CBJ: Cleaning up after kitty

A Charlottesville-based company has a cleaning solution for cat owners who don’t like to clean up their furry one’s waste.

DoodyCalls, a national pet waste removal company, has expanded its services to help cat owners. For a weekly fee starting at $15, company employees will come to a client’s house and replace and clean out kitty litter boxes.

Although DoodyCalls has always offered service for cat owners, it recently decided to make a full marketing campaign to promote the work. For the last 10 years, most of the company’s clients have been dog owners.

DoodyCalls provides cat owners with two or three litter boxes ready to use. Each week the pet owner leaves the dirty litter box on the porch before they go to work and returns home to find a clean litter box waiting for them.
“The pet owner never has to buy kitty litter again,” company owner Jacob D’Aniello said. “We take care of all it.”

D’Aniello and his wife, Susan, both University of Virginia graduates, started DoodyCalls in 2000 in Northern Virginia. In just four years, they were able to start franchising the business across the country.

Jacob D’Aniello got the idea of animal waste removal while listening to a radio talk show on his way home from work as a technology consultant. The show was about a man who cleaned up animal feces for a living.

“I can’t remember what they said, but they didn’t say [cleaning up feces] was a good idea or a bad idea,” D’Aniello said.

The D’Aniellos, who were dating at the time, said they quickly realized the pet waste removal concept was a possible business venture that they could work into their schedules. The couple bought cleaning supplies and started working on a way to promote the business.

“We thought this was something we could do together,” Jacob D’Aniello said. “We realized we could build an industry and we were winning people into a fresh new industry no one had ever thought of before.”

In the beginning, the couple worked evenings and weekends and put all of their profits back into the business. But within three years, Jacob left his job to work on the business full-time.

Within another year, the couple was working on a plan to franchise the business across the country.

“People started calling us from all over the country because they wanted these services,” Susan D’Aniello said. “We knew we had something.”

The couple, which still owns the original business in Fairfax, moved to Albemarle County and opened their home offices, affectionately called “Doo’Ville,” on the Downtown Mall in 2006.

The company has seven full-time employees in the Charlottesville office, including the D’Aniellos, and other employees in areas along the East Coast. There are more than 40 DoodyCalls franchises across the country servicing more than 5,000 clients, both residential and commercial.

Last year, the company’s revenues were approximately $3.5 million, Jacob D’Aniello said.

“All of the franchisee training is done in Charlottesville,” Susan D’Aniello said. “We bring them out here for a week and teach them about the business.”

Despite the dip in the economy, the company has continued to grow and the D’Aniellos said they have worked to promote their business and find new customers. Many people who have cancelled the services because of income issues have reestablished services after a month or so, Jacob D’Aniello said.

“Everyone has a priority list of what they are willing to pay for,” he said. “We believe we provide a service people are willing to pay for.”

Although the company doesn’t currently provide pet waste removal services to local residents, the D’Aniellos hope to find the right person to open a franchise in the area.

They briefly provided the services when they moved to the area years ago, but the D’Aniellos quickly realized they couldn’t provide the quality of service and work on growing their franchise business.

“We would love to start a business here because we know there is a market,” Jacob D’Aniello said.

Although the company does currently serve clients who have pet geese and deer, they have no plans to promote waste removal services for more exotic animals. But they are willing to help clients take care of any waste that can be removed without going into the client’s house.

“There is not a pet owner in America that likes poop, and we’re here to take care of that problem,” Jacob D’Aniello said.