Meet a 29-year-old blue-collar founder who used AI to triple his revenue in 3 years
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Rick Chorney dropped out of high school because he needed to find his own place. Ten years later, he's about to cross the $1 million revenue line.
The first year Rick Chorney ran his own cleaning company, he didn’t take a single day off. He was in the field by 7 a.m., home by 8 p.m., and back at his laptop until 1 in the morning—seven days a week, hauling in roughly $14 an hour subcontracting jobs across the suburbs of Vancouver. He told Fortune plainly that it broke something in him.Recommended Video “I went a little crazy,” he said. “There came a day where I was just like, ‘I am done.'” What happened next changed everything: he spent four hours looking at how AI could help him “simplify the business a little bit.” Today, Chorney is 29 years old, based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and running Echo Janitorial Services—a company he co-founded in 2023 with his best friend Adrian (they’ve known each other since they were age 2). It’s been going well—thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). Rick Chorney is expected to clear $1.3 million in sales this year.Rick Chorney “So last year we did just under a million dollars,” he told Fortune, sharing a remarkable growth story. The year before that had been $242,000, still impressive but, as Chorney explained, not optimized for the AI entrepreneur era: “That first year I didn’t really put in a lot of AI, I was mostly focused on SEO.” Once he added AI agents to his workflow, he was able to fast-track quoting, hire more workers, and begin a flywheel. Fortune reviewed Chorney’s business records to verify his explosive growth in revenues. “I had a meeting today, I thought this wa...
