Elon Pope

I did not start as a consultant. I started as a solo operator with a pressure washer, a truck, and zero systems. For years I ran my exterior cleaning company, The Rinse Lab, the way most small business owners do — on instinct, in my head, with spreadsheets held together by willpower. Every customer interaction, every quote, every follow-up lived in my head or in a text thread.

The business was making money. But I could not explain how. I had no SOPs, no lead pipeline, no financial dashboard, no documented processes. Every day was reactive. Every week felt like survival. I was the entire operation — sales, service, scheduling, invoicing, marketing — and I was burning out doing all of it manually.

So I built the infrastructure myself. Phase by phase, I designed and installed the operating system that The Rinse Lab runs on today. KPIs, automations, SOPs, CRM, financial tracking, hiring processes — all of it, from scratch, inside a real business. I documented every decision, every workflow, every system that moved the needle. I tested what worked and cut what did not.

The result was measurable. Revenue increased 87%. Manual follow-ups dropped to zero. I went from working in the business every day to working on the business. The Rinse Lab became the proof of concept — a real company running on real infrastructure, not theory from a business coach who has never operated.

That system became the 8-Phase EP Framework. And when other operators started asking how I did it, I realized the methodology was the product. Project EP is that methodology, productized. We enter a business, build the operating system in 60-90 days, and hand you the keys to an operation that runs without you in the room.

Elon Pope is the founder of EP Industries, Project EP, and The Rinse Lab. Based in Vallejo, California, Pope built The Rinse Lab as a tech-first exterior cleaning operation and later productized the systems into Project EP, an infrastructure agency for small businesses.