A dirty job, but someone has to get rich doing it

ByABC News
October 10, 2007, 10:35 PM

— -- James Dillard, owner of Dillard's Septic Service in Annapolis, Md., once rolled his company truck loaded with wastewater.

In the septic business, that's about the worst thing that can happen, a Houston-we've-got-a-problem moment. He was fortunate. The front of the truck wound up facing uphill in a drainage ditch so that the load drained out the back and not into the cab.

Dillard goes most days without getting a splash on his clothes. "The only odor you catch is when you take off the cap and agitate the solids," he says.

Dillard runs a business that most others consider beneath them. Dillard knows that, but he takes it to the bank. He understands the attitude. His father was in the septic business, and when James was in school, he was a little embarrassed of him. James tried other occupations, including managing a furniture store. But he has circled back to septic, where he charges $200 to $300 a visit. At about five stops a day, his annual income passes six figures with months to spare.

Turns out there are a lot of people doing well and getting rich running businesses large and small that others consider mundane, boring, beneath them or downright disgusting. Their success flies in the face of perhaps the most pervasive piece of career advice out there that goes something like this: Do something you enjoy, and the money will follow. Or, work at what you love, and you'll never feel like you work for a living.

Portable toilets are lucrative, so much so that they have a trade association called the Portable Sanitation Association International, which says the industry brings in $1.5 billion a year servicing 1.4 million portable restrooms worldwide with a fleet of 9,400 trucks. Most anyone can clean, but more and more don't want to, and so the commercial and residential cleaning services industry grew to $49 billion in 2005 from $29 billion in 1998, says John LaRosa, research director of Marketdata.