Mr. Big Sh*t
- Heather Anne Lee
- Fred Lopez
A pit bull with a lisp and a loose stool. A schnauzer with a memorable schnoz. A duo of dainty maltipoos with frighteningly large feces. Just another day in the life of Mike Wright.
As the owner of The Poop Bandit, a dog poop removal service, it’s easy to picture Mike as a colorful mashup of your favorite Pink Panther characters: David Niven’s Phantom jewel (or in this case, stool) thief only to be foiled by Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau—who literally steals the show (or, in this case, the shit).
“It’s a crappy job, but someone has to do it,” he deadpans.
It wasn’t always this way. Mike was once a professional talent manager, rubbing elbows with heiresses, Hollywood producers, and Michelin-starred chefs. So how does one go from the jet-set life to—err, waste management?
“Well, that’s a loaded question. Pun intended,” Mike jokes. “Basically it started as a job for my oldest son and was named for my dog, Bandit. He—Lucas, not Bandit—was having a hard time finding a job when he turned 16, and I was like, ‘Well, why don’t we just create one?’”
Let’s be clear: Mike wasn’t talking about mowing lawns or washing cars. There was no trip to Publix to fill out applications. No. He was talking about creating a bonafide incorporated company.
The pooper-scooper business was one of a hundred ideas bouncing around in Mike’s hyperactive brain, but it was the one that was already partially vetted. “I can’t say that it was my original idea. I knew someone in Michigan that had a scoop business, and he was very successful. Ran that business for, like, 20 years. So I did a little bit of research, and there was nothing in the area like it. So one Taco Tuesday, my wife and I sketched out a business plan, came up with the branding, and put a one-page website together. Tacos, tequila, and then bam! We’re in business.”
Then again, that’s just the way Mike operates … fast, furious, and flying on gut instinct. None of which seems out of the ordinary coming from a Midwest hustler who grew up in Detroit.
“My upbringing was pretty strange, to put it mildly,” he says. “My dad worked for GM until he went legally blind and had to retire on medical disability. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a grease monkey. It destroyed him. He always had stuff going on after that, but he always failed. He could never make anything work, and honestly … I think there’s a lot of power in watching your parents try, even if they fail. It’s real life. Not everything works out, you know?”
Mike continues, “But that’s me as an adult, after years of therapy, looking back. As a kid, it wasn’t a good environment. Officially, I got my license at 14, but I was driving my dad around at 10 or 11, running errands for my uncle who had a chop shop. Straight-up stolen cars, drug deals, illegal parts, gangs, total movie shit. That’s really where I got a lot of my hustle, my swagger. I never fell into the drug scene, thank goodness, but I certainly learned how to deal with all kinds of people —rich, poor, good, bad, liars, cheats, you name it. I would never in a million years want that kind of life for my own kids, but that experience definitely gave me skills that I use every day. I can talk shit with the best of them.”
Mike is deflecting, of course, using his sarcastic, yet infectious sense of humor the keep the conversation light. Truth be told, it wasn’t an easy life. He left home for good at 19 and never looked back.
“I met my wife, Mandi, in 1993. I was 17. Engaged at 20, married at 22, and had our first kid at 25. We’ve been together for 25 years now, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. When I decide I want something, there’s no stopping me,” he laughs.
Sh*t in the Dark
If you told Mike 25 years ago that his family and livelihood would be dependent on dog shit, he would have said you were full of just that. Well, he still would actually, but that’s the fun of it.
But polishing that turd wasn’t an overnight affair. “Lucas just wanted to make enough money to pay for his car insurance, gas, and have a little bit of cash in his pocket. So he had a handful of customers, probably like eight or so, and that was it. Then when he graduated high school and went into the Marine Corps, the company just limped along,” Mike says. “We kept a handful of clients, mostly friends, but that was it. I was in the shit, literally, with my other company, and didn’t have the time or resources to put into scooping.”
For more than a decade, Mike’s primary business was running Domestic Estate Management Association, an association for personal chefs, butlers, estate managers, nannies, personal assistants, and such. DEMA connected high-quality, vetted service people with high-net-worth families.
Founded in 2007, he and a partner built the company from scratch, growing it from just a handful of members to 22 chapters with 5,000 members throughout the U.S., one in Monaco, and one in London. “By 2016, we were poised to expand even further but realized we were spread too thin. So that’s when we decided to double-down and bring on an investor. It was a real-life version of Shark Tank, only not as fun,” he says. “The investor started stealing money from the organization within about six months, and the whole thing just mushroomed into a big, messy divorce in 2017. Friends I had for a decade. It was heartbreaking.”
Fresh off the heels of that debacle, Mike transitioned into private service. “I was reeling from the partnerships and didn’t trust anyone, so I basically became an independent consultant, a headhunter talent recruiter for billionaires. They would come to me looking for people to run their homes or estates, and I’d find the people. Eventually that grew into consulting, where I’d go into their estates and diagnose their staff issues and, you know, help them with a battle plan to fix it.”
“Those three years were a lot of work, but it was really fun. I mean, I got to work and consult for some wonderful, high-profile people. One day I’m talking to George Lucas. The next, I’m dealing with Hollywood producers and celebrities. It was exciting and challenging and really high pressure, everything that I loved.”
And then COVID hit in March 2020, and it all just … stopped. Mike’s private practice went from thriving to dying. “Obviously, no one was hiring,“ he says. “Especially with the wealthy because they didn’t want people coming in and out of their home any more than needed. It was like a water pump getting shut off.”
Like most of the world, Mike just hung out for a bit. “I did what everyone else did, watched Netflix and gained 30 pounds,” he jokes. “But it was pretty clear to me after the first month that COVID wasn’t going away. I’m not one to just sit around, either. I go stir crazy if I’m not working on something.”
So, he decided to revisit the old Poop Bandit concept. “Believe it or not, we still had a handful of clients, so it was time to decide: Am I going to let this company die, or am I going to put in the effort? I still believed it was a great idea, with untapped potential in this area, but to be totally honest, I was having a massive identity crisis. Here I was, a guy that gave advice to billionaires for 20 years, and now I’m going to pick up shit? There’s no nicer way to say it. I really struggled.”
For the same reasons it made sense for his son to do it in 2016, it made sense to Mike in 2020: low overhead, high potential. So, in the end, getting over that mental hurdle didn’t require a therapist or psych degree. It just required doing the work. And landing his first really big account that fall. Then his second by the end of the year. And with each success, any personal issue he had with scooping diminished. “If you can’t laugh at yourself, right?”
Calling the Sh*ts
These days, the King of CaCa has a warehouse, three trucks, nine employees, and a six-figure business. But his blood pressure is dangerously high, and he’s wondering what it all really means.
“It’s a cliche, I know it. I’m 46 … it’s a mid-life crisis. I lost everything in 2017, and spent three years re-evaluating my life, my purpose as a man, as a husband. All of that really humbled me in a way that let me look at my kids, and I have to tell you … Lucas, Phoenix, Stella, they’re my greatest accomplishment. So … why am I stressing out so much? I turned shit into a lucrative business, for god’s sake. Why do I feel the need to reinvent myself yet again?”
In September 2022, two years after landing his first really big, shitty contract, the Poop Bandit has one last hill to climb.
“Do I still want to conquer the world and make a million dollars? Of course! Will I build another business? Probably. That’s just who I am. But here’s the thing I know for sure—I conquered the world by having a great family, by being a good husband and a great dad. I didn’t spend 70 hours a week for 40 years working for someone else’s dream. I spent 70 hours a week building my dream, on my terms, for my family. That’s conquering the world.”
And if there’s one thing Mike knows, there is always a brighter side to every shitty situation—or, at least one that smells better.
