Meet Marq

Most people who run a dog waste business fell into it. Marquis Pounds chose it from a standing start, ten months into a retirement he had already earned twice over.

He grew up in Portland and graduated from Jefferson High School in 1988. He went straight into the Navy and spent six and a half years as a missile technician on ballistic missile submarines, working the missiles and their firing systems. There are not many jobs where following the procedure exactly matters more. After the Navy came a couple of years at Intel back in Oregon, and then in 1997 he tested for and was hired by the Tacoma Fire Department.

He stayed 27 years. About half of that he ran as a paramedic. He spent time on dispatch. For the last couple of years he was a fire inspector, which meant walking into small businesses across Tacoma all day, every day, and seeing exactly how they were run. He retired in March of 2024.

It started in his own back yard

The retirement lasted about ten months before he got antsy. The way he tells it, he was standing in his back yard one day and noticed the dog waste. His kids had always been the ones to clean it up. They were grown now and had no interest in coming back for it.

So he thought: I wonder if I can hire somebody to do this.

He went looking, found out there were companies that did exactly that, and realized he had stumbled into a real market with very few people in it locally. Then he did the thing that separates people who notice an opportunity from people who take one. He did not hire somebody. He became somebody.

Those last two years of fire inspections turned out to be the most valuable business education he could have gotten. He had met owners from every walk of life and every kind of business, and he had watched, up close, what worked and what did not. He knew marketing and modernizing were where the gap was, and he was in a position to invest in that from day one rather than hoping to afford it later.

I saw a window and I jumped. What's the saying? An entrepreneur jumps and then builds the airplane on the way down.

Marquis Pounds

Why it looks like a comic book

The branding is not an agency's idea of fun. It is just Marq. He has been a book hound since he was a kid, straight through science fiction, fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons, comics, and the original Atari 2600 on up.

If I am going to pick up dog waste, I am going to have fun doing it.

So he turned his dog Logan into a superhero, and the rest of it followed from there. On the comics side he leans dark, Batman and Punisher and Wolverine, though he will tell you Superman is just Superman. On Star Wars he has the credentials: he was in the lines that wrapped around the theater, he had the original toys, and he mailed in his proof of purchase for Boba Fett before the figure hit stores. Empire Strikes Back is the favorite. Rogue One is the modern pick.

Ask him why any of that stuck and he goes to the music. He was seven or eight when Superman came to the big screen, sitting in the theater when the John Williams fanfare came up, and he describes it as leaving a mark for a lifetime. That is the register the whole brand is pitched in. A job nobody wants to think about, done by somebody who decided it was going to be enjoyable anyway.