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.
"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.
Today, Chorney is 29, based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, running Echo Janitorial Services — a company he co-founded in 2023 with his best friend Adrian, whom he's known since they were two years old.
Revenue: three years of explosive growth
Year one focused on SEO. AI agents were added afterward — kicking off the flywheel. Fortune reviewed Chorney's business records.
The Kid Who Wanted a House
Chorney grew up without much of a safety net. Adopted at five, he relocated from Ontario to British Columbia as a child. As a teenager he fell into substance abuse, passed through a group home, and wound up on a provincial youth agreement — government support set to evaporate at 19.
He was in grade 11, doing grade 10 courses, when he started applying for jobs. He walked into a Greyhound office; his future boss urged him not to drop out, "but he offered me the job anyways." Within two years, Chorney had rented the three-bedroom townhouse he'd been working toward.
Using AI to Remove Overhead
The early months were brutal: subcontracting meant long hours for thin margins. Then, on the day he was "just done," Chorney automated his customer intake so new inquiries flowed straight into his job-management platform, installed an AI receptionist, and set up automatic client acknowledgments. Within weeks he and a partner drove across Canada to Montreal and back — gone a month and a half. His first vacation ever.
The Stack That Changed Everything
Chorney started with ChatGPT to polish emails, then found what he calls a business advisor in Claude — using it to navigate BC labor law, build client-facing case studies, and document operations for a future franchise. He's assembled a whole roster of AI "colleagues":
The AI receptionist math
Email dropped to about 20 minutes a day. Jobber says its best AI adopters grow roughly 90% faster than those who don't.
Thinking Bigger
With his days reclaimed — down from 19-hour slogs to a manageable eight — Chorney is channeling the freed-up time into expansion. He calls it Project Echo: an AI-built operational playbook he believes will become the blueprint for a national franchise, with Toronto, Edmonton, and Calgary as first targets, and friends eyeing Arizona and Delaware.
Economists see him as a leading indicator. Torsten Slok of Apollo Global Management argues AI is "dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of launching a company," driving new-business formation to its highest level in decades. Zeisler's forecast is blunter: "The next generation of millionaires — there are going to be a lot of blue-collar millionaires."