By Wyatt McAvoy, Head of Product at Village. Former busboy, hockey player, and the kid in your neighborhood with a pressure washer and a business podcast in his ears.
For most of high school I made my money the way most people do at sixteen: capped at whatever the restaurant would pay me per hour. I bussed tables, ran food, learned to move fast and keep my head down. It was honest work and it built a real work ethic. But the ceiling was always right there. More hours was the only lever I had, and there were only so many hours.
That started bothering me.
I couldn't shake the feeling that there was more value I could be creating than a fixed hourly rate allowed. I had energy, I had hustle, and I had watched enough guys I respected build things from scratch to believe I could do the same. I just hadn't found my opening yet.
The summer after my junior year, I found it.
It started in the garage
A few of my friends were already mowing lawns and making decent money doing it. That was enough of a signal. I didn't go buy a truck or take out a loan. I walked into my dad's garage, took stock of what was there, and got to work.
The first version of the business was pure, unglamorous hustle. Mowing lawns in the Georgia heat. Bagging leaves. Cutting down small trees with whatever I had. The kind of work that teaches you real fast whether you actually want to be an entrepreneur or just liked the idea of it. I kept showing up.
I got better at pricing jobs. Better at reading a yard and knowing what it would take. Better at the conversation with the customer at the door. And then I found the thing that changed the trajectory entirely.
The tool that changed everything
Pressure washing.
The economics were different from anything else I'd done. The equipment did most of the heavy lifting. A job that might take a landscaper half a day of manual labor could be done in a fraction of the time with the right machine. I was clearing anywhere from $60 to over $100 an hour depending on the job. Compare that to the roughly $20 an hour I'd been making in restaurants. It wasn't close.
I eventually outgrew my dad's tools. I reinvested in a high-PSI pressure washer with multiple attachments — that became my money maker — along with weed whackers, a chainsaw, and the full arsenal you need to take on whatever a customer throws at you. Every piece of equipment was bought with money the business had already earned.
I named it College Boys' Home Solutions. CBHS. It appealed to the neighborhood.
The photos above are straight from the CBHS camera roll. That's the thing about this trade: every job photographs its own before-and-after. You don't have to convince anyone the work is worth paying for. You just show them the line.
The first $1,000 day
I remember the exact moment the ceiling broke open.
A single job. One day. $1,000.
I was tasked with pressure washing almost the entire exterior of a Sandy Springs mansion. No small task, but it was one I was more than up for.
When you're seventeen and the most you've ever seen in your bank account from a day's work is a couple hundred dollars, a four-figure day hits differently. It wasn't just the money. It was the proof. Proof that the leverage was real, that the ceiling I'd been bumping up against in the restaurant wasn't a law of nature. It was just a paycheck structure. I didn't have to live inside it.
What I didn't expect was the tip. On top of the job rate, the homeowner handed me extra cash at the end of the day. It happened on other big jobs too. Customers would see the effort — showing up early, staying late, leaving the property cleaner than I found it, being genuinely good to talk to — and they'd reach into their wallet. Those tips weren't just money. They were a signal. They told me that the way you carry yourself on a job is part of the product, and that people notice and reward it. Every tip fueled the ambition a little more.
That job didn't make me rich. But it rewired how I thought about work, value, and what was actually possible.
How the customers came
I wasn't running ads or paying for leads. My early pipeline was word of mouth and Nextdoor, the same channel Will used selling pine straw a few years before me in the same area.
Here's what I learned about selling home services as a young person: the "college student hustling" angle gets you in the door. People root for it. There's something in a neighbor that wants to see the kid with the truck succeed, and they'll give you a shot they wouldn't give a faceless company. But that only buys you the first call. What gets you the callback is being easy to work with, showing up when you said you would, doing the job right, and being the kind of person they actually enjoy having on their property. That combination turned one-time jobs into repeat customers and repeat customers into referrals.
While I worked, I listened to business podcasts. Alex Hormozi was always my favorite to tune into. There was something I liked about making money and learning how to make more of it at the same time. The work gave me the hours, and I tried to use them.
The part where it became a real company
By my second spring and summer running CBHS, I had more work than I could do alone.
I hired some of my friends. I paid them $35 an hour, which was well above what they were making anywhere else. Managing people for the first time taught me things no classroom will. You learn fast that your crew's attitude is downstream of yours, that the standard you hold yourself to is the ceiling for everyone under you, and that being a good boss is harder than being a good worker. I wasn't always perfect at it. But I was learning.
All in, CBHS generated around $50,000 in revenue across the time I ran it. My best month was $10,000 in June 2025. For a business that started with borrowed equipment from a garage, I'll take it.
What it actually taught me
The money was real, but it wasn't the main thing I walked away with.
Running CBHS taught me how to price a job, manage a customer relationship, hire someone, hold a standard, and build something out of nothing. It taught me that value doesn't have to come attached to an hourly rate someone else sets. It taught me that the gap between "I wonder if I could do that" and actually doing it is smaller than it looks from the outside. You just have to be willing to start with what's in the garage.
That experience was the foundation. It's what gave me the confidence to start Niche Supplements in college, which UGA backed with $20,000. It's part of why I'm now Head of Product at Village, working with Will to build the tool I wish I'd had running CBHS.
Why Village changes this
When I was running CBHS, I managed everything manually. Texts, notes, cash, checks, mental math. I was literally keeping my jobs list in an iPhone notes sheet. It worked, barely, because I was one person. The moment I added crew it got harder. Scheduling, customer communication, keeping track of who owed what — all of it lived in my head or in a scattered thread of text messages.
Village is what I would have wanted. A single place to capture leads, book jobs, send quotes, collect payments, and coordinate crew, all from your phone. The kind of infrastructure that lets a high school or college student running a legitimate operation look and act like a real business from day one, without a back office or an office at all.
That matters for a reason that goes beyond convenience. The way you show up — how fast you respond, how clean your invoice looks, how easy you make it for a customer to pay — is part of the product. It's what separates the guy who gets called back from the guy who doesn't. CBHS got there eventually. Village gets you there on the first job.
Wyatt McAvoy is Head of Product at Village. He ran College Boys' Home Solutions through high school, founded Niche Supplements at the University of Georgia, and is a Finance major at UGA's Terry College of Business. He will be interning in investment banking in summer 2027.