular shows on TV. They're all either law enforcement or hospital related. Right. So people are curious about it. And have you ever had content taken down off any of the platforms? I think so. I think TikTok is a one that their their rules change um with the wind so uh every once in a while we will get um community violation or something like that we'll just remove it what type of content they don't allow any gore whereas the other platforms love gore so you really just have to know who your who your platform is yeah what what is the definition of gore like yeah well

no blood no body parts i mean i see the inflation numbers and that looks gory to me that's exactly correct yes that should be a crime to post that like if we're just gonna have an open opaque definition exactly i'm like let's start there i i would agree with you there yeah all right and uh as you as you have been posting is there a specific type of content that really takes off with the audience yes it's typically death related or hoarding hoarding those two are what we we used to post everything now we're only posting those two service verticals okay and what do you do around hoarding uh they love to see what people hoard what becomes becomes of their homes what becomes of them what are they hoarding some animals hoard animals some hoard

trash it's like they just don't take the trash out ever not only do they not take their trash out they're going to go through your trash and bring that shit into their house for what purpose because they like it they're trash people yeah yeah or they have you know they have seven vacuums six don't work but i'm going to keep the six because it has parts for the one that does work oh makes sense yeah well of course of course because the first five don't have parts either right man there's some weird people out there yeah everybody's got their own there should be a show uh in new york city where they just showed people's apartment like surprise style yeah and they're like mtv cribs yeah but like you haven't cleaned you don't know they're coming

and just like people would be enamored by how weird fucking people are oh yeah totally right and just like hey knock knock you know that would people would not let them in because the first time that somebody some camera crew walked in and was like oh shit there's four dildos over there you know they'd be like oh fuck yeah but but i think that there's some people who are super weird who are proud they want people to know perhaps yeah like i always just think of uh uh like the guy who probably has like 16 parrots yeah he's like come on in look there's larry and rob and dan right we eat together we bathe together yeah look i taught him this trick yeah we shit together yeah and so you look at it you're like okay like those types of people would definitely love it oh

yeah and then there's the people who are doing real weird stuff yeah yeah i'm good exactly and then you're like well can we pay you yeah exactly there you go we want to come here i found that people have um you know they're adamant oh no don't fill me don't fill me but what if we pay you oh okay yeah come in so uh you know their threshold changes when you offer them money do you have to get approval we do we do we get approval with everyone and is it just like hey if you if you uh work with us we're gonna film yeah it's you know we could use this for marketing and educational purposes and you can say yes or no yeah then will you still do the job if they say no of course absolutely so basically it's you ask everyone but some people say no yeah and do

the people who say no ever have like weird shit going on or it's like nah i just i don't want to usually if they say no it's it's due to a suicide interesting yeah they're they're uh which you know has always perplexed me that you would feel more um private about a suicide than you would about an unattended death me personally i would be and this is no shame on anybody else but i would feel embarrassed if a family member died unattended because that would mean that nobody ever checked on them whereas a suicide is i view it as a very personal choice that was the individual's choice and it's their life and they can do whatever the fuck they want with it yeah um but most people that decline it's always a suicide suicide yeah because there's uh

intimacy to it or whatever yeah absolutely crazy yeah um what else about the business that people may not realize that like would be interesting labor is difficult yeah other than the physical demands of the labor yeah well you know i think labor in general in america is is going to shit and a handbasket, blue-collar-wise. And I'm not only seeing that with our type of business, but I'm hearing it from plumbers, AC people, contractors, you name it. It's just a change in our work ethic, and everybody wants a shit ton of money to do as little as possible.

Me too. Yeah, don't we all, right? But if you don't have the skill set for that, you're not going to get that. yeah i'm joking for those who are listening or watching um and do you think that that is just a like cultural i think it's cultural yeah i do i've seen the change since i first started 18 years ago um and you know we've actually tested some different things we've we've tested paying brand new off the street guy doesn't even have a high school diploma 15 bucks an hour we've tried paying them 25 an hour all the way up to 35 and we got the same quality of employee with three

very different pay rates what would you say the average employee you have now college educated high school educated no high school education how old are they like high school only in their 20s high school only in their 20s and so this is something where hey i don't have tons of options they don't and so this is a good option because it probably pays decently well compared to my other options right uh and i don't have to have a degree or all this other stuff but here's the deal they get in they start working for about 90 days and they're like okay i know i'm making 20 an hour but this shit's fucking hard i'm just gonna go to mickey d's and make 15 and work just fucking flipping burgers so i think that's the mentality that's kind of happened now

so we're really kind of in a conundrum here of of finding good talent that's gonna stay how do you do that i don't know i don't have the secret yet how often do the employees turn over about every six months every six months yeah that's real short yeah it is and it's not near as short as a mcdonald's employee i feel their pain uh but with ours it's more expensive because you're giving yeah the training is expensive the inoculations um uniforms you know the fit testing and all that kind of stuff it's expensive you guys have to do physical fitness testing uh respirator fit test and the physical of like an actual physical like you went to play football or whatever that's what i mean it's basically you're testing the physical yeah uh

fitness or whatever of the can you breathe with a respirator on just different like a lot of people can't do that people don't know what that is they don't know what that is yeah you go through the gas chamber right yeah the um uh i i was uh talking to a friend that was on the show and he's a navy seal there's all this controversy now about how the seals are getting treated during their training and as you can imagine most of the seals are like uh okay yeah exactly wait till you hear what happens after yeah training um but uh one of the things that anyone uh in the army or in the navy usually goes through is these gas chambers and so uh we're we're joking after the show that people think you go into the gas chamber with the gas mask on no and then you walk out and

like it's just like to test yeah and we were like if only the public somehow figured out that no they make you take the gas mask off talk open your eyes say your social your phone number all that yeah oh yeah and then they make you put the gas mask back on and people come out and they got snot ringing oh yeah and he was like so yeah uh gas chamber's fine right like like almost if people actually knew the details they'd be even more pissed oh yeah but a respirator you're not necessarily uh doing that type of stuff but it's very hard to breathe to your point it is it's um it's very taxing and you know my biggest issue with it is well there's two the cartridges tend to carry a little bit of weight to them so my neck at the end of the day is fucking on fire

um and secondly my peripheral vision is fucking shot so when somebody's like you know swinging a hammer back there i can't see it i can't see it and you have to wear the respirator and all the protective equipment because you kind of don't know what you have no idea what's in there and i don't want you know hepatitis you know touching my skin you know c diff mursa there's just a ton of um that you you have to protect yourself against what's the most fun part of doing this now you've been doing it for 18 years that it's different every day what's the worst part just whatever you just thought you should say well i i'm i'm thinking i would say working in confined spaces like uh claustrophobic yeah i had a guy that shot himself in the attic with a

shotgun and uh fucking attic like an unfinished attic super small and i'm walking up the stairs because the the cops were still there and they're like oh he's up in the attic you know you can go take a look or whatever and i get up to the second floor and his blood is dripping down the wall on the second floor from the attic so it looked like the shining going in and i'm like oh wow it's fresh like real fresh and it's clearly a lot of fucking blood up there so i go up there and he's still up there and all i could see was about this much of his scruff and his face is just blown off his eyeball is shot into the air vent and his jaw like just fucking everything right it's just everywhere and the blood is just dripping down so not only are you cleaning the attic now you're

cleaning the fucking second floor which is a finished living space yeah so it's challenging yeah um when you think back to the start of the business what do you wish you knew that you know now so much like i probably lost a shit ton of money oh i know i did i lost a shit ton of money the first three years in business because no one taught me how do you quote this how do you build this how do you how do you charge for this like it was literally just kind of cowboys and indians like yeah that sounds good you know and i'm way way under charge i was lucky enough to have an insurance adjuster pull me aside like three years later and go hey i'm not supposed to tell you this but you way under charge. I'm like, fucking a, are you serious? Yeah. He's like, you should be

charging double. It's like, wow. Oh fuck. For the same amount of work. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Cause there's just nothing to go off of. It's not like, you know, plumbing. I know what a typical like truck travel charges or whatever with this, it's totally out of the blue. Yeah. I know that you get a lot of inspiration from other industries or other businesses. How do you go about finding those inspirations or those ideas that you then can bring into an industry that frankly, there's just not that many people do or know about? Yeah. So I, I always look outside industries and particularly real estate investment kind of, uh, for my ideas, especially with marketing. So we have to be kind of strategic about how we market. And, um, about five years

ago, I came up with bandit signs. I'm like, man, they, they do that everywhere for real estate and it works. So let's try that. Let's try that. So we kind of deployed that in all of our markets and we tested kind of different type of things. Well, not only did we get service calls for it, we got employees out of it. Oh my God, crime scene cleaning. I want to do that. Are you hiring? Like, you know, people were kind of enamored with that. So I kind of got that idea from there. Software ideas I get from there too. You know, like CRMs, automation, just things like that. They're the, that industry is very good at that. Um, and we can't do a traditional billboard, you know, uh, buy one, get one free, you know, any newspaper ad, you can't do,

do anything like that. But radio ad, Hey, if a family member has passed away. Yeah. If you see something dripping through your second floor, call us. Yeah. You can't really do that. So it's been a test, you know, and when I first started out, I did that billboard thing, lost a shit ton of money because it never worked. But I, it was almost like throwing darts at a dartboard and seeing what stuck. Um, but as I grew, I was able to kind of say, okay, let's take different industries and see what's working for them and see if that there's a possibility that that could work with us. And social media was one of those outside of the bank loan. Did you have to take any money to grow the business? No. Yeah. Well, I tried. No one ever

gave me any money ain't that a bitch yeah i tried to get a lot of um bank loans uh you know things like that the only thing that i've ever gotten was a mortgage for our building and when you look at that is that actually a blessing in disguise now not really because i feel like i could have grown twice as fast in a shorter period of time and uh you know perhaps exited gone into a different type of industry and you know just kind of rinse and repeat but i've been doing this for 18 years that's that's a bit long yeah my uh my last question for you yeah are you still having fun yes i am having fun with uh various aspects of it you know i i have a lot of fun with the social media side of it because i think it's just it's so ripe for for anything you know and uh it cracks

me up when most business owners are like oh my god you have to be so pc you have to watch what you say what should you do i'm like fuck no you don't we do whatever we want we don't censor shit if you don't like it don't fucking watch the channel you know that's just really what it is and uh businesses are too focused on being sterile and we're not i think that is a great piece of advice for a lot of people i do cutting through the noise right if you act talk and uh kind of conduct yourself the way everyone else does it's real hard to stand out absolutely where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about the business well if you like watching gore you can go to youtube at crime scene cleaning uh we just passed a million subs on that

so we're super excited about that um we're on tiktok as well crime scene cleaning we got about five million there instagram facebook you know we're kind of all over the place and if we're actually starting a subscription site on our crime scene cleaning website crime scene cleaning.com for um kind of behind the scenes super gory videos that we wouldn't make it on on social I can't wait to hear how many people sign up for that. Your own personal gross room, right? Absolutely. And then do you have anything personally that people should follow?

Yeah, I've got a book getting ready to come out here probably in a few months. We just got signed with an agent on that. So I'm working on that. We're kind of in talks with maybe a reality show going on here. And I'm on Facebook as well and LinkedIn and all that other kind of stuff. Laura Spalding. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it very much.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I learned a lot. Didn't know the economics of street busts or crime scene cleaning, but we'll definitely do this again in the future. Yeah, thanks for having me.