In early 2023, Rick Chorney was 26 years old, working 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. seven days a week, pulling in roughly $14 an hour subcontracting commercial cleaning jobs across the suburbs of Vancouver. He had no investors, no degree, and no safety net. He told Fortune directly: it broke something in him.
“There came a day where I was just like, ‘I am done.'” What he did next is the reason you’re reading this.
He sat down for four hours and figured out how AI could take work off his plate. Three years later, his company Echo Janitorial Services is on track to clear $1.3 million in revenue in 2026, up from $242,000 just two years prior. Fortune reviewed Chorney’s business records to verify the numbers.
The Real Story Here
This isn’t a “tech bro uses AI” story. Chorney dropped out of school in grade 11 to pay his own rent after aging out of a provincial youth welfare program in British Columbia. He spent years doing door-to-door sales at Vivint (which sent him to Tony Robbins seminars and gave him an education in resilience he couldn’t have gotten in a classroom), then launched his first cleaning business during COVID. It didn’t scale.
When Echo launched in 2023, the first phase looked exactly like failure. Subcontracting, thin margins, no time. Then he changed the system.
Today, Echo runs 16 cleaners, two business partners, and one AI receptionist built on Jobber’s platform that handles up to 15 calls per hour. Chorney says he now works eight-hour days and takes vacations. His AI-powered pitch deck closes deals: “I had Claude make me a case study on what it would cost them to pay me $1,000 a month more than they’re paying me now, versus hire in-house cleaners and what the risks and costs of that look like.” He told Fortune the Claude analysis sealed the contract.
By the Numbers
- $242,000 in revenue year one (2023), mostly without AI
- $1M in revenue year two (2024), after adding AI tools to the workflow
- $1.3M projected for 2026, Fortune-verified
- 16 cleaners on staff, up from a one-man operation
- 1 AI receptionist handling up to 15 calls/hour via Jobber
- New business applications are at near-record highs, per Census Bureau Business Formation Statistics data, with AI tools cited as a key cost-reduction driver
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, has noted on his Daily Spark blog that AI tools are “dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of launching a company,” and argues this is not a job killer but an entrepreneurship accelerator. “People are inventing new businesses in a way that we just have not seen, literally for decades.”
Forrest Zeisler, co-founder and CTO of Jobber, put it even more plainly: “No one’s going to benefit more than the small blue-collar businesses from AI. For them, time is literally money. They’re out and about in the field, not sitting at a computer.”
The Hustler’s Library Take
Here’s what most AI coverage misses: the biggest winners of the AI era aren’t going to be the startups raising $100M rounds in San Francisco. They’re going to be people like Rick Chorney, working in industries that haven’t been touched by technology in decades, who figure out one or two workflow automations that eliminate hours of grind per week.
Cleaning, landscaping, HVAC, plumbing, trucking, pest control. These businesses still run on phone calls, paper quotes, and the owner’s personal hustle. That’s exactly where AI creates asymmetric leverage. When your competitor is still answering every inquiry manually and you’ve got an AI receptionist handling 15 calls an hour, you win contracts they don’t even know existed.
The Chorney model is not a special case. It’s a repeatable system. And the barrier to entry is lower than it’s ever been. Lean operations with the right tools beat headcount every time, and that’s especially true when those tools are now accessible to anyone with a laptop and a few hours to learn them.
Your Action Plan
Chorney’s playbook has three repeatable moves that apply to any service business. Here’s how to steal them:
1. Start with the phone. The first thing Chorney automated was inbound inquiries. His AI receptionist on Jobber handles call volume that would otherwise require a full-time hire. If you’re a service business owner answering your own phone, look at Jobber, ServiceTitan, or even a basic AI call-answering layer. Your follow-up system is where deals die, and a live AI layer fixes that before the lead ever hits your CRM.
2. Build a Claude close. Chorney used Claude to build a cost-comparison case study that justified his price increase to a client. You can do the same thing in 30 minutes. Open Claude, describe your service and your competitor’s in-house option, ask it to build a financial case study showing your value. Use that as a sales leave-behind. Blue-collar business buyers respond to numbers, not pitches.
3. Protect your margin before you scale headcount. Chorney went from $14/hour subcontractor to $1.3M operator not by hiring faster, but by automating the overhead before adding staff. Most service business owners hire to fix a time problem that automation could solve for a fraction of the cost. Filter out the “hire more” advice until you’ve first exhausted what AI can remove from your plate.
Chorney’s original story is worth the full read: Fortune’s profile of Echo Janitorial Services. And if you want the data behind the AI-driven entrepreneurship surge, the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics are the primary source Slok and others are pulling from.
If you want to see more real playbooks from founders who built without VC money, institutional support, or a head start, join Hustler’s Library for free. We find the ones worth learning from.
Ready to Know Where You Stand?
The Business Journey dashboard maps your exact position across all 13 stages. Track your progress, unlock resources for each step, and build with a framework used by thousands of founders at Hustler's Library.
No credit card required · Takes 3 minutes · Personalized to your stage
