When Omar Kharbat left Kuwait and arrived in the U.S., he started his own carpet cleaning business that soon pivoted to restoration services. 27 years later, that business had grown so large he was able to exit and begin fostering a new passion: creating a better platform for the service industry.
Boots & Ladders is a direct marketplace where trade service professionals offer up-front prices for labor, allowing customers to book instantaneously.
The current marketplace for the service industry, Kharbat said, is not well suited for workers. The structure is comprised of either direct trade or listings with no tangible prices offered.
“Our mission is to make buying a service as easy as purchasing a product off a store shelf,” he said.
Becoming a service worker isn’t easy—especially if you are fresh out of high school and lack name recognition in the industry, as is often the case. Many other platforms, such as HomeAdvisor, rely on lead generation software that sells back collected data rather than allowing users to provide their own services directly.
Kharbat said the industry is growing in the wrong direction and choking the service professionals, making it difficult for them to generate profits in the industry unless they spend significant amounts of money.
By cutting out the middlemen, so to speak, Boots & Ladders empowers professionals to list their services with clear pricing and transparent profiles. Buyers can then access the platform, online or in app form, and shop for offers with services described as clearly as if the buyers were reading product labels.
Along with providing professionals with the platform to advertise their services, the three-person team at Boots & Ladders also supplies over 400 pre-generated service templates that help users craft up-front offers and pricing. These templates give users insight into the demand for certain services and effectively act as advice on how to structure offers.
Kharbat has seen the benefits of up-front pricing firsthand; in his carpet cleaning business he was able to offer a whole house cleaning for $100.
“People were instantly booking the service, so now we don’t even have to answer phone calls or give quotas or give prices,” he said.
This specialization and transparency allowed them to streamline the service process, which meant they didn’t have to carry extra equipment on jobs.
Challenges & The Road Ahead
To date, the biggest challenge Boots & Ladders has faced has been getting trade service professionals to recognize the benefits the startup is offering. Many professionals have had bad experiences with telemarketers and faulty promises, leaving them skeptical of any new platform offering assistance.
“We have to craft those messages really well,” Kharbat said. “We have to reach out to them through channels… at their convenience, on their good times without pressuring them.”
Kharbat said that ultimately Boots & Ladders will be particularly beneficial to high school students, as it gives them an opportunity to enter the trades industry.
“It’s kind of dying now,” Kharbat said of that industry. “We’re losing plumbers. We’re losing heating and air. We’re losing all those guys and it’s becoming more and more difficult for [new] guys to get into the industry.”
QUICK BITS
Startup: Boots & Ladders
Founder: Omar Kharbat
Founded: 2020
Location: Wilmington, NC
Website: bootsandladders.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Boots & Ladders provides a starting point for those with less experience to offer simple gigs without having to go through another business. Kharbat said the platform will not only help people generate extra money but also teach them how to meet customer expectations and set prices. This in turn opens the door for them to potentially start their own businesses.
Boots & Ladders has been bootstrapped to date with its main revenue source amounting to a small portion of the revenue earned from each job on the platform.
The platform currently has around 1,670 users, well exceeding an initial goal of 1,000 users by the end of 2024. Kharbat said they hope to reach 10,000 at some point next year.
He added that they are slowly building the platform to create a strong foundation that would make it difficult for the startup to be overtaken by competitors. The plan is to expand outside of Wilmington to provide services across the country.
Raleigh- and Charlotte-based platforms are next.
