- Jacob Shaidle started a barbecue cleaning business to pay for university in July 2021.
- In 2023, with help from a high school friend, he took the business online and started expanding.
- Shaidle Cleaning now operates in six Canadian cities and employs 20 students.
In July 2021, Jacob Shaidle knocked on his neighbor's door, explained that he was starting a business to pay for university, and asked if he could clean his barbecue.
His pitch was mediocre at best, he told Business Insider: "I was fumbling my words and really, really nervous, but he said yes."
The next day, he spent three hours deep-cleaning his first client's barbecue.
"After the service, he asked, 'How much do I owe you?' I had no idea what to say, and '150' came out of my mouth," said Shaidle, who was 16 at the time. "He came out with three $50 bills and I remember being like, 'Oh my gosh, I just made $50 an hour.'"
It was a significant jump from the $12 an hour he'd been collecting the past three years working on a tree farm. As Shaidle got closer to graduating from high school and starting university, which his parents expected him to pay for, he realized the tree farm gig wasn't going to cut it.
He considered a few home service businesses, like car detailing and landscaping, but his research suggested they were oversaturated.
The idea of cleaning grills came after doing the job for his mom. She encouraged him to reach out to their neighbors in Hamilton, a Canadian port city in southern Ontario, where owning a home is practically synonymous with owning a barbecue, noted Shaidle: "There's a pretty good market for it."
Plus, there didn't seem to be a lot of competition.
"Anyone can clean their grills and their flavorizer bars, but I wanted to offer a service that could really help people and get those areas that they miss when they do it themselves," said Shaidle.
He spent nearly all of his savings, about $400, on wire brushes, scrapers, a degreaser, and other cleaning equipment at Home Depot, and landed his first five clients by door-knocking. The teen didn't yet have a car to lug his equipment, which included a pressure washer he borrowed from his dad, so he developed a cumbersome yet effective system: "I would call the client and ask if my mom could drop off the equipment the night before. Then, I would walk to the job in the morning, do the job, and then my mom would pick up the equipment and bring it back home afterward. It definitely wasn't the most streamlined service business ever, and there were a lot of hoops to jump through, but that's where it started."
His net revenue at the end of summer 2021 was about $8,000, he said.
Buying a car, notching his first five-figure month, and partnering with a friend to bring the business online
After a year of school, Shaidle restarted his cleaning business in June 2022. His priority was to profit enough to invest in a car so he wouldn't be limited to jobs within walking distance of his home.
About a month into the season, after working mostly with existing clients, he had enough to buy a $5,000 car in cash. Expanding his working radius led to his biggest revenue month to date, he said: $7,000, which he hit at the end of the 2022 season.
Heading into year three of the business, Shaidle had a car, a growing client list, and top-grade equipment, including an all-natural, chemical-free degreaser from another small business he partnered with called Strodes — and he'd fine-tuned his process after working on hundreds of grills.
"Not every barbecue is the same. There are so many brands, so many different things to look out for, so learning by doing was huge for me — and I would always ask for customer feedback," said Shaidle. "I would ask what I could have done better, and that's been a huge part of our business, even still."
In May 2023, after coming home from his first year at the University of British Columbia, "I did my first $10,000 month," he said. "I did two barbecues a day, every day, for the whole month."
One of Shaidle's high school friends, Aran Giffen, took note. He'd also just wrapped up his first year at UBC and didn't start his internship until later in the summer, meaning he had some time to kill.
"I saw Jake doing all of this and was like, 'I don't have anything going on. I'm a little bored. Let me reach out to Jake and see if he needs help,'" said Giffen, who assumed a creative role and put together a Shaidle Cleaning website, designed a logo, and started posting content on social media. He also took it upon himself to reach out to a few news outlets, including the Hamilton Spectator.
The publication ran an article in August 2023. Shaidle was working at a client's home when the story went live: "I was there for three hours, and I probably got 50 calls."
He and Giffen managed the flood of inquiries and built out a waitlist, but it was too many jobs for Shaidle to take on alone.
Expanding to multiple cities, growing the team, and doing six figures in annual revenue
With the help of two friends he trained to be barbecue "technicians," Shaidle worked his way through the waitlist by the end of summer 2023.
He earned enough to cover his annual tuition, which ranges between $16,000 and $18,000 a year, he said: "I paid my whole tuition in cash to my parents. That was a huge moment for me because the whole goal of this business was to pay for my tuition, and I actually did what I said I was going to do."
He and Giffen spent their second year at university planning for what they expected to be a busy 2024 season for Shaidle Cleaning.
For starters, they needed to hire technicians. The 19-year-olds turned to their peers. As of August 2024, they've hired and trained 20 high school and university students, who they deploy in one of the six cities they're operating in in southern Ontario. By the end of the cleaning season, which spans May to September, they expect to complete 1,000 barbecue cleanings and generate $150,000 in revenue. They've already hit six figures in revenue, which Business Insider verified by looking at a sales dashboard showing total transactions for summer 2024 and copies of invoices.
Shaidle and Giffen know how difficult it can be to find a good-paying summer gig, and they hope that by offering competitive pay, they can help other students reduce their tuition fees.
"One of the things with being a small business, and I knew this right off the jump, is that we need to be competitive in terms of what we offer our employees because they are taking a risk, too," said Shaidle, who pays his technicians an hourly rate. They also keep 100% of the tips that they receive. "It's not like they're getting a Google job where they know they're going to have work every day and everything is super well structured. We're just a group of teenagers still."
Shaidle, who did two cleanings a day for the first two weeks of the summer to set an example for his growing team, has transitioned to more of a manager role. He and Giffen already have big plans for 2025, in which they expect to grow to 60 employees and complete around 5,000 jobs.
The friends, whose shared mantra is to "take your dream, double it, double it again, and now shoot for that," use their time at university to think through how to grow their business strategically and sustainably.
"What we're trying to do is be as ambitious as possible. When you've got such a great team putting in a lot of great work, you can do a lot more than people might think," said Giffen. That said, they want to perfect their systems in Ontario before entering other parts of Canada. "We don't want to go too big geographically and then everything comes falling down because we can't control the quality."
Giffen, who's on a full university scholarship for accounting, isn't technically under contract as a Shaidle Cleaning employee.
"I refuse to take cash from Jake. My scholarship covers my school fees and, honestly, any more money I take I'd probably spend on something stupid, so I'd rather keep it in the business," said Giffen, who has an on-campus job that covers his non-tuition expenses. For now, he'd rather prioritize his friend's tuition than his own savings: "At the end of the day, I want Jake to go to school because I go to school with Jake and Jake's my best friend, so I want him to be there. Right now it's not a priority, I just want to keep growing this thing."