Green Entrepreneurs: From Helping Mom to Green Entrepreneur

A great story from the Miami Herald about a 19-year old college student who accidentally found his niche and jumped on it.

19 year old Chris King was helping his mother around the house one day and ran into a problem with the clothes dryer vent being backed up. His family was using a ton of energy more than they needed to dry clothes.

King, being a business major, turned that experience into a startup venture and ran with it. Finding his own secret method to cleaning the system out, he started going door to door selling his service for $39 in his own neighborhood. The cost in energy savings alone far outweighs the service, and King has already expanded. We can only hope for the best and hope more Green Entrepreneurs step up, even solving the little problems that can help preserve some natural resources.

Full text from the MiamiHerald:

The work is a lot like being a chimney sweep - that is, the only chimney sweep in town, because it had never occurred to any of the neighbors to sweep their chimneys.

The business model invented by Chris King, 19, a freshman at USC living in Huntington Beach, Calif., with his parents during summer break, is pretty simple: extract built-up lint from long, winding clothing-dryer ducts, and charge $39 for the service.

It’s a low-cost way to immediately boost energy efficiency and dramatically cut drying time for clothes.

“One neighbor said it took like an hour and 20 minutes,” King said. “Now it’s down to 20 or 30 minutes, tops. He’s super happy. He said, ‘Call me back next summer.’”

King said he got the idea after trying, unsuccessfully, to find a summer job.

“I started applying everywhere,” he said. “You know, the economic downturn. I got a couple calls back, but it’s hard to get a job right now.”

Instead, he began helping around the house.

“One weekend, my mom was complaining about how long it took to dry her laundry,” King said. “My dad tried to fix it. I was helping him.”

Like many others in his neighborhood, their house has a laundry room in the middle of the house. The duct that releases warm air from the dryer must be 18 feet long to reach an outer wall.

A kind of light bulb, perhaps with a greenish tinge, went off in King’s mind. A lot of his neighbors had the same floorplan.

The cleaning method - King wants to keep it secret for now - works most dramatically on long ducts. In only two weeks of offering the service door to door, he says he’s already picked up about 25 customers.

King, who is planning to be a business major, said he said he hopes to continue the service even after school resumes in August.

“I’ve already started marketing around a couple surrounding neighborhoods,” he said. “If everything goes as planned, I’ll try to expand as fast as I can.”

Originally posted at Green OC (http://greenoc.freedomblogging.com/).

Tweet This Post 

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!